Actor Dennis Hopper Dies in Venice 2010

Dennis Lee Hopper (May 17, 1936 – May 29, 2010) was an American actor, filmmaker and artist. He made his first television appearance in 1954 and appeared in two films featuring James Dean, Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and Giant (1956).

During the next 10 years, Hopper appeared frequently on television in guest roles, and by the end of the 1960s had played supporting roles in several films. He directed and starred in Easy Rider (1969), winning an award at the Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay as co-writer.

He was unable to build on his success for several years, until a featured role, that of the American Photojournalist, in Apocalypse Now (1979) he played brought him attention.

He subsequently appeared in Rumble Fish (1983) and The Osterman Weekend (1983), and received critical recognition for his work in Blue Velvet and Hoosiers, with the latter film garnering him an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. He directed Colors (1988), played the lead character named after the movie title in Paris Trout, and played the villain in Speed (1994). He played another villain, King Koopa, in Super Mario Bros. (1993). Hopper also played heroes, such as John Canyon in Space Truckers. Hopper's later work included a leading role in the television series Crash. Hopper's last performance was filmed just before his death: The Last Film Festival, originally slated for a 2011 release. Hopper was also a prolific and acclaimed photographer, a profession he began in the 1960s.

DOUBLE STANDARD (1961) Dennis Hopper

In the late 1980s Hopper purchased a trio of nearly identical two-story, loft-style condominiums at 330 Indiana Avenue in Venice Beach, California — one made of concrete, one of plywood, and one of green roofing shingles — built by Frank Gehry and two artist friends of Hopper’s, Chuck Arnoldi and Laddie John Dill, in 1981. In 1987, he commissioned an industrial-style main residence, with a corrugated metal exterior designed by Brian Murphy, as a place to display his artwork.

Illness and death

On September 28, 2009, Hopper, then 73, was reportedly brought into an unidentified Manhattan hospital by an ambulance wearing an oxygen mask and “with numerous tubes visible.” On October 2, he was discharged, after receiving treatment for dehydration.

On October 29, Hopper's manager reported that Hopper had been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer. In January 2010, it was reported that Hopper's cancer had metastasized to his bones.

On March 18, 2010, he was honored with the 2,403rd star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, in front of Grauman's Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. Surrounded by friends including Jack Nicholson, Viggo Mortensen, David Lynch, Michael Madsen, family and fans, he attended its addition to the sidewalk six days later.

As of March 23, 2010, Hopper reportedly weighed only 100 pounds and was unable to carry on long conversations. According to papers filed in his divorce court case, Hopper was terminally ill and was unable to undergo chemotherapy to treat his prostate cancer.

Hopper died at his home in the coastal Los Angeles district of Venice on the morning of May 29, 2010 at the age of 74, due to complications from prostate cancer.

Hopper's funeral took place on June 3, 2010 at San Francisco de Asis Mission Church in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico. He was buried in Jesus Nazareno Cemetery, Ranchos de Taos.

Actor & Comedian Harvey Korman 2008 Woodlawn Cemetery

Harvey Herschel Korman (February 15, 1927 – May 29, 2008) was an American comedic actor who performed in television and movie productions beginning in 1960. His big break was being a featured performer on The Danny Kaye Show, but he is best remembered for his performances on the sketch comedy series The Carol Burnett Show and in several films by Mel Brooks, most notably as Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles.

Early life

Korman, who was of Russian Jewish descent, was born in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Ellen (née Blecher) and Cyril Raymond Korman, a salesman. He served in the United States Navy during World War II. After being discharged, he studied at the Goodman School of Drama. He was a member of the Peninsula Players summer theater program during the 1950, 1957, and 1958 seasons.

Career

His early television work included voice-over work as the Great Gazoo on The Flintstones. He appeared on numerous television programs, including the role of Blake in the 1964 episode "Who Chopped Down the Cherry Tree?" on the NBC medical drama The Eleventh Hour. He frequently appeared as a supporting player on The Danny Kaye Show from 1963 through 1967. From 1964-1966, he appeared three times in consecutive years on the CBS's comedy The Munsters starring Fred Gwynne and Yvonne De Carlo. During the 1965-1966 season, Korman made regular appearances on The Flintstones as The Great Gazoo, in what would be its final season on network TV. He also starred in the short-lived Mel Brooks TV series The Nutt House.

In later years he did voice work for the live-action film The Flintstones as well as the animated The Secret of NIMH 2: Timmy to the Rescue. In his final Mel Brooks film he starred as the zany Dr. Seward in the 1995 film Dracula: Dead and Loving It.

The Carol Burnett Show

It was his work on The Carol Burnett Show which brought Korman his greatest fame. Korman was nominated for six Emmy Awards for his work on The Carol Burnett Show, and won four times - in 1969, 1971 (for "Outstanding Achievement" by a performer in music or variety), 1972 and 1974. He was also nominated for four Golden Globes for the series, winning in 1975. In later years he reunited with fellow Carol Burnett Show alumnus Tim Conway and toured the country reprising skits from the show, as well as new material. A DVD of new comedy sketches by Korman and Conway, Together Again, was released in 2006.

Personal life

Korman was married to Donna Ehlert from 1960 to 1977, and they had two children together (Maria and Chris) and three grandsons (Scott, Noah and Ethan). He married Deborah (née Fritz) in 1982 and was married to her until his death. They had two daughters together (Kate and Laura).

Death

Harvey Korman died on May 29, 2008, at UCLA Medical Center as the result of complications from a ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm he had suffered four months previously. He was buried at Santa Monica's Woodlawn Cemetery.

Actor John Barrymore Isn't Interred Here Anymore 1942 Calvary Cemetery

John Sidney Blyth (February 15, 1882 – May 29, 1942), better known as John Barrymore, was an American actor of stage and screen. He first gained fame as a handsome stage actor in light comedy, then high drama and culminating in groundbreaking portrayals in Shakespearean plays Hamlet and Richard III. His success continued with motion pictures in various genres in both the silent and sound eras. Barrymore's personal life has been the subject of much writing before and since his death in 1942. Today John Barrymore is known mostly for his portrayal of Hamlet and for his roles in movies like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1920), Grand Hotel (1932), Dinner at Eight (1933), Twentieth Century (1934), and Don Juan (1926), the first feature length movie to use a Vitaphone soundtrack. The most prominent member of a multi-generation theatrical dynasty, he was the brother of Lionel Barrymore and Ethel Barrymore, and was the paternal grandfather of Drew Barrymore.

Barrymore collapsed while appearing on Rudy Vallee's NBC radio show and died in his Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital room on May 29, 1942. His dying words were "Die? I should say not, dear fellow. No Barrymore would allow such a conventional thing to happen to him." Gene Fowler attributes different dying words to Barrymore in his biography Good Night, Sweet Prince. According to Fowler, John Barrymore roused as if to say something to his brother Lionel; Lionel asked him to repeat himself, and he simply replied, "You heard me, Mike."

According to Errol Flynn's memoirs, film director Raoul Walsh "borrowed" Barrymore's body before burial, and left his corpse propped in a chair for a drunken Flynn to discover when he returned home from The Cock and Bull Bar. This was re-created in the movie W.C. Fields and Me. Other accounts of this classic Hollywood tale substitute actor Peter Lorre in the place of Walsh, but Walsh himself tells the story in Richard Schickel's 1973 documentary The Men Who Made the Movies. However, Barrymore's great friend Gene Fowler denied the story, stating that he and his son held vigil over the body at the funeral home until the funeral and burial.

He was interred at Calvary Cemetery, in East L.A., on June 2. Surviving family members in attendance were his brother Lionel and his daughter Diana. Ex-wife Elaine also attended. Among his active pallbearers were Gene Fowler, John Decker, W.C. Fields, Herbert Marshall, Eddie Mannix, Louis B. Mayer, and David O. Selznick.

Barrymore had left specific instructions that he be cremated and his ashes buried next to his parents in the family plot in Philadelphia. However, as brother Lionel Barrymore and sister Ethel Barrymore were Catholic and cremation was not sanctioned by the Church at the time, the executors of his estate had Barrymore’s remains entombed at Calvary Cemetery in Los Angeles.

In 1980, John Drew Barrymore decided to fulfill his father’s wishes and have him cremated, and recruited his son to help. They had the casket removed from its Los Angeles crypt; before the body was cremated, John Jr. insisted on having a look inside. “Thank God I’m drunk,” he told his son. “I’ll never remember it.”

Barrymore’s ashes are interred in Mt. Vernon Cemetery in Philadelphia. Engraved on his tombstone below his name is the line from Hamlet, “Alas, Poor Yorick.”
 

Comedian Fanny Brice 1951 Westwood Village Cemetery

Fanny Brice (October 29, 1891 – May 29, 1951) was a popular and influential American illustrated song "model," comedienne, singer, theatre and film actress, who made many stage, radio and film appearances but is best remembered as the creator and star of the top-rated radio comedy series, The Baby Snooks Show. Thirteen years after her death, she was portrayed on the Broadway stage by Barbra Streisand in the musical Funny Girl and its 1968 film adaption.

Early life

Fanny Brice (occasionally spelled Fannie Brice) was the stage name of Fania Borach, born in New York City, the third child of relatively well-off saloon owners of Hungarian Jewish descent.

In 1908, Brice dropped out of school to work in a burlesque revue, and two years later she began her association with Florenz Ziegfeld, headlining his Ziegfeld Follies from 1910 into the 1930s. In the 1921 Follies, she was featured singing "My Man" which became both a big hit and her signature song. She made a popular recording of it for Victor Records.

The second song most associated with Brice is "Second Hand Rose," which she introduced in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1921.

She recorded nearly two dozen record sides for Victor and also cut several for Columbia. She is a posthumous recipient of a Grammy Hall of Fame Award for her 1921 recording of "My Man."

Brice's Broadway credits include Fioretta, Sweet and Low, and Billy Rose's Crazy Quilt. Her films include My Man (1928), Be Yourself! (1930) and Everybody Sing (1938) with Judy Garland. Brice, Ray Bolger and Harriet Hoctor were the only original Ziegfeld performers to portray themselves in The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and Ziegfeld Follies (1946). For her contribution to the motion picture industry, she has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at MP 6415 Hollywood Boulevard.

Radio

From the 1930s until her death in 1951, Fanny made a radio presence as a bratty toddler named Snooks, a role she premiered in a Follies skit co-written by playwright Moss Hart. With first Alan Reed and then Hanley Stafford as her bedeviled Daddy, Baby Snooks premiered in The Ziegfeld Follies of the Air in February 1936 on CBS.

She moved to NBC in December 1937, performing the Snooks routines as part of the Good News show, then back to CBS on Maxwell House Coffee Time, the half-hour divided between the Snooks sketches and comedian Frank Morgan, in September 1944. Her longtime Snooks sketch writers---Philip Rapp, David Freedman---finally brought in partners like Arthur Stander and Everett Freeman to develop an independent, half-hour comedy program, launched on CBS in 1944 and moving to NBC in 1948, with Freeman producing. First called Post Toasties Time (named for the show's first sponsor), the show was renamed The Baby Snooks Show within short order, though in later years it was often known colloquially as Baby Snooks and Daddy.

Brice was so meticulous about the program and the title character that she was known to perform in costume as a toddler girl even though seen only by the radio studio audience. She was 45 years old when the character began her long radio life. In addition to Reed and Stafford, her co-stars included Lalive Brownell, Lois Corbet and Arlene Harris playing her mother, Danny Thomas as Jerry, Charlie Cantor as Uncle Louie and Ken Christy as Mr. Weemish. She was completely devoted to the character, as she told biographer Norman Katkov: "Snooks is just the kid I used to be. She's my kind of youngster, the type I like. She has imagination. She's eager. She's alive. With all her deviltry, she is still a good kid, never vicious or mean. I love Snooks, and when I play her I do it as seriously as if she were real. I am Snooks. For 20 minutes or so, Fanny Brice ceases to exist."

Baby Snooks writer/producer Everett Freeman told Katkov that Brice didn't like to rehearse the role ("I can't do a show until it's on the air, kid") but always snapped into it on the air, losing herself completely in the character: "While she was on the air she was Baby Snooks. And after the show, for an hour after the show, she was still Baby Snooks. The Snooks voice disappeared, of course, but the Snooks temperament, thinking, actions were all there."

Marriages

Brice had a short-lived marriage in her teens to a local barber, Frank White, whom she met in 1911 in Springfield, Massachusetts, when she was touring in "College Girl." The marriage lasted only a few days and she brought suit for divorce.[1] Her second husband was professional gambler Julius W. "Nicky" Arnstein. Prior to their marriage, Arnstein served 14 months in Sing Sing for wiretapping, where Brice visited him every week. In 1918 they were married, after living together for six years. In 1924, Arnstein was charged in a Wall Street bond theft. Brice insisted on his innocence, and funded his legal defense at great expense. Arnstein was convicted and sentenced to the Federal penitentiary at Leavenworth where he served three years. Released in 1927, Arnstein disappeared from Brice's life and that of his two children. Reluctantly, Brice divorced him. She went on to marry songwriter and stage producer Billy Rose and appeared in his revue Crazy Quilt, among others. That marriage also failed.

Television

Brice and Stafford brought Baby Snooks and Daddy to television only once, an appearance in June 1950 on CBS-TV's Popsicle Parade of Stars. This was Fanny Brice's only appearance on television. Viewing the kinescope recording today, Fanny is a strange, but amusing sight: a middle-aged woman in a little girl's outfit (and none of the other cast seem to find this unusual). Brice handled herself well on the live TV broadcast but later admitted that the character of Baby Snooks just didn’t work properly when seen.

She returned with Stafford and the Snooks character to the safety of radio for her next appearance, on Tallulah Bankhead's legendary big-budget, large-scale radio variety show, The Big Show, in November 1950, sharing the bill with Groucho Marx and Jane Powell. In one routine Snooks knocks on Bankhead's dressing room door for advice on becoming an actress when she grew up in spite of Daddy's warning that she already lacked what it took.

Six months after her Big Show appearance, Fanny Brice died in Hollywood at the age of 59 of a cerebral hemorrhage. She is interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. (Her original interment was at Home of Peace Memorial Park.) The May 29, 1951 episode of The Baby Snooks Show was broadcast as a memorial to the star who created the brattish toddler, crowned by Hanley Stafford's brief on-air eulogy: "We have lost a very real, a very warm, a very wonderful woman."

Brice portrayals

Although the names of the principal characters were changed, the plot of the 1939 film Rose of Washington Square, in which the principal characters were portrayed by Tyrone Power and Alice Faye, was inspired heavily by Brice's marriage and career, to the extent it borrowed its title from a tune she performed in the Follies and included "My Man." She sued 20th Century Fox for invasion of privacy and won the case. Producer Darryl F. Zanuck was forced to delete several production numbers closely associated with the star.

Barbra Streisand starred as Brice in the 1964 Broadway musical Funny Girl, which centered on Brice's rise to fame and troubled relationship with Arnstein. In 1968, Streisand won an Academy Award for Best Actress for reprising her role in the film version (sharing the Oscar with Katharine Hepburn, for The Lion in Winter, in the Academy's only-ever tie vote). The 1975 sequel Funny Lady focused on Brice's turbulent relationship with impresario Billy Rose and was as highly fictionalized as the original. Streisand also recorded the Brice songs "My Man," "I'd Rather Be Blue Over You (Than Happy with Somebody Else)" and "Second Hand Rose," which became a Top 40 hit.

Funny Girl and Funny Lady are examples of how plays and films take great liberties with the lives of historical figures and/or events. The Streisand film makes no mention of Brice's first husband at all. It also suggests that Arnstein turned to crime because his pride wouldn't allow him to live off Fanny, and that he was wanted by the police for selling phony bonds. In reality, however, Arnstein shamelessly sponged off Brice even before their marriage and was eventually named as a member of a gang that stole $5 million of Wall Street securities. Instead of turning himself in, as in the movie, Arnstein went into hiding. When he finally surrendered, he did not plead guilty as he did in the movie, but fought the charges for four years, taking a toll on his wife's finances. It is thought that Ray Stark, the producer of the play and both movies and Brice's son-in-law, changed Arnstein's story in order to avoid a lawsuit, as Arnstein was still alive at the time. Brice's son William was not mentioned in the play or movies by mutual agreement; other changes (such as the portrayal of Brice's parents as poor rather than well-off or the omission of Brice's first husband) may have been done to increase the dramatic power of the story.

Two children were born of the Brice-Arnstein marriage. Daughter Frances (1919-1992) married Ray Stark, while son William (1921-2008) became an artist of note, using his mother's surname.

The campus of the State University of New York (SUNY at Stony Brook formerly had a Fannie Brice Theatre, a small 75-seat venue which has been used for a variety of performances over the years, including a 1988 production of the musical Hair, staged readings, and a studio classroom space. The building was razed in 2007 to make way for new dormitories.

The 1946 Warner Bros. cartoon Quentin Quail features a character based on Brice's characterization of Baby Snooks.

Further reading

Goldman, Herbert, Fanny Brice: The Original Funny Girl, Oxford University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-19-508552-3.
Grossman, Barbara, Funny Woman: The Life and Times of Fanny Brice, Indiana University Press, 1992, ISBN 0-253-20762-2.

References

1.^ "Fanny Brice Dies at the Age of 59" from "On This Day," May 30, 1951 from The New York Times

Lone Star Producer Paul Malvern 1993 Hollywood Forever Cemetery

Paul William Malvern (June 28, 1902 - May 29, 1993) was a movie producer for Monogram Studios and Universal. He created his own production company "Lone Star Productions" at Monogram Studios. At Universal, he produced HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN and HOUSE OF DRACULA.

 

Paul Malvern, a former child acrobat with The Ringling Bros. Circus, worked as a movie stuntman during silent and early talkie films. While working at the Monogram Studios, Malvern took over the responsibility of producing films under his newly created "Lone Star Productions" logo. He produced 16 westerns from 1933 to 1935 and worked very closely with actor John Wayne on his early films. Later in his career, Malvern moved over to Universal Studios where his films generated big business for the studio and created a wave of prosperity for the studio that began with the introduction of Deanna Durbin's musicals and lasted until after WWII. Malvern retired in 1952 to take care of his stepson who was ill with cancer, and his wife who wasn't in the best of health. Paul was married for fifty years to actress Jean Huntley, whom he'd met when he fell from a balcony while filming a scene.

-- IMDB  - vicdru@hotmail.com

Monogram Pictures Corporation was a Hollywood studio that produced and released films, most on low budgets, between 1931 and 1953, when the firm completed a transition to the name Allied Artists. Monogram is considered a leader among the smaller studios sometimes referred to collectively as Poverty Row. The idea behind the studio was that when the Monogram logo appeared on the screen, everyone knew they were in for action and adventure.

Monogram was created in the early 1930s from two earlier companies, W. Ray Johnston's Rayart Productions (renamed "Raytone" when sound pictures came in) and Trem Carr's Sono Art-World Wide Pictures. Both specialized in low budget features and, as Monogram Pictures, continued that policy until 1935 with Carr in charge of production. Another independent, Paul Malvern, released his Lone Star western productions (starring John Wayne) through Monogram.

 

Paul Malvern is entombed with his wife Jean at Hollywood Forever Cemetery.