RIP: Lupita Tovar & Robert Vaughn
Monday, November 14, 2016 at 6:30PM Didn't mean to let these two farewells slip by.
After the death of Luise Rainer, Lupita Tovar held the title of 'The Oldest Living Screen Star of Note' for a few years. She died Sunday at the 106 years of age so here's to enduring genes. The Mexican actress's original claim to fame was starring in the Spanish version of the famous horror picture Dracula (1931). Though her last movie was in 1945 she continued to affect the movies via her gene pool...
She mothered an Oscar nominee, Susan Kohner (Imitation of Life) who is still with us. Lupita's grandsons are the Oscar-nominated siblings Paul Weitz & Chris Weitz (About a Boy) who are both writer/director/producers. Chris's most recent film was A Better Life (2011) which nabbed Demian Bichir an Oscar nomination for his moving performance as an illegal immigrant father. Paul's most recent film was the comedy Grandma (2015) starring Lily Tomlin which we kept raving about last year; he obviously knew from cool Grandmas! Our condolescences to that talented family.
That day before Lupita passed away Hollywood lost Robert Vaughn (1932-2016). His first brush with fame was a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination in his twenties for The Young Philadelphians (1959) and he followed that breakthrough as one of The Magnificent Seven (1960) and is best remembered today as the leading man of the beloved TV series The Man From UNCLE (1964-1968). In the past two years both of those triumphs were remade. Henry Cavill took on his role in the movie version of The Man From UNCLE and his hit western was remade, too.
He was the last surviving member of the original Magnificent Seven as illustrated by this sad tweet [sniffle] [Pictured from left to right: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Horst Buchholz, Robert Vaughn, Charles Bronson, Brad Dexter, and James Coburn]
Steve McQueen, 1980
— The Pixel Factor (@ThePixelFactor) November 11, 2016
Yul Brynner, 1985
James Coburn, 2002
Brad Dexter, 2002
Horst Buchholz, 2003
Charles Bronson, 2003
Robert Vaughn, 2016 pic.twitter.com/A7OaPeggYQ
Reader Comments (3)
This year has just been merciless, now in so many ways but huge in the loss of so many talented artists for all walks of life.
The last thing you can say when someone passes at 106 is that it's shocking, more so that she made it to that great age, but it is sad to see that piece of Hollywood history leave us. What a legacy she left behind though.
I wasn't a huge Vaughn fan, in that I didn't seek something out just because he was in it, but he was reliably entertaining and The Man From U.N.C.L.E. is still fun and like the same period's It Takes a Thief a real snapshot of the 60's.
Vaughn had one of those distinctive voices, "gargly" I called it as a kid.
My favorite Vaughn performance is in The Towering Inferno, where he played the kindly senator. His distinctive voice was put to great use in Demon Seed, in which he played the voice of the computer that terrorizes Julie Christie. He definitely had the coolness down. Rest in peace.