Obituaries
Ase -- Tuesday, July 09, 2002 -- 09:15:02 PMWho is no longer with us
Note. Please post announcements only as posts. Add reaction and other obits as comments.
This thread is tagged: death, news(All users will see what tags exist for a thread. Please tag carefully!)
This seemed to be a reasonable place for this, since we'll probably mostly announce popular culture icons (it is in news and media on TT, but there is no such place here).
Not that old, in a world that still has Katharine Hepburn, Eddie Albert and even (in a way) Ronald Reagan. I believe those are the three remaining folks who were stars in the 30s.
Oops. Add Jane Wyman to the list.
Actually, that's a good movie topic thread.
I wonder what shape Ronnie is in...
My parents are 70, and the past few times I was home they have told about people I know who has (or had) alzheimers. Living this far away, I get very out of the loop with being close to aging people, so when I'm there, I feel so sad to hear about these people who I remembered as vibrant, and intelligent and not terribly old being so gone that they recognize absolutely nothing.
I just sent the DVD of "In the Heat of the Night" to my dad for his birthday--it's his favorite movie.
On the plane coming home I watched Judy Dench in that movie about Iris Murdoch's descent into alzheimer's, & then death. Wow, what an outstandingly fabulous study of the end of life. Wow, just wow. I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Yeah. I haven't seen the movie. Perhaps I should, if I'm up to it.
I mentioned elsewhere my parents telling me about people I knew growing up who succumed to Alzheimers. Some now dead (the dad of my first big crush), one still living (head master of the school my siblings went to). It is just horrible to hear. I'm not sure if it is horrible for them, because they appear to be so terribly gone, but...
God, that movie really hit a nerve with me. I think possibly because I read Flowers for Algernon/Charley at an impressionable age. Ase, in the movie at least it is made as horrible as it ever could possibly be for the very reason that she is aware of what's going on and, if this makes any sense, she's as devastated by it as someone of her intelligence at its highest point would be, but as scared by it and as unable to cope with it as a person with the mental age of three would be. It's like, she got the worst of all worlds. Every now and then a flash of lucidity in which she would recognize how far she'd fallen, and then all the rest of the time increasing terror as the world becomes less and less understandable. And the fact that her personal sense of self and self-worth apparently always rode on her intelligence. Being brilliant was a major way she defined herself. And she retained enough awareness to watch, helpless but able to see it was happening, as it was taken from her. And then, when she was finally "terribly gone", the world was just a terrifying place because she had no skills to cope with anything.
But, on the lighter side, there sure was a lot of full frontal Kate Winslet nudity!
Chaim Potok, writer of such novels as The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev, is dead. AP obituary is here.
And dear old Leo McKern of Rumpole of the Bailey fame died last week. Still, at 82, he had a decent innings.
I don't know how many of you remember Donna Dear from the TT politics folder...I just found out last night that she had died on the 6th of this month.
This is a hard hit for me. I worked with her on Yahoo and knew her outside TT in general. We didn't always agree but that didn't stop me from appreciating her. I'll miss her. She was amazing, annoying and incredible all in the same breath. For a glimpse of who she was:
http://www.cnn.com/2002/SHOWBIZ/TV/08/07/obit.robinson.ap/index.html
The first actor to play Gordon on Sesame St., Matt Robinson, has died.
Roscoe Orman, who's played Gordon since 1974, is still with us.