Movie Industry Obituaries

[Leo Enticknap]

Forking this off from the "random news stories" category, as there seem to be a lot of them recently.

Obituary - Gena Rowlands

Gena Rowlands, star of A Woman Under the Influence and Gloria, dies aged 94

Hollywood star won three Emmys and two Oscar nominations during a four-decade career

Gena Rowlands, the three-time Emmy winner and dual Oscar nominee, has died at the age of 94.

On Wednesday, the movie star was hailed as one of the United States’ greatest actresses and a leading light in independent cinema,

Rowlands is best known for he roles in A Woman Under The Influence, Gloria, and a part in her son Nick Cassavetes’ blockbuster The Notebook.

Her death was confirmed on Wednesday by representatives of Cassavetes. He revealed earlier this year that his mother had been living for years with Alzheimer’s disease.

She died at her home in Indian Wells, California.

During a remarkable film career, Rowlands and husband John Cassavetees created indelible portraits of working-class strivers and small-timers.

She made 10 films across four decades with Cassavetes, including A Woman Under The Influence, Gloria, Faces, Minnie and Moskowitz, Opening Night and Love Streams.

She earned two Oscar nods for two of them: 1974’s A Woman Under the Influence, in which she played a wife and mother cracking under the burden of domestic harmony, and Gloria in 1980, about a woman who helps a young boy escape the mob.

“He had a particular sympathetic interest in women and their problems in society, how they were treated and how they solved and overcame what they needed to, so all his movies have some interesting women, and you don’t need many,” she said in 2015.

In addition to the Oscar nominations, Rowlands earned three Primetime Emmy Awards, one Daytime Emmy and two Golden Globes.

She was awarded an honorary Academy Award in 2015 in recognition of her work and legacy in Hollywood.

“You know what’s wonderful about being an actress? You don’t just live one life,” she said at the podium. “You live many lives.”

A new generation was introduced to Rowlands in The Notebook, in which she played a woman whose memory is ravaged, looking back on a romance for the ages. The younger version of the character was portrayed by Rachel McAdams.

In her later years, Rowlands made several appearances in films and TV, including in The Skeleton Key and the detective series Monk.

Her last appearance in a movie was in 2014, playing a retiree who befriends her gay dance instructor in Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks.

She and Cassavetes met at the American School of Dramatic Arts when both their careers were beginning. They married four months later.

In 1960 Cassavetes used his earnings from the TV series Johnny Stacatto to finance his first film, Shadows. Partly improvised, shot with natural light on New York locations with a $40,000 budget, it was applauded by critics for its stark realism.

Rowlands’ big break came when Josh Logan cast her opposite Edward G Robinson in Paddy Chayefsky’s play Middle of the Night. Her role as a young woman in love with her much older boss brought reviews hailing her as a new star.

MGM offered her a contract for two pictures a year. Her first film, a comedy directed by and co-starring Jose Ferrer, The High Cost of Loving, brought Rowlands comparisons to Carole Lombard, one of the great 1930s stars.

But she asked to be released from her contract because she was expecting a baby. Often during her career she would absent herself from the screen for long stretches to attend to family matters.

In addition to Nick, she and Cassavetes had two daughters, Alexandra and Zoe, who also pursued acting careers. John Cassavetes died in 1989.

I met her, briefly, at the Egyptian, around 2015 or '16. We had played Opening Night (on 35mm), at which she did a Q & A afterwards. She thought that there was a scene missing from the print, and a manager brought her up to the booth to ask me about it as I was shutting everything down. She was so pleasant to me that I almost felt guilty at having formed the opinion over the previous three hours that Opening Night was one of the most boring, depressing, self-indulgent, and generally f*****g abysmal films I'd ever encountered! The print was in near new condition, with no splices apart from at the starts and ends of each reel (for which the ID frames all matched), and so if the scene she recalled had been removed, it must have been done in post rather than taken out of the actual print.

[Mike Blakesley]

Maybe we should all add our own obits to this thread and then after we are dead, somebody can fill in the date of our demise. (It would be fun to read peoples' biographies..... maybe the "edit" function could be made unlimited so people could update their writeup.)

I started this post as a bit of a joke, but I actually think it's not a horrible idea.

[Leo Enticknap]

Here...

Kathleen Hughes, ‘scream queen’ best known for the 3-D cult classic It Came from Outer Space

‘In 3-D anything sticking out towards the camera is going to come out into the audience. I walk into the scene wearing this tight blouse’

Kathleen Hughes, who has died aged 96, was a one-time B-movie blonde bombshell best known for her role in It Came from Outer Space (1953), Universal’s first serious venture into sci-fi and now a cult classic of the eerie-music-in-the-desert-after-the-UFO-has-landed genre.

Based on a Ray Bradbury short story, directed by Jack Arnold and with an atmospheric, theremin-rich score by Henry Mancini, the film was made in 3-D, and the statuesque Kathleen Hughes, who had been named “Miss Cheesecake 1952” by the armed forces newspaper Stars and Stripes, had few illusions about why she was given a role. “Because I was very three-dimensional, they picked me,” she recalled. “I had to parade back and forth on a runway while they tested the cameras.”

The previous year she had had a substantial role in the comedy Sally and Saint Anne, but she auditioned for a walk-on part as the girlfriend of Russell Johnson’s human-looking alien in the sci-fi movie. “I had to beg for that part,” she recalled. “They said, ‘You just did a lead. You can’t do such a small part.’ I said, ‘How can it be small? It’s in 3-D. You’ve got to give it to me.’” Eventually, they relented.

In the film, her character walks into a police station to report her boyfriend missing. “The thing about working in 3-D is you have to know that anything that is sticking out towards the camera was going to come out into the audience. I walk into the scene wearing this tight blouse,” she recalled. “I enjoy the audience reaction when I come on screen. It’ s a big kick.”

She became known as the film’s “scream queen” only thanks to a publicity still. “I had just finished working,” she told Fox News in 2019. “I went to the still gallery, and as I walked in, the cameraman said to me, ‘Put your hands up in the air and scream.’ And I did. It was an instant success.”

The picture went on to be used in advertisements (“Hummus, a flavor that screams”) and birthday cards, though Kathleen Hughes’s husband objected when a prophylactic manufacturer wanted to use it for a condom advertisement.

Kathleen Hughes was named Miss 3-D 1953.

She was born Elizabeth Margaret von Gerkan in Los Angeles on November 14 1928. An uncle was Hugh Herbert, a screenwriter, who told her that she would never make it in the movies because at 5ft 9in she was too tall to play opposite leading men, who were all short: “One of the reasons I stuck to acting was to prove him wrong.”

She was a student at Los Angeles City College and appearing in a play at the Geller Theater when she was spotted by a talent scout for Twentieth Century-Fox, which signed her in 1948 and changed her name to Kathleen Hughes.

She took small roles in a handful of Twentieth Century-Fox films, including Mr Belvedere Goes to College (1949), and she did a screen test with Rock Hudson, though she was not impressed: “I didn’t think he was a Greek god or anything. After it was over, I never said to myself that he is going to be a big star.”

Nor did Fox; instead it was Universal which put Hudson under contract. After three years with Fox, Kathleen Hughes, too, was signed by Universal, and she went on to give Hudson his first on-screen kiss, in The Golden Blade (1953). That year she reunited with Jack Arnold, playing a gold-digger and murder victim in The Glass Web, a 3-D film noir starring Edward G Robinson.

Kathleen Hughes’s contract with Universal ended after three years, and while she took small roles in numerous television series in the 1960s and 1970s, unlike Rock Hudson she never made it big in movies.

In 1954 she married the screenwriter and producer Stanley Rubin, who died in 2014. She is survived by two sons and a daughter. Another son predeceased her.

Kathleen Hughes, born November 14 1928, died May 19 2025

As we now know (though she likely didn't at the time), she was wasting her affections on Rock Hudson...

[Marcel Birgelen]

Maybe we should all add our own obits to this thread and then after we are dead, somebody can fill in the date of our demise. (It would be fun to read peoples' biographies..... maybe the "edit" function could be made unlimited so people could update their writeup.)

I started this post as a bit of a joke, but I actually think it's not a horrible idea.

It's a bit like those newspapers and news channels who have stories already pre-made in the event an "important someone" like the King of England or the Pope dies more or less unexpectedly. Some of them have ended up being published inadvertently in the past.

[Leo Enticknap]

Source

Peter Watkins, filmmaker best known for his searing mock-documentary The War Game, banned by the BBC

‘They should string up bedsheets between the trees and show The War Game in every public park,’ declared the film critic Roger Ebert

Peter Watkins, who has died the day after his 90th birthday, was a radical and visionary filmmaker who won an Oscar for The War Game, his mock-documentary about the aftermath of a nuclear attack on Britain; it had been commissioned by the BBC, who folded under pressure from the Government and withdrew it before it was due to be screened in October 1965.

“The effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting,” a statement read. “It will, however, be shown to invited audiences.”

The film duly premiered at the National Film Theatre in London the following spring and went on win the Special Prize at the Venice Film Festival before winning its Academy Award. The BBC eventually caught up with it in 1985, when they transmitted it to mark the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the day before repeating Threads, the 1984 drama depicting life after a nuclear attack on Sheffield – a film that had The War Game in its DNA.

When John Lennon was asked in 1969 what had got him and Yoko Ono started on their peace campaign, he replied: “The thing that really struck it off was a letter we got from a guy called Peter Watkins who made a film called The War Game. It was a very long letter stating just what’s happening – how the media is really controlled, how it’s all run, and everything else that people really know deep down.”

Peter Watkins was born on October 29 1935 in Norbiton, Surrey. He attended Cambridge University and then Rada. He went on to do his National Service in Canterbury, and he settled there.

He initially worked in advertising, while directing a local theatre group, Playcraft, whose members chipped in to help with his early films. The Web (1956), Field of Red (1958) – both long lost – The Diary of an Unknown Soldier (1959) and The Forgotten Faces (1961) all employed the handheld cameras and tight framing that would come to characterise Watkins’s work. Field of Red , about the American Civil War, was named as one of the 10 best non-professional productions of the year by Amateur Cine World and received national distribution.

Like two other amateur filmmakers, Ken Russell and John Schlesinger, Watkins was recruited by the BBC, joining what would become BBC Two in 1962. But his first film for them stirred up trouble.

He was commissioned by Huw Wheldon, head of the documentary department, to make a film about the Battle of Culloden in 1746, in which the Duke of Cumberland’s forces routed the Jacobites and ended their rebellion.

The result was the brutal Culloden (1964), made on a tiny budget and up-ending the conventions of filmmaking, using non-professional actors and shooting the film as if a modern news crew were on the battlefield. With one cannon and a handful of extras, Watkins brilliantly framed the film to convey the chaos and clamour of a real battle.

He ranged a cast from London and the Scottish Lowlands for the Hanoverian forces against people from Inverness for the Jacobite army, many of the latter descended from those who had been killed in the battle. While looking back to “the rape of the Highlands”, Culloden also had echoes of the war that was raging in Vietnam.

Watkins followed it with his magnum opus, The War Game. He employed amateur actors again, casting through a series of public meetings. It was shot in Kent, in Tonbridge, Gravesend, Chatham and Dover, and like Culloden was presented as a documentary, chronicling Britain’s rapid descent into post-apocalyptic chaos.

A Telegraph leader supported the BBC’s decision to can the film, noting: “It is not stuff to be viewed by every elderly person living alone or even for a few minutes by a child.”

In The War Game the country falls apart, the Blitz spirit little in evidence. On Christmas Day, a few months after the attack, orphans are interviewed at a shelter in Dover and asked what they want to be when they grow up. “I don’t want to be nothing,” says one, while others simply look blank.

The great film critic Roger Ebert, praising the film’s authenticity, hailed it as a masterpiece. “They should string up bedsheets between the trees and show The War Game in every public park,” he wrote. “It should be shown on television, perhaps right after one of those half-witted war series in which none of the stars ever gets killed. And, somehow, it should be shown to the leaders of the world’s nuclear powers, the men who have their fingers on the doomsday button.”

But Watkins clashed bitterly with the BBC over the film, and in 2000 he remarked: “Had television taken an alternative direction during the 1960s and 1970s and worked in a more open way, global society today would be vastly more humane and just.”

Watkins moved on from The War Game with the feature film Privilege (1967), adapted from a story by Johnny Speight, who had made his name writing the sitcom Till Death Us Do Part. Filmed in characteristic fashion as a mock-documentary, Privilege starred the Manfred Mann singer Paul Jones – with Jean Shrimpton as his girlfriend – playing a near-future pop star controlled by the government as part of their ongoing project to keep the masses subdued. When he cracks under the pressure of his role, the singer is effectively “cancelled”.

The film took potshots at politicians, big business and the media, but the critics were largely hostile. “One is left feeling,” wrote Patrick Gibbs in the Telegraph, “that while the situation of a pop star may be a suitable subject for social satire, it is too trivial to support, as it asked to here, a serious would-be savage criticism of the quality of contemporary life.”

Stung by the domestic rejection of all he had done so far, Watkins left Britain and worked mostly abroad from then on. He had a more agreeable reception in Sweden, where a distributor funded his second feature, The Gladiators (1969), which imagined the International Peace Games as a means of avoiding large-scale conflict, with mini-battles fought between small teams of soldiers from each country, and broadcast around the world (adverts included).

Some critics praised its vivid anti-war message, but like so much of Watkins’s work it mostly lay in the vaults following its release. He made Punishment Park (1970) in the US, another faux documentary, in which a European film crew follows the National Guard as they pursue a bunch of activists across 50 miles of scorching desert. If they make it across, they are free; if they are captured, they are taken to prison.

Though he had written a script, for the first time Watkins allowed his cast to improvise; they came to identify so closely with their characters that on one occasion they threw rocks for real at their pursuers, who fired on them for real in return.

Punishment Park – shot, like most of Watkins’s films, on a micro-budget – left many outraged, and it was roundly condemned when it was shown at the 1971 New York Film Festival. A particular bone of contention appeared to be resentment that a Brit should be criticising America, and the Hollywood studios all steered clear.

Much more successful was Edvard Munch (1974), originally conceived as a two-part miniseries commissioned by Norwegian and Swedish state television, which had been sparked by Watkins’s visit in 1968 to the Munch Museum in Oslo. Atmospheric, and visually ravishing, it covered three decades of the artist’s life in the style of a dramadoc. Ingmar Bergman called it “a work of genius”, and it won in the Best Foreign Programme category at the 1977 Baftas.

Filmed in Denmark, Evening Land (1977) – made, as usual, with non-professional actors and in mock-doc style – occupied familiar Watkins territory, as police hunt for radicals who have kidnapped a government minister. Once again, outrage ensued, with Watkins accused of siding with the activists, and though it was shown at the Cannes, Edinburgh and Moscow film festivals, Danish TV declined to air it, claiming that it did not meet their professional standards.

The Journey (1983-87) was an internationally funded 14-hour straight documentary, updating much of the information about the nuclear threat which he had included in The War Game.

His last great docudrama, La Commune (Paris, 1871) (2000), was about the Paris commune. “No less than the event it chronicles, La Commune is a triumph of spontaneous action,” said Sight & Sound.

Peter Watkins was married to Vida Urbonavičius, and had two sons.

Peter Watkins, born October 29 1935, died October 30 2025

I vividly remember being marched into the middle school gym and sitting cross-legged on the floor to see The War Game on 16mm as a kid in the early '80s. The Day After was on TV not long afterwards. Some aspects of growing up in the '70s and '80s were distinctly not that fun....

[Leo Enticknap]

As Ioannis Syrogiannis notes on another thread, Frederick Wiseman passed today. I can't copy and paste this obit, because it exceeds the character limit for a post. But it doesn't seem to be behind a paywall, so this link should work.

[Leo Enticknap]

Here.

Actor who played The Gimp in ‘Pulp Fiction’ dead at 68

By Lauren Sarner
Published March 6, 2026, 4:36 p.m. ET

Stephen Hibbert, best known for playing The Gimp in “Pulp Fiction,” has died at 68.

The actor and writer died of a heart attack in Denver, CO., on Monday, according to TMZ.

In a statement given to the outlet, Hibbert’s children — Greg, Ronnie, and Rosalind — said, “Our father, Stephen Hibbert, passed away unexpectedly this week. His life was full of love and dedication to the arts and his family. He will be dearly missed by many.”

Hibbert was best known for playing The Gimp in Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 classic “Pulp Fiction,” starring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman. His character had no lines and was covered by a leather bodysuit. Bruce Willis’ character had a memorable run-in with him.

Born in Fleetwood, England, Hibbert wrote for TV in the ‘90s, on shows such as “Late Night with David Letterman” “Mad TV” and “Boy Meets World.”

He also acted as a script doctor for numerous iconic movies like “Shrek” and “Austin Powers,” and he appeared in a small role in “Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.”

In a 2024 interview with AARP, he said he met Tarantino at the famous improv group, the Groundlings Theater.

Since The Gimp had no lines and was covered in leather, he said he got cast without talking. “Quentin and I acted out a master and slave scenario for the casting director. He bossed me around the office and I groveled. I felt like I’d been training all of my work life for an opportunity to audition for a role like that. Whee!”

He also recalled his sudden fame after the movie premiered. The actor said he got “two dozen messages” on his answering machine from men telling him they liked his performance and wanted to meet for coffee

“Yikes! These fellas had to wait for the end credits to see who played The Gimp, then find a pay phone, call LA 411 and snag my number. I quickly changed my number and became unlisted,” he quipped.

He recalled his role fondly, however, noting that he thinks it’s “one of the greatest films of all time,” and “a great time capsule” of LA in the ’90s.

From 1989 to 1994, Hibbert was married to actress Julia Sweeney, who was also in “Pulp Fiction.”

In addition to writing and acting, he also taught a film theory course at Denver School of the Arts, and he taught improv at Chaos Bloom Theater in Denver.

Hibbert is survived by his three kids.

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[Leo Enticknap]

Here.

John Bengtson, film historian who tracked down the locations used in Hollywood silent movies

His ability to identify locations was uncanny, and fellow film historian Kevin Brownlow asked ‘does he lay out his photos on a Ouija board?’

Telegraph Obituaries
Published 30 March 2026 6:00am BST

John Bengtson, who has died of motor neurone disease aged 68, was an unassuming Californian lawyer acclaimed as “the Sherlock Holmes of film locations”; he dedicated his spare time to obsessive cinema detective work, tracking down hundreds of places glimpsed in Hollywood silent films.

Perhaps Bengtson’s most remarkable discovery was that a single alley south of Hollywood Boulevard had been used in more than a dozen films of the early 1920s.

In Cops (1922), Buster Keaton is chased down the distinctive T-shaped alley by a pack of policeman before making his escape by seizing a fast-moving car. In the same alley, Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp finds an abandoned child in The Kid (1921). And it is here that Harold Lloyd in Safety Last! (1923) troops into the employees’ entrance of the De Vore department store, from the clock of which he later famously dangles.

Bengtson also identified Harry Houdini, Douglas Fairbanks and Oliver Hardy in the same alley in various other films. His campaigning led to a plaque being unveiled in 2021 by Hollywood Heritage to mark “Chaplin-Keaton-Lloyd Alley”.

Bengtson began his investigations in 1995, when the Buster Keaton archive became available on LaserDisc. The new technology allowed him to freeze and manually photograph the frames on his television at home. He soon realised that Keaton’s preference for filming out in the city rather than in the studio had “inadvertently created this real record of Hollywood and San Francisco and Sacramento”.

He began to cross-reference the details he observed with records in public libraries, to track down the places in real life. He found fire insurance maps particularly useful, as they listed the construction materials of roofs. His ability to identify a location from clues as slim as an unusually shaped window, a curved roof or a faded sign on a wall was agreed to be uncanny. The silent film historian Kevin Brownlow called him a “psychic – does he lay out his photos on a Ouija board?”

The product of four years’ research, Bengtson’s first book, Silent Echoes: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Buster Keaton (2000), was described by one reviewer as “clearly, and in the best way, the work of someone obsessed with his subject”. It was followed by Silent Traces: Discovering Early Hollywood Through the Films of Charlie Chaplin (2006) and Silent Visions: Discovering Early Hollywood and New York Through the Films of Harold Lloyd (2011).

John David Bengtson was born in Bakersfield, California, on November 17 1957. His father, of Swedish extraction, was a geologist for Standard Oil. As a teenager John collected silent films on Super 8 reels, taught himself Scott Joplin rags and directed a five-minute silent film of his own, The Pool, starring his classmates from Ygnacio Valley High.

After graduating from UC Berkeley, he stayed on for an MBA before qualifying in law from UCLA. He specialised in pro bono copyright work for songwriters and children’s authors, working for California Lawyers for the Arts.

As well as his books, he published his film research on a blog, Silent Locations. His Charlie Chaplin research revealed how the Little Tramp’s evocations of London’s depressed East End had been filmed “near the old Plaza de Los Angeles, where Hispanic descendants of California’s former ruling class would find themselves ostracised in their own land, and in the old Chinatown nearby, where restrictive laws and immigration policies conspired to keep the descendants of Chinese railroad labourers on the lower rung of the social and economic ladder,” wrote Kevin Brownlow in his introduction to Bengtson’s Silent Traces. “We would never be able to appreciate this subtle interplay of history and drama without first knowing where Chaplin shot his films.”

Bengtson’s final project was a three-volume analysis of Laurel and Hardy locations.

His marriages to Mary Uniack and Kristin Anderson both ended in divorce. He is survived by two daughters from his first marriage.

John Bengtson, born November 17 1957, died January 29 2026

[Harold Hallikainen]

Jerry Pierce, Inter Society Digital Cinema Forum. I worked with Jerry and ISDCF for over 10 years, especially on captioning and screen luminance projects including several plugfests. Jerry got stuff done!

A video of Jerry talking about immersive sound is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZOd-pcgTXM .

An obituary is at https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries...ry?id=61279611 .

As a side note, my wife went to high school with Jerry.

[Mike Blakesley]

Bobby Franklin, owner of Franklin Designs in Florida, tragically died from injuries sustained from a 65-foot fall from a scaffolding while working on a job. There is a news article that says he fell through a drop ceiling, so I'm not sure which is correct.

I don't know any more details than that, but I feel so awful for his family. What a terrible way to end a life. He was a really nice guy. Bobby was 71.

Franklin Designs does theater architecture, wall decor, projection and sound....they say they have everything for a theater except the movies.

More info: https://dailyvoice.com/pa/reading/ro...-fall-coroner/

[Leo Enticknap]

Ughh. This is certainly a wake-up call for those of us working on install sites to stay vigilant, and to look out for ourselves and others, at all times. They can be chaotic places, with general contractors, riggers, electricians, seating/carpeting installers, alarm/security system contractors, and projection/audio techs competing for access to the same space at the same time, all working under pressure to get their scopes done and get out on schedule, especially if a hard open date has been set. Thankfully, I've never worked on an install at which a serious accident took place, but this goes to show that we can never let our guard down. Condolences to Mr. Franklin's family.

[Mike Blakesley]

Here's another article which says he WAS wearing a safety harness but it failed. So check those straps'n'buckles, guys. OSHA is investigating.

https://www.wfmz.com/news/area/berks/contractor-killed-in-fall-at-reading-imax-theater-identified-by-coroner/article_23510317-d171-424e-b645-4416f60c11e2.html

[Ryan Gallagher]

That is really tragic. But from decades in related industries requiring harness and work at heights. Typically a "failure" of such a harness comes down to user error in wearing it, or failure in usage practices, such as maintain 100% tie off in awkward traverses etc. Plenty of things can go wrong while falling in a harness or after you are suspended in one, but for better or worse they do usually catch you if you are tied off.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Geez, thats awful, and I'm very sorry to be reading this. Bobby did quite a few front ends and walls on jobs I worked on over the years, and always did excellent work. The last one he did was the Imax sized screen at Zion Canyon when we converted it to 3-D Digital in 2010. He also hung another Imax sized screen at the Dinosaur Museum south of Salt Lake City. He will be missed!

[Marcel Birgelen]

While there are apparently people who survived similar falls, falling from 65 feet on any hard surface, especially if you're 71 is not going to be positive for your life expectancy... The safety harness failing is pretty shocking, but I've heard about incidents where it wasn't the harness self that failed, but the thing it was attached to. And yes, if you need to re-attach the harness while moving, you're temporarily unprotected...