Departed During 2024

[Hydromet]

I thought it was that men died WITH prostate cancer rather than because of it.

https://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health ... eading-One

Only if it's detected early enough.

[Karearea]

Sir Colin Giltrap, who founded the influential Giltrap Group focusing on luxury cars and was knighted for services to motorsport, has died.

Giltrap Group confirmed he had passed away peacefully with his family overnight aged 84.

While he had stepped away from the business after suffering a fall in London last year, the name Giltrap remained prominent in the motor vehicle industry.

Today the Giltrap Group website bears a farewell for its founder, "Sir Colin Giltrap 1940-2024".

Sir Colin founded the business in the 1960s buying Matamata Motors then steadily expanding into Auckland, buying Coutts of Great North Road in Auckland. His father had run a machinery business and Sir Colin had tinkered with cars in his spare time as a student.

Over the years the company became the Giltrap Group and won the rights to sell luxury brands like Daimler, Audi, Triumph, Porsche and Rover.

At the same time, Giltrap also became a significant dealer in mid-range cars.

A history of the group lists many of the biggest car brands among its dealerships or joint ventures over the years.

Recently, he had stepped back from the managing the group to leave sons Michael and Richard in charge.

He and his wife Lady Jennifer have been involved with raising money for the Starship Foundation from its inception as well as sponsors of Symphony in the Park.

In a statement, the Giltrap Group says he was "well known for building enduring relationships, valuing people and for contributions to the automotive industry and in the world of motorsport, which is legendary.

"Sir Colin was a keen family and businessman, with an all-consuming life long passion for cars"

Radio NZ News: Giltrap Group founder Sir Collin Giltrap dies, aged 84

[PHXPhlyer]

Dickey Betts, co-founder of the Allman Brothers Band, dead at 80

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/18/entertai ... index.html

Dickey Betts, a guitarist and the co-founder of the Allman Brothers Band, has died, according to a family statement shared with CNN on Thursday by his longtime manager.

Betts was 80.

“It is with profound sadness and heavy hearts that the Betts family announce the peaceful passing of Forrest Richard ‘Dickey’ Betts,” the statement reads. “The legendary performer, songwriter, bandleader and family patriarch passed away earlier today at his home in Osprey, FL., surrounded by his family. Dickey was larger than life, and his loss will be felt world-wide. At this difficult time, the family asks for prayers and respect for their privacy in the coming days. More information will be forthcoming at the appropriate time.”

Betts’ manager David Spero told Rolling Stone the guitarist had cancer and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

A native of West Palm Beach, Florida, Betts’ early musical influences included bluegrass, country music and later rock and roll. Credited with helping define the sound and of Southern rock genre of the ’60s and ‘70s, Betts, bass guitarist Berry Oakley, drummers Butch Trucks and Jaimoe joined brothers Gregg and Duane Allman to form the Allman Brothers Band in 1969. He wrote the group’s biggest hit, “Ramblin’ Man.”

Tragedy struck the group when Duane Allman died in a motorcycle accident in 1971 and Oakley was killed in a motorcycle crash a year after. Betts and Gregg Allman became the band’s leaders, but creative differences and substance abuse in the group caused them to break up and reform multiple times.



PP

[PHXPhlyer]

Moody Blues cofounder Mike Pinder, last surviving original member of band, dies at 82
Pinder's family's statement described him as a “musician, father, cosmic philosopher & friend” who “lived his life with a childlike wonder, walking a deeply introspective path which fused the mind and the heart.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mo ... rcna149501

Mike Pinder, the Moody Blues’ longtime keyboardist and the last surviving founding member of the Rock Hall-inducted band, has died at the age of 82.

Pinder’s family announced his death via a statement shared by the group’s bassist John Lodge, stating that Pinder had died peacefully on Wednesday at his home in Northern California home. No cause of death was announced.

Their statement described him as a “musician, father, cosmic philosopher & friend” who “lived his life with a childlike wonder, walking a deeply introspective path which fused the mind and the heart.”

Pinder was an early proponent of the Mellotron, a keyboard that was essentially an early sampler that created a distinctive orchestral sound that marked many songs by the Moody Blues and other groups of the progressive-rock era. Born in Birmingham in the British Midlands in 1941, he came up on the city’s vibrant music scene — which ultimately produced members of groups ranging from the Move and Traffic to Electric Light Orchestra and Black Sabbath — and formed the “Moodies” in 1964 with Graeme Edge, Ray Thomas (both of whom would remain for many years), Clint Warwick and singer Denny Laine. The group rocketed to stardom in 1965 with their cover of Bessie Bank’s soulful ballad “Go Now” and Pinder wrote many of the group’s early originals with Laine, but he departed the group in 1966 (ultimately joining Paul McCartney’s Wings several years later).

Pinder played a key role in recruiting Laine’s replacement, Justin Hayward, and Lodge joined shortly after, cementing the group’s classic lineup, which would remain through 1978. “I’d written some songs and sent them to Eric Burdon [of the Animals]. Unbeknownst to me he passed them to Mike Pinder in the Moodies and soon I had a call from Mike. I came up to London to meet him and we got on,” Hayward told Rolling Stone.

In 1967, the group recorded what is considered by many to be the first progressive rock album, “Days of Future Passed,” working with an orchestra whose sound Pinder would reproduce on the Mellotron in a live setting. The album included the orch-rock classic “Nights in White Satin,” which became an unlikely hit single in the U.S. some five years later. Yet the Moody Blues were a popular act in the U.S. and the U.K. during this period, with all six of the albums released between 1967 and 1972 going being certified gold or platinum.

The group went on hiatus in the mid-1970s — with Pinder releasing a solo album titled “The Promise” — and returned for their 1978 reunion album “Octave,” but chose not to remain with the band. He had relocated to Northern California with his family and worked in the tech industry, returning to music only occasionally and releasing a second solo album in 1994. He appeared with the group when it was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but did not speak. Some fans perceived this as disapproval of the Hall, but he later said it was because the ceremony already had gone on for too long.

PP

[G-CPTN]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duane_Eddy

[Boac]

Great guitar! 1960

[PHXPhlyer]

Aviation record-setter: Dick Rutan, first to fly around the world without refueling, dies at 85
Rutan achieved the milestone with Jeana Yeager when they departed Edwards Air Force Base flying for 9 days in a specially constructed aircraft designed by his brother

https://www.abc15.com/obituaries/aviati ... dies-at-85

Richard 'Dick' Rutan set a record for aviation in the 1980's becoming the first person to circumnavigate Earth by aircraft without refueling, Guinness World Records wrote. He did it along with his co-pilot Jeana Yeager — both Americans — in an aircraft designed by Rutan's younger brother Burt. Dick Rutan died on Friday evening at a hospital in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho — his brother Burt and others were by his side, theAssociated Press wrote.

In 1986 Rutan set off from Edwards Air Force Base in California with Yeager and an off-duty crew member in the cabin area on his brother's Voyager craft, which now sits in a Smithsonian Institution museum in Washington, DC, USA. They were able to fly around the globe in 9 days 3 minutes and 44 seconds on that historic flight, at a distance of 24,986 miles.

Along the way there were worries about the plane's ability to handle turbulence, and various possible mechanical failures. Burt said, “Dick never doubted whether my design would actually make it around, with still some gas in the tank."

"He played an airplane like someone plays a grand piano," his brother Burt would later say. Dick was a decorated Vietnam war pilot. He seemed to live on his own terms, adventurously.

Bill Whittle, a friend, said Dick died on his own terms after a severe lung infection, deciding to go without the assistance of oxygen during his last hours, the AP wrote.

The family seemed to have flying in their spirit. Dick's brother Burt designed SpaceShipOne, which became the world's first privately-built manned craft to reach space when it had a successful launch in 2004 with the help of financing from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the Coeur d'Alene Press reported.

The Rutan-designed spacecraft won the $10 million Ansari X Prize for the achievement, after carrying three people into a suborbital spaceflight, the National Air and Space Museum said.

Dick Rutan would go on, after his major aviation record, to embark on other adventures, like a trip to the North Pole in a Russian biplane that sank through the ice, his brother said. Greg Morris, the president of Scaled Composites told the AP Dick was “Bigger than life."

He is survived by his wife Kris Rutan, and daughters Holly Hogan and Jill Hoffman — along with his grandchildren.

PP

[tango15]

I'm not normally a fan of the acting profession, but I was sad to learn of the death of Bernard Hill. He is probably best remembered for his part as Yosser Hughes, the laconic member of 'The Boys from the Blackstuff', a more realistic portrayal of a man driven to the edge of his sanity by the loss of his job, his wife, the authorities' continued attempts to take his children away from him and his constant attempts at salvaging his male pride, than had ever been portrayed previously.

He also played an excellent Captain Smith (master of the Titanic), and Shirley Valentine's fella. I believe he was also in Star Wars

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

His performances as King Theoden of the Rohorrim in The Lord of the Rings were excellent.
It isn't every actor who can deliver just a few simple words and generate enduring quotes across multiple media.
e.g.

..and of course he got to lead the greatest charge in film history


..and of course his 'Yosser' became the archetypal Scouser in comedy

[PHXPhlyer]

Roger Corman, pioneering independent producer and king of B movies, dies at 98
Corman revived the B movie, helped the careers Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, and had cameos in "The Godfather: Part II," Philadelphia,” and "Apollo 13."

https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/mov ... rcna151849

Legendary B-movie king Roger Corman, who directed and produced hundreds of low-budget films and discovered such future industry stars as Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, has died. He was 98.

Corman died Thursday at his home in Santa Monica, California, surrounded by family members, the family confirmed to Variety.

“His films were revolutionary and iconoclastic, and captured the spirit of an age. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he said, ‘I was a filmmaker, just that,’” the family said in a statement.

Corman’s empire, which existed in several incarnations, including New World Pictures, and Concorde/New Horizons, was as active as any major studio and, he boasted, always profitable. He specialized in fast-paced, low-budget genre movies — horror, action, science fiction, even some family fare — and his company became a work-in-training ground for a wide variety of major talents, from actors like Nicholson (“Little Shop of Horrors”) and De Niro (“Boxcar Bertha”) to directors like Francis Ford Coppola (“Dementia 13”) and Scorsese (“Boxcar Bertha”).

When Corman was awarded an Oscar at the AMPAS’ first Governors Awards ceremony in November 2009, Ron Howard saluted him for hiring women in key exec and creative jobs, as well as for giving them big roles, and Walter Moseley was quoted as saying Corman offered “one of the few open doors,” looking beyond age, race and gender.

Corman hailed film as “the only truly modern art form.” But he pointed out that the need of cast and crew payments mean a constant compromise between art and business.

Howard also joked that when he directed his first film, “Eat My Dust,” he complained to Corman about the low budget and the sparse extras for a crowd scene only to be told, “If you do a good job on this film, you won’t ever have to work for me again!”

Quentin Tarantino toasted him with “the movie lovers of planet Earth thank you.” Jonathan Demme praised his acting, saying Corman gave “tremendous value at a really affordable price.” In several movies for Demme, Corman wanted the same fee he gave actors in the 50-plus films he’d directed: scale plus 10%.

Over almost half a century, he took over the B-movie market, which had largely disappeared in the wake of television, and kept it alive almost single-handedly (along with Sam Arkoff of American Intl. Pictures, who financed most of Corman’s early directing/producing efforts). Well into his nineties, he was producing Bs for $5 million and under and rolling them out for video and television release.

After he left off directing in the late ’60s (to return only briefly in the mid-’80s with “Frankenstein Unbound”), he formed New World Pictures, which also imported foreign art films like Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” and taught the industry how to effectively market and distribute such rarefied films.

Born in Detroit, Corman moved with his family in 1940 to Los Angeles. He attended Beverly Hills High School and then Stanford University, majoring in engineering. He admitted to being infatuated by movies from the time he came to California. “There was no way I couldn’t be interested in movies, growing up where I did,” he once said.

Service in WWII and his education (he also attended Oxford for a term, studying English literature) slowed him down. After Stanford he worked for four days at U.S. Electric Motors and then tried to break into the business by working as a messenger at 20th Century Fox. When he returned from Oxford (and a short stay in Paris) he became, in his own words, “a bum.” From 1951-53 he did odd jobs and collected unemployment. He briefly worked as a script reader; convinced he could do better, he wrote “Highway Dragnet” and sold it to Allied Artists for $4,000.

With the money he made from the 1954 release and contributions from family and friends, he produced “The Monster From the Ocean Floor” and struck a deal with Arkoff’s AIP. In return for cash advances, Corman agreed to make a series of movies.

From 1955-60 Corman produced or directed more than 30 films for AIP, all budgeted at less than $100,000 and produced in two weeks or less. There were Westerns (“Five Guns West,” “The Gunslinger”); horror and science fiction (“The Day the World Ended,” “The Undead” in 1956 and 1957); as well as teen movies like “Carnival Rock” and “Rock All Night.”

Soon he was the hero of the drive-ins.

Critically, it wasn’t until “Machine Gun Kelly” in 1958 that Corman was noticed. That pic was followed by a studio film, “I Mobster,” for Fox. After “Little Shop of Horrors” in 1960, Corman convinced Arkoff to bankroll some more ambitious projects, in particular, a series of films based on the works of one of Corman’s favorite authors, Edgar Allan Poe. The horror series, which starting with “The Fall of the House of Usher” in 1960, spawned eight low-budget hits including “The Tomb of Ligeia” and “The Masque of Red Death.” They revived the careers of Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Basil Rathbone and Peter Lorre and became classics of a kind.

During the same period he was giving unknown actors like Ellen Burstyn, Nicholson and De Niro, screenwriters like Robert Towne and directors like Scorsese, Demme, Joe Dante and Peter Bogdanovich their starts.

His one and only “message” film, 1962’s “The Intruder,” starring William Shatner, was about racism. Reviews were good, but because the film used the “N” word it was denied the Production Code Seal, so bookings were few. “I decided then and there I would never again make a movie that would be so obviously a personal statement,” he once told a New York Times interviewer.

Nor was he satisfied with his venture into “big” movies for Columbia Pictures when execs there tried to stint on his budgets. Back at AIP, he made “The Wild Angels,” a biker movie with Peter Fonda that cost $360,000 and grossed more than $25 million.

It was followed by “The Trip,” about LSD, and other youth-oriented hits. But he started to run out of steam around the time of “Bloody Mama” in 1970 and withdrew from directing after “Von Richthofen and Brown.” In 1970 he formed New World Pictures to produce and distribute the kinds of films Arkoff had once bankrolled. By the end of his first year, with releases like “Women in Cages” and “Night Call Nurses,” he was in the black. Later he would produce such films as “Piranha,” “Eat My Dust” and “Death Race 2000.”

His hunger for art films began in 1972 with Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” and continued with “Autumn Sonata,” “The Story of Adele H,” “Amarcord” and “Fitzcarraldo.” He reinvented their marketing and distribution, booking them in a wider variety of venues and giving audiences outside the major cities a taste of world cinema they had not previously enjoyed.

Foreign films were one fifth of New World’s $55 million annual revenue by 1980. He also added family films like “A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich” to his mix and higher-priced (as in $5 million) projects like the sci-fier “Battle Beyond the Stars.” In 1983 he sold New World for $16.5 million and started Concorde/New Horizons. He continued to unearth new talent like director Luis Llosa and by 1989 was boasting in Variety of a string of 40 consecutive profitmakers. But the market had changed, and his profits never reached the heights of the AIP or early New World days. Fortunately for Corman, the ever-burgeoning foreign market took up some of the slack — it came to represent half or more of his business — and CNH came about at the perfect time to capitalize on the new home video market. With his massive back catalog, he was perfectly positioned to bring out his old pics on video while making new ones specifically targeted to that market.

Returning to the director’s chair for the first time in two decades for 1990’s “Frankenstein Unbound,” Corman disappointed genre fans and did not direct again.

PP

[PHXPhlyer]

Roger Corman
Part 2

There is no question, however, that his high volume for home video strategy was financially successful. Corman renamed the business New Concorde in 2000 and reorganized to form New Concorde Home Entertainment.

Corman had produced a movie called “The Fast and the Furious” in 1955, and when producer Neal Moritz discovered the film back when he was launching a car-fueled franchise of his own starring Vin Diesel and Paul Walker, Moritz decided that he had to have that title for the movie. The two men came to an agreement under which Moritz swapped stock footage for name rights to the 2001 film and its successors.

Corman also found a new outlets for his pics on Showtime and the Sci Fi Channel (now Syfy). CNH produced a “Roger Corman Presents” series of science fiction, horror and fantasy films for the pay cabler. The 2001 Sci Fi Channel “Black Scorpion” series was based on two of his more popular straight-to-vid films. Telepics for Syfy included “Dinoshark,” “Dinocroc vs. Supergator” and “Sharktopus.”

In 2005 Concorde signed a 12-year deal with Buena Vista Home Entertainment giving the latter distribution rights to the more than 400 Corman-produced pics, then in 2010 Corman signed a deal with Shout Factory giving the latter exclusive North American home vid rights to 50 Corman-produced films.

Together they launched a home entertainment series called Roger Corman’s Cult Classics. The first titles made available were “Piranha,” “Humanoids From the Deep,” “Up From the Depths” and “Demon of Paradise.”

In 1990 Corman published his memoirs “Maverick: How I Made 200 Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime.”

He frequently made cameos in the pics of the successful filmmakers who got their start with him, appearing, for example, in Demme’s “Philadelphia,” Howard’s “Apollo 13,” Coppola’s “The Godfather: Part II” and Dante’s “Looney Tunes: Back in Action.”

In 1998 he received the first Producers Award ever presented by the Cannes Film Festival.

In 2006 Corman received the David O. Selznick Award from the Producers Guild of America. The same year, his film “Fall of the House of Usher” was among the 25 pics selected for the National Film Registry, a compilation of significant films to be preserved by the Library of Congress.

Alex Stapleton’s 2011 feature documentary “Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel” explored the filmmaker’s activities. Last year, Corman was honored by the Los Angeles Press Club with its Distinguished Storyteller Award recognizing his contributions to the film industry.

Corman is survived by his wife, producer Julie Corman, and daughters, Catherine and Mary.

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