Obituary after obituary after obituary

This has seemed like one of those weeks where an inordinate number of well-known names, and a few lesser-known names, have left us. Some of the people probably deserve a separate post, and I assume there will be at least one standalone TCM programming tribute down the road, but I haven't seen anything of that yet. And with February being 31 Days of Oscar I'd guess that any programming tributes wouldn't be until March.

The first person I had been intending to mention was child actor Claude Jarman, Jr., who died on Sunday at the age of 90. He was the young friend of Juano Hernandez in Intruder in the Dust, which will be on TCM on Monday (Jan. 20) at 2:00 PM as part of TCM's Martin Luther King Day programming. Jarman also played the boy who works for Jeanette MacDonald in the Lassie film The Sun Comes Up. I blogged about that one on Christmas this past year obviously not knowing that Jarman was going to be dying in January, and also not having looked at the January TCM schedule. The Sun Comes Up is on TCM on January 30. Jarman was also in The Yearling, which I thought I had on my DVR to do a post on but apparently don't. That one's going to be on TCM as part of 31 Days of Oscar in mid-February.

The person who probably most deserved a standalone post is director David Lynch. Lynch directed such films as Blue Velvet and Mulholland Falls, as well as the TV series Twin Peaks that I never cared for. Lynch died on Wednesday at 78. It turns out that I've got one of his films on my DVR: Eraserhead. I tried to watch it some months back, but had difficulty getting into it. I'll have to give it another try, as it's coming up on TCM as part of the prime time lineup on January 31, although it's technically in the early hours of Feb. 1. So as of now I'm planning to do a full-length post on it in two weeks' time.

Then there's British actress Joan Plowright, who died yesterday aged 95. Like a lot of British actors and actresses, Plowright did a lot of work on the stage. But she's also known for having married Laurence Olivier, meeting him while they were making The Entertainer. For some reason, I thought that one was also getting an airing during 31 Days of Oscar, but a search of the February schedule doesn't yield any hits. Among Plowright's other movies -- and one that's on my DVR -- is her turn as a Jewish immigrant mother in Avalon So that one is going to be showing up on the blog fairly soon, most likely tomorrow, although I've got a fair bit of schedule juggling to do with my posts since I have a handful of posts on movies that are actually going to be on TV over the next week.

I didn't recognize the name Phyllis Dalton, but she was the sort of behind the scenes person whose work is as important to movies as all the bigger names. Dalton was a costume designer for a bunch of very high-profile movies, most notably Lawrence of Arabia, although that one surprisingly didn't get her an Oscar nomination. She would go on to win two Oscars, however, for Doctor Zhivago and the Kenneth Branagh version of Henry V. Other films included Alfred Hitchcock's remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Dalton was 99.

Finally, I should probably give brief mention to Jeannot Szwarc. Szwarc directed some films whose names you might recognize, most notably Jaws 2; he died on Wednesday at the age of 85.