Monday, August 3, 2020 at 10:30AM by Nathaniel R
Wilford Brimley and 80s child star Barret Oliver in Cocoon (1985)
A beloved character actor passed away this weekend. Wilford Brimley was born and died in Utah, but he became a fixture in mainstream Hollywood for a couple of decades for his earthy appeal and facility with adorable curmudgeons. Though he'd been acting since the 1960s he didn't crossover into true fame until the mid 80s...
Sunday, August 2, 2020 at 8:39PM by Nathaniel R
Alan Parker and Madonna on the set of "Evita"
We were remiss Friday in sharing the news that we've lost another fine talent. The director Alan Parker who brought us gangster comedies, oddball indies, multiple musicals, and prestige literary adaptations has died at 76 years of age of an undisclosed lengthy illness. His 14 films netted a combined 27 Oscar nominations and 6 wins, and he himself received two Best Director nominations (1978's Midnight Express and 1988's Mississippi Burning).
Parker burst onto the scene as a scrappy young British director with 1976's playful gangster musical spoof Bugsy Malone and its all kid cast (Scott Baio and Jodie Foster headlined)...
Sunday, July 26, 2020 at 4:07PM by Nathaniel R
We have long dreaded this day coming so it's with heavy hearts that we share that the iconic Olivia de Havilland has passed away. We have celebrated her several times here at The Film Experience, most notably in 2016 with a multi-film retrospective for her Centennial. Having been a true screen immortal for the past (gulp) 80 years, it was hard to picture this woman as an actual mortal. Pictures of her happily bicycling in Paris in her centenarian years were popular around the web but all things eventually end. The Oscar winner, who had just celebrated her 104th birthday on July 1st, died peacefully yesterday in her Parisian home...
Tuesday, July 14, 2020 at 12:01PM 2020 continues to be a hellscape year. Apologies that we can't give these recently departed talents larger tributes. They will be missed for their contributions to the arts that we love so much here at TFE.
• CNN As you've probably heard the very talented Naya Rivera ("Santana" on Glee) went missing days ago. Her body has now been found, police learning that she saved her son just before drowning. She was just 33.
• Pinkvilla The Glee cast came together at Lake Piru as tribute (on the anniversary of another Glee star's death. This is when we lost Cory Monteith in 2013)
• People Kelly Preston, John Travolta's wife, and an actress of numerous 80s and 90s movies, has also died. She passed away from breast cancer.
• The Guardian pays tribute to Preston with a photogallery of her biggest movie roles
• NYT Grant Imahara, an engineer who worked on the Star Wars prequels and other Hollywood blockbusters and co-hosted "Mythbusters" has died from a brain aneuryism. He was just 49.
• NYT Ragaa el-Gedaway, Egyptian cinema star, has died from COVID-19
• ABC Tony-nominated Nick Cordero, who we just loved on stage -- for our money he even surpassed Chazz Palminterri's performance in Bullets Over Broadway when he played the Oscar-nominated role in the stage version -- has finally succumbed to COVID-19 after months of a torturous struggle.
Monday, July 6, 2020 at 8:00PM by Nathaniel R
Confession, dear reader. Two decades of writing about movies later I still feel ill-equipped to write about one of the largest tools in the filmmaking arsenal: scoring. Ennio Morricone once described music as "energy, space, and time" which is a broad and huge and cosmic enough description to explain away how overwhelming a task it is to write about... especially to those of us who are more visually attuned. As you've undoubtedly heard, Morricone, by all accounts of the all time great composers, has passed away at the age of 91 after a fall which hospitalized him. In the course of his spectacular career, which stretches across six decades of cinema, he helped defined an entire genre (the spaghetti western), and composed the scores for over three hundred movies as well as an alarming number of TV shows on the side.
His six Oscar nominations (Days of Heaven, The Mission, The Untouchables, Bugsy, Malena, The Hateful Eight) and two Oscars (one of them an Honorary) don't even begin to cover what he gave to the cinema. He was beloved by auteurs as is amply evident in his filmography. Some of his most famous films and scores outside of those Oscar-honored works include The Good The Bad and the Ugly, La Cage Aux Folles, Lady of the Camelias, Once Upon a Time in America, Inglorious Basterds, Wolf, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, For a Few Dollars More, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, and Cinema Paradiso. Do you have a favourite score from that illustrious body of work?
Morricone is survived by his wife of 63 years, Maria Travia, and their four children. He will be missed but his legacy has long since been immortalized.
