Saturday, January 6, 2024

Glynis Johns and other obituaries

I mentioned Glynis Johns' 100th birthday a few months back. Johns died on Thursday. She had a long career, including an Oscar nomination for The Sundowners. A lot of people will probably best remember her for her role in Mary Poppins, if Disney doesn't decide to bury the 1960s version of the movie in their ongoing cultural revolution. I remember her more for one of her earliest roles, in 49th Parallel as the Hutterite girl who has good reason to hate the Nazis; that and the doomed mother in All Mine to Give which TCM ran over Christmas. I've found clips of her in both movies on YouTube, so I'll embed them here hoping that the clips don't get taken down:

David Soul, who played Hutch in the 1970s TV series Starsky and Hutch, also died on Thursday; Soul was 80 years old. Soul's movie career includes Magnum Force, the second of the Dirty Harry movies. Soul also had a #1 hit here in the US on the back of his TV stardom, a song called "Don't Give Up on Us".

Another centenarian besides Johns died: Oscar winning sound director Peter Berkos died on Tuesday aged 101. It's one of those names I would never have recognized, but behind-the-camera people like film and sound editors deserve to be better remembered as they also bear a good portion of the responsibility of the success of a film.

Finally, not being much of a viewer of more recent films, I have to admit to not recognizing the name Christian Oliver, who tragically died in a plane crash with his immediate family on Thursday. Oliver's work included The Good German and the most recent Indiana Jones movie. Oliver was 51.

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