Obituary

About Entertainment – Magazine –



























Accessibility links

Obituary: Dame Beryl Bainbridge

Page last updated at 13:51 GMT, Friday, 2 July 2010 14:51 UK

Dame Beryl Bainbridge Dame Beryl was born in 1934

Novelist Dame Beryl Bainbridge, who has died at the age of 75, was one of the UK's most popular and prolific authors.

She started her career as an actress in Liverpool, but continued to entertain throughout her working life as a writer.

Dame Beryl drew heavily on her early career in her 1989 book An Awfully Big Adventure, about a theatre company, which was later made into a film starring Hugh Grant and Alan Rickman.

It was one of more than 20 novels, screenplays and TV series she wrote during her career, the majority based on her own experiences and her relationship with three key men in her life.

"I always base the characters on me," she told a BBC documentary in 2007.

"If I could take a leap forward and invent somebody that's not me it would be alright, but I don't do that. I feel alienated, detached from it, and that's the worry."

Suicide attempt

Dame Beryl was born in Lancashire in 1934 and was educated at Liverpool's Merchant Taylors' School.

Her early career as an actress took her from Liverpool Repertory Theatre to a role in Coronation Street.

She tried to commit suicide in her 20s when going through a difficult patch. Recalling the incident in an interview, she said: "Putting one's head in the oven, yes, I think I was probably trying to draw attention to myself. I am terribly ashamed. I was a bit miserable. When one is young, one has these ups and downs."

Dame Beryl had been a keen writer as a child and wrote her first novel, Harriet Said, in the 1950s.

Beryl Bainbridge Dame Beryl’s literary career began in the 1960s

It was continually rejected by publishers and did not make it into print until 1972 when her novels A Weekend With Claude (1967) and Another Part of the Wood (1968) were already in print.

Most of her books during the 1970s and 1980s were semi-autobiographical but she later moved into historical fiction, first with 1991's The Birthday Boys – about Scott's last expedition to the Pole.

Master Georgie, published in 1998 was set during the Crimean War.

Everyman for Himself (1996), set on board The Titanic, won the Whitbread Novel Award.

Dame Beryl won the literary award twice, also for Injury Time (1977) and was nominated for the Booker Prize a record five times.

Those nominations were for The Dressmaker (1973); The Bottle Factory Outing (1974); An Awfully Big Adventure (1990); Every Man for Himself (1996); and Master Georgie (1998).

Despite being dubbed the "perpetual Booker Prize bridesmaid", Dame Beryl told the BBC in 2008 that she was delighted to be shortlisted so many times.

‘No standards’

In later years, her once-prolific writing slowed with her final books – According to Queeny and The Girl In The Polka-Dot Dress – published in 2001 and 2008 respectively.

In an interview with The Guardian in 2007, Dame Beryl – who received her damehood in 2000 – said: "It was easier when I was young because I had no standards – I would just write.

"It was wonderful, I wouldn't bother whether it was any good. It gets worse the more you know – your standards go up and up and you realise you can't reach them."

At the age of 71, convinced it was the age she was destined to die, Dame Beryl made a documentary with her grandson, called Beryl's Last Year, which was shown on BBC Four.

It detailed her upbringing and eventful life, as well as her attempts to write a novel, Dear Brutus, which she decided to leave unfinished.

"Everybody should write down, as best they can, before they die, what they think they were like," she said.

"Then their children would get an entirely different idea of who they were."

Bookmark with

  • Delicious

  • Digg

  • reddit

  • StumbleUpon

What are these?

Print Sponsor


See also

  • Dame Beryl Bainbridge dies at 75

    02 July 10UK

Related links

  • Related internet links

    • The Guardian – Beryl Bainbridge

    The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites

TOP ENTERTAINMENT STORIES

  • Brit actor Garfield is Spider-Man

  • Dame Beryl Bainbridge dies at 75

  • Shrek musical to open in London

|
News feeds

Most popular stories now

  1. Lancastria: Britain’s forgotten disaster

  2. Are standing seats a standing joke?

  3. Dame Beryl Bainbridge dies at 75

  4. Mayor’s apology over trouser drop

  5. Former SA police chief convicted

  1. Apple admits iPhone signal fault

  2. ‘I married Russian spy suspect’

  3. Deadly blasts hit Pakistan shrine

  4. Scientists peer inside a python

  5. Are standing seats a standing joke?

  6. Brit actor Garfield is Spider-Man

  7. Former SA police chief convicted

  8. Russia set for drink-driving ban

  9. ‘Legendary’ Gaza man and his ever-growing family

  10. Mexico gang clash leaves 21 dead

Most popular now, in detail

FEATURES, VIEWS, ANALYSIS

  • The life and career of prolific author Beryl Bainbridge

  • Profile of the UK’s last remaining Wimbledon hope

  • Why standing seats on aeroplanes could never happen

Skip to top

Products & services

  • E-mail news
  • Mobiles
  • Alerts
  • News feeds
  • Podcasts

Skip to the top of the page



bbc.co.uk navigation

  • News
  • Sport
  • Weather
  • TV
  • Radio
  • More…

BBC © MMX

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.

This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets (CSS) if you are able to do so.







Quantcast






TOP NEWS FRONT PAGE STORIES

  • Row over anti-terror cuts warning

  • Apple admits iPhone signal fault

  • Capello to remain England manager

|
News feeds


July 2nd, 2010 in Entertainment

Leave a comment

Your comment

Obituary

About Entertainment – Magazine –

























Accessibility links

Obituary: Louise Bourgeois

Page last updated at 10:02 GMT, Tuesday, 1 June 2010 11:02 UK

Louise Bourgeois, pictured in 1937 Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris on Christmas Day 1911

Louise Bourgeois, who has died in New York at the age of 98, was one of the world's most important and influential contemporary artists.

Yet it was not until the French-born, American-based sculptor was 70 years old that her work became known to the wider art world.

That recognition came when the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a solo show of her career in 1982.

The exhibition – the first retrospective the museum had ever mounted of a female sculptor – led to an invitation to represent the US at the 1993 Venice Biennale.

Best known for her giant metallic spider sculptures, her work was influenced by surrealism, primitivism and such early modernist sculptors as Alberto Giacometti and Constantin Brancusi.

When the Tate Modern opened in London in 2000, Bourgeois was commissioned to produce its first special exhibition.

I Do, I Undo at Tate Modern in 2000 Bourgeois created two giant towers for the opening of Tate Modern in 2000

Born in Paris in 1911, Bourgeois spent her early years studying at the Academie des Beaux-Arts and other schools and studios.

She moved to New York in 1938 after marrying US art historian Robert Goldwater, becoming an American citizen in 1955.

It was there that she produced the bulk of her art, provocative works that explored the traumas of her childhood and sexuality.

Working in a wide variety of materials, she tackled themes relating to male and female bodies, anger and betrayal.

In many interviews, Bourgeois cited her father's adulterous affair with a woman named Sadie – hired to teach her English – as a key inspiration.

"I always hated that woman," she told the Washington Post in 1984. "My work is often about murder."

One of her seminal works, The Destruction of the Father, represents a dinner table headed by a tyrannical father whose terrified family are driven to attack him.

The work – based on hunks of mutton and beef cast in plaster and then covered in latex – was completed shortly after the death of her husband in 1973.

The Destruction of the Father The Destruction of the Father was first exhibited in 1974

In 1997, she received a National Medal of Arts from US President Bill Clinton. The same year she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.

Before her death, she had been actively involved in preparations for an exhibition of her work in Venice, due to open on Friday.

Bourgeois is survived by two sons, Alain and Jean Louis. According to her studio, a third son, Michel, died before her.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy has paid tribute to a "very great artist" who "never stopped creating and renewing herself in her art."

Bourgeois, he continued, had been able to "reach a higher truth, rich in its contradictions, avoiding the trap of the latest trends."

Bookmark with

  • Delicious

  • Digg

  • reddit

  • StumbleUpon

What are these?

Print Sponsor


See also

  • US sculptor Louise Bourgeois dies

    01 June 10Entertainment

  • In pictures: Louise Bourgeois

    01 June 10Entertainment

  • Tate unveils Bourgeois exhibition

    21 June 07Entertainment

Related links

  • Related BBC links

    • BBC – Gomp/arts: Louise Bourgeois – One of the very best

  • Related internet links

    • Tate Modern

    The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites

TOP ENTERTAINMENT STORIES

  • Del Toro ‘takes leave’ of Hobbit

  • Shrek beats Sex and the City film

  • Homer is ‘greatest TV character’

|
News feeds

Most popular stories now

  1. E-mail error ends up on road sign

  2. Homer named greatest TV character

  3. Senior al-Qaeda leader ‘killed’

  4. Del Toro ‘takes leave’ of Hobbit

  5. UN urges Israel convoy raid probe

  1. UN urges Israel convoy raid probe

  2. Three dead during Chinese trial

  3. Senior al-Qaeda leader ‘killed’

  4. Duchess ‘drinking’ in paper sting

  5. E-mail error ends up on road sign

  6. Del Toro ‘takes leave’ of Hobbit

  7. Day in pictures

  8. A space odyssey of the mind

  9. Leak woes push BP shares down 15%

  10. Homer named greatest TV character

Most popular now, in detail

FEATURES, VIEWS, ANALYSIS

  • The influential artist who brought huge spiders to UK

  • Six men, 520 days and a ‘spaceship’ going nowhere

  • “Surreal, exciting…” Five new MPs find their feet

Skip to top

Products & services

  • E-mail news
  • Mobiles
  • Alerts
  • News feeds
  • Podcasts

Skip to the top of the page



bbc.co.uk navigation

  • News
  • Sport
  • Weather
  • TV
  • Radio
  • More…

BBC © MMX

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites.

This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets (CSS) if you are able to do so.







Quantcast







June 1st, 2010 in Entertainment

Leave a comment

Your comment

Obituary

About Entertainment – Magazine –

Lena Horne

Lena Horne: The star who blew a storm

Lena Horne’s singing career spanned more than 60 years. With her passionate voice and good looks, she became the first black sex symbol in the 1930s.

She was born in Brooklyn. Her mother was an actress and her father ran a small hotel.

Horne’s parents separated when she was three, and she was boarded out. She did not live with her mother again until she was 15.

A year later she became a chorus singer in Harlem’s fashionable Cotton Club. Her mother used to chaperone her there every night.

At 19, she ran away from home, got married and went on to raise two children.

Musical numbers edited

By now she had begun to sing regularly on radio and toured with Noble Sissle’s orchestra in the mid-1930s, and sang with the Charlie Barnett band in the early 1940s.

After conquering New York’s Cafe Society club, she was snapped up by Hollywood on the coming of sound.

She appeared in a cluster of musicals including Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather, the title song of which became her signature tune.

Lena Horne appears in Stormy Weather

The musical Stormy Weather gave Horne her theme tune

Her mixed ancestry – she was part white, Blackfoot Indian and Senegalese – affected her career.

During a period when black women were cast as menials, not stars, Lena Horne found many of her numbers edited out of the versions shown in southern states.

The studios lightened her appearance with special white make-up. But she refused to play stereotyped roles.

On one occasion for a film musical, she refused to be cast as an exotic Latin American.

"I don’t have to be an imitation of a white woman that Hollywood sort of hoped I’d become," she later said. "I’m me, and I’m like nobody else."

On tour, she often slept on the coach when hotels refused to rent her a room. She became active in the civil-rights movement and was blacklisted in the McCarthy era.

In the 1960s she became increasingly vocal, once throwing a lamp at a fellow customer in a Beverley Hills restaurant for making a racial slur.

Horne also marched on Washington DC in 1963 along with 250,000 other people to hear Martin Luther King deliver his "I have a dream" speech.

Catalogue of tragedy

She was happily married for 24 years to a white man, Lennie Hayton, musical director of MGM in Paris. But this only added to her emotional pressure.

By the 1950s, in musicals like Jamaica, black artists were beginning to gain acceptance.

Lena Horne went on to win international fame, finding her niche giving jazz renditions to popular songs such as Honeysuckle Rose and The Lady is a Tramp.

For 13 months in 1971-72 she suffered a catalogue of tragedy. First she lost her father. Then her son from her first marriage died of kidney failure. Soon afterwards, Lennie Hayton had a fatal heart attack.

Shattered, she went into retirement but, after a time, friends persuaded her to resume her career.

It reached a late climax in 1981 when her one-woman show, the award-winning The Lady and her Music, based on her life and career, ran for more than a year on Broadway and, subsequently, in London.

May 10th, 2010 in Entertainment

Leave a comment

Your comment

Obituary

About Entertainment – Magazine –

Corin Redgrave

Corin Redgrave: Late-flowering leading man and left-wing activist

With his imposing physique and sonorous voice, the actor Corin Redgrave often played figures of authority, with views which were a far cry from his own radical socialist beliefs.

Born in 1939, Corin Redgrave was the scion of perhaps Britain’s greatest acting dynasty, which included his parents Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson, sisters Vanessa and Lynn, as well as daughter Jemma Redgrave and nieces Joely and Natasha Richardson, who died last year.

Educated at Westminster public school and Cambridge, where he took a First in English, he bloomed later than Vanessa, who soon became an international star, yet went on to be regarded as one of the country’s greatest character actors.

Redgrave’s first marriage to former model Deirdre Hamilton-Hill – who died of cancer in 1997 – led to the births of Jemma, and a son Luke.

He later married actress Kika Markham and had two more sons, Harvey and Arden.

Redgrave’s first stage appearance was at the Royal Court in 1961 as Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, produced by Tony Richardson, who would later marry Vanessa.

Immediately afterwards he played the Pilot Officer in John Dexter’s production of Wesker’s Chips with Everything in the West End and on Broadway.

In 1972, Corin Redgrave joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, taking the role of Octavius in Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, and Antipholus of Ephesus in The Comedy of Errors.

Jemma Redgrave

Corin’s daughter, Jemma, followed him into the acting profession

Among a vast number of stage credits was Alan Ayckbourn’s comic trilogy The Norman Conquests, in which he starred as the bed-hopping Norman.

But it was later in his career when Redgrave reached his prime, playing expansive, often domineering, older characters.

In 1998 he won a Laurence Olivier award for his performance as Boss Whalen in the Tennessee Williams play Not About Nightingales, a previously lost work rediscovered and produced by him and his sister Vanessa.

Political party

And he excelled as the emotionally-blinkered and slightly eccentric Gaev in Trevor Nunn’s 2000 production of Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard at the National.

After rave reviews for his childlike Lear with the RSC, seen by many critics as the pinnacle of his career, Corin Redgrave collected the prestigious Pragnell Shakespeare Birthday Award for services to the Bard.

At the time he said: "When I saw the list of previous award winners, I was at a loss to think how I could have found myself in their company.

"Nevertheless, it’s a great privilege to be recognised for something so dear to my heart."

In 1995, he published a biography of his troubled father, called Michael Redgrave: My Father.

It was praised for its honesty about his family life and his father’s bisexuality.

Redgrave was also a celebrated playwright, penning Roy and Daisy and Fool for the Rest of his Life, both for BBC Radio.

In 1993, Redgrave and sister Vanessa founded the Moving Theatre company, an outlet for both their acting and directing.

But the siblings were as famous for their political activism.

For many years they were members of the Trotskyite Workers’ Revolutionary Party, whose fellow travellers included Dame Helen Mirren, the Big Issue’s John Bird and the actor and game-show host, Matthew Kelly.

Vanessa and Corin Redgrave

Socialist siblings: Vanessa and Corin Redgrave

More recently, the pair formed the Peace and Progress Party, which calls for the withdrawal of British troops from Iraq, the cancellation of the developing world’s debt and the repeal of the UK’s current asylum legislation.

They also supported Akhmed Zakayev, the Chechen separatist politician charged in Russia on 13 counts including murder and false imprisonment, in his successful bid for political asylum in Britain.

And Redgrave strongly suspected that his activism impeded his early progress as an actor, much as the BBC once blacklisted his father, Michael Redgrave, for his rumoured links with communism.

Although primarily a theatre actor, Corin Redgrave also enjoyed success on television and in films, featuring in Richard Attenborough’s big-screen musical satire, Oh! What a Lovely War, Four Weddings and a Funeral and, more recently the film adaptation of Robert Harris’s best-selling novel, Enigma.

In 2005, he suffered a heart attack while addressing a meeting in Essex about travellers’ rights. He had also been ill with cancer.

April 6th, 2010 in Entertainment

Leave a comment

Your comment

Obituary

About Entertainment – Magazine –

Edward Woodward

Edward Woodward had a reputation as an actor of authority

Although Edward Woodward’s repertoire included both musicals and Shakespeare, it was television series Callan which initially made him a household name in Britain.

He acquired an early love of theatre from the exuberant performances of the traders at the street market in his home town of Croydon, south of London, and his visits to the Croydon Empire.

He was only five when his recital for a talent contest at Wallington in Surrey won him the first prize, what he believed to be a silver penknife, until it began peeling to reveal a dull, base metal.

It taught him scepticism. "You start doing deals with Americans, particularly the big Hollywood ones, and you’ll appreciate the story about the silver penknife."

Edward Woodward’s next prize was more valuable, a place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, which enabled him to give up his job as a sanitation engineer.

Theatrical success

At 16, he became Rada’s youngest student and made his professional debut in repertory in 1946. Nine years later, he graduated to the London stage in Where There’s a Will.

Woodward improved his credentials with a season at Stratford-on-Avon and made his first breakthrough in Rattle of a Simple Man in London.

Edward Woodward in A Dream Divided

A 1969 television role saw Woodward play writer F Scott Fitzgerald

Its success took it to Broadway, and led to Woodward’s appearance in a New York production of a musical, High Spirits, based on Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit.

With his pleasing, light-tenor voice, Woodward then played the leading role of Sydney Carton in a musical version of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, and was on tour with the show when he received a call from Laurence Olivier.

Invited to choose his own role at the National Theatre, Woodward shook Olivier by declaring: "I want to play Cyrano de Bergerac", a work requiring several dozen actors.

He triumphed in the role, although he was obliged to supplement his income by singing in cabarets and clubs to support his wife and family.

Edward Woodward made more than a dozen records and featured in many dramas on BBC radio.

But it was in the title role of Callan, a brooding, resentful and rebellious British secret agent, that will be one of his best remembered roles.

Last screen appearance

The Thames Television series ran from 1969 to 1973, spawning a film of the same name. Woodward also starred in The Wicker Man, a film which attracted a huge cult following on both sides of the Atlantic, and in Breaker Morant, set during the Boer War.

He was made an OBE in 1978.

The success of Callan earned him an award for TV Actor of the Year and led to Woodward starring in a long-running American television series, The Equaliser.

His five years in New York made him wealthy, but Woodward regretted making the series, which took a heavy toll on his health.

Working 20 hours at a time, he coped by smoking 100 cigarettes a day – and had a major heart attack.

Edward Woodward in EastEnders

The actor’s final on-screen appearance came earlier this year in EastEnders

But the role did win him a coveted Golden Globe for best actor in 1987.

Woodward’s two sons and a daughter by his first marriage to Venetia Barratt are all actors, while he and his second wife, the actress Michele Dotrice, also have a daughter.

Edward Woodward gave up smoking and continued working, appearing in the BBC series Common as Muck.

He also had a role in Simon Pegg’s big-screen police comedy Hot Fuzz.

His last on-screen appearance was as Tommy Clifford in EastEnders earlier this year, a character who sought forgiveness for the murder of Patrick Trueman’s girlfriend decades earlier.

His most recent film, A Congregation of Ghosts, is currently in post-production.

Despite his success in several fields, and the authority he brought to each of them, he was grateful for simply enjoying employment in a tough profession.

November 16th, 2009 in Entertainment

Leave a comment

Your comment

About Entertainment – Magazine – Obituary

About Entertainment – Magazine –

Boyzone

Boyzone, with Gately centre, reformed in 2007 after eight years apart

Stephen Gately, who has died at the age of 33, joined Boyzone in 1993 after answering an advert in Dublin to audition for a new boy band.

Manager Louis Walsh wanted to form an Irish version of Take That, and said Gately and fellow singer Ronan Keating immediately stood out in auditions of 150 young men.

The group found major success with a cover of The Osmonds’ song Love Me for a Reason in 1994, which reached number two in the UK chart.

The craze for boy and girl bands was taking off and Boyzone’s clean cut charm, along with a clever choice of classic love songs, helped them appeal across generations.

Further hits followed the following year, including a version of Cat Stevens’ Father And Son and The Bee Gees’ Words, and the band also enjoyed success with their own songs.

Boyzone in 1996

The group had 17 UK top 10 singles, including six number ones

But at the end of the decade, they agreed to "take a break".

Around the same time, Gately decided to tell fans he was gay.

Much of the appeal of boy bands was built on sex appeal, and being homosexual was seen as a taboo.

"This is the hardest thing I have ever had to do but I owe it to our fans – as well as myself – to be completely honest," Gately said at the time. "I know this may come as a bombshell to our followers.

"Many of them may be upset. I only hope they understand how important it is for me to reveal that I am gay."

Gately said his Roman Catholic parents had accepted his sexual orientation four years earlier.

Born in the working class Sheriff Street area of Dublin, Gately said he realised that he was homosexual when he was 15 years old.

Stephen Gately

The singer was introduced to partner Andrew Cowles by Sir Elton John

At the time of his announcement, he was in a relationship with Dutch performer Eloy de Jong.

Gately pursued a solo career after Boyzone split, but failed to reach the same heights and sunk into depression.

"I was depressed for three years when the group split," he said. "Even when I was doing my solo album, I didn’t feel 100%.

"I missed the guys. It was weird being on your own in Asia promoting yourself and not having your buddies there. I had to get help. I was on anti-depressants for a couple of years."

The singer split from de Jong in 2002 and moved back to Dublin. Sir Elton John introduced him to internet businessman Andrew Cowles, and the pair became a couple.

Gately took to the West End stage, starring in musicals including Joseph and The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and appeared on the ITV1 show Dancing on Ice.

In 2007, following the huge success of the Take That reunion, Boyzone also hit the comeback trail.

Boyzone

Boyzone reformed to play arenas in 2008 and 2009

"We all decided to take a break but it lasted a lot longer than we thought," Gately said at the time.

"When we saw Take That do it so well I said to the boys, ‘C’mon, lets do it again’ because we could see how much fun they were having," said Gately.

Their first performance was for BBC’s Children In Need that year and fans snapped up 250,000 tickets for 10 concerts on a UK tour last summer.

They went on the road again this year and a new Boyzone album had been scheduled for 2010.

October 11th, 2009 in Entertainment

Leave a comment

Your comment

About Entertainment – Magazine – Obituary

About Entertainment – Magazine –

Keith Floyd

Keith Floyd: Shambolic master of televisual cuisine

With a whisk in one hand, a glass of wine in the other and wearing his trademark bow-tie, Keith Floyd transformed the face of television cookery.

Whether rustling up a spicy prawn dish on a beach in Thailand, 40-clove garlic chicken in Provence or jambalaya in Louisiana, Floyd’s idiosyncratic, often shambolic, style of presentation endeared him to millions of viewers around the world.

But Keith Floyd almost stumbled into stardom. Born in 1943, he was educated at Wellington School, Somerset, and became a junior newspaper reporter before the sight of the Michael Caine film Zulu led him into the Army.

He served as a second lieutenant in the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment before leaving to pursue a career in the catering industry.

After working as everything from a potato peeler to a dishwasher, Keith Floyd opened his first restaurant, Floyd’s Bistro, in Bristol. He was a mere 22 years old.

His culinary style, with its emphasis on fish, proved a hit and he was soon running three establishments.

Keith Floyd on Floyd on Fish

The 1985 series Floyd on Fish established him as a star

But Floyd’s lack of business acumen, and a staggering propensity to distribute largesse to all and sundry, soon proved his downfall, just as they would throughout his career.

After selling up, he sojourned in France for a while before buying a restaurant there. This too, was a failure and Floyd returned to Bristol and opened yet another bistro.

This restaurant, situated near the city’s BBC studios, was frequented by a television producer and bon viveur by the name of David Pritchard.

It was Pritchard who first recognised the star potential of the place’s eccentric, Stranglers-loving, patron.

Well lubricated

Though Floyd was well known among Bristol’s foodies, and had already written his first book, Floyd’s Food, it was television exposure that made him a star.

The 1985 series Floyd on Fish was unlike anything that had come before. For a start, Pritchard moved the action out of the television studio.

The first episode, for example, featured Floyd cooking on a trawler while out at sea, meeting other chefs and demonstrating their recipes.

Keith Floyd

Keith Floyd’s effervescent style made him famous around the world

As a presenter, Keith Floyd was unique. Well lubricated with the ubiquitous glass of wine, both booze and banter would flow as he directed his long-suffering cameraman Clive to show either his face or the dish with regular commands like "back to me".

Additionally, Pritchard would often order scenes to be re-shot, with a recharged glass each time so, as Floyd later admitted: "I used to come off those shoots just wrecked."

It should probably have failed, but the alchemy produced by the flamboyant chef and the immediacy of Pritchard’s production style proved an instant hit.

Series after series followed – Floyd on Food, on France, Spain, Italy, Australia, Floyd’s American Pie and Far Flung Floyd, to name but a few. And the books of the series made Floyd a wealthy man.

Bankrupt

But the good times were not to last. Having ploughed a million pounds into his dream pub, The Maltsters Arms in Devon, Keith Floyd lost the lot.

His media commitments prevented him from spending much time there and not even the presence of superchef-in-waiting Jean-Christophe Novelli in the kitchen was consolation for diners who wanted to meet the man himself.

Floyd eventually went bankrupt, allegedly after he accepted a £36,000 cheque for a drinks order. The cheque bounced.

Keith Floyd in Toledo, Spain

Cheers! Floyd took cookery programmes out of the studio

And matters got even worse when the BBC cancelled his shows. In an era of Nigella, Gordon, Jamie and a re-emergent Delia, the airwaves were packed with cookery programmes.

More recently, Floyd appeared on channel Five and had been in negotiations with the BBC about a return.

But many bridges had been burned. He fell out spectacularly with David Pritchard and was bitter, both about his treatment by the BBC and his own legacy.

"We don’t cook any more, we just watch TV programmes about cookery," he told one interviewer.

"Nobody takes cookery seriously now, it’s just cheap entertainment. I’m totally to blame. I started it all and now I’m going to go down in history for having started a series of culinary game shows.

"It makes me terribly sad."

September 15th, 2009 in Entertainment

Leave a comment

Your comment

About Entertainment – Magazine – Obituary

About Entertainment – Magazine –

Eartha Kitt in 2000

Eartha Kitt: Versatile diva

Once described by Orson Welles as the most exciting woman in the world, Kitt’s smouldering, feline drawl in memorable hits, such as Santa Baby, Old Fashioned Millionaire and I Wanna Be Evil conveyed a wealth of innuendo.

Ostracized at an early age for her mixed race heritage, international star Eartha Kitt defied criticism of her illegitimate past and conquered the entertainment world with finesse.

Born in 1927, she endured a tough childhood. Kitt’s mother, who worked on a cotton plantation, was just 14 when she gave birth, the white father thought to have been the son of the plantation owner.

Kitt’s features, neither black nor white, led to her being accepted by neither community. She was given away by her mother at the age of eight to live with an aunt in Harlem, New York City. Little did she know that this would be the start of a long showbiz career.

With a flair for the dramatic, Kitt, aged 15, auditioned for the famed Katherine Dunham Dance Troupe and won a spot as a featured dancer.

The work took her worldwide, and her unique style was enhanced as she became fluent in French during the European tour. It was during a performance in Paris that she caught a certain director’s eye, and was cast as Helen of Troy in Orson Welles’ production of Dr Faust.

Eartha Kitt in 1956

Eartha Kitt had a tough upbringing

Kitt made her name back in New York in the ‘New Faces of 1952′ revue. Her show-stopping performances, which ran for a year, led to a national tour and a follow up feature film with the same title.

Other films followed, such as St Louis Blues with Nat King Cole, and she played the title role in Anna Lucasta alongside Sammy Davis.

For her succession of best-selling records Kitt earned a Grammy nomination, she received her first Tony nomination for her acting, and also managed to complete her first volume of autobiography Thursday’s Child.

HAVE YOUR SAY
There is nobody who could possibly replace her and she will be sadly missed.

Joy Pattinson, Switzerland

One of Kitt’s more recognisable roles was her part as Catwoman, in succession to Julie Newmar, in the late 1960s television series Batman. She excelled in the part, and her trademark growl became a part of pop culture.

In the late sixties, however, Kitt’s career encountered a substantial setback after she made her anti-Vietnam war views explicit during a White House luncheon.

The CIA put together a dossier on her and she became professionally exiled from the US. She worked abroad for 11 years, where her reputation remained unscathed, but returned triumphantly to New York in 1974 to star in a Broadway spectacle of Timbuktu!

One-woman show

Kitt became a firm fixture on the Manhattan cabaret scene. Live theatre was always her passion and, in 2001, Broadway critics singled her out for praise for her role in The Wild Party.

Eartha Kitt in 2002

Sophisticated: Kitt’s exotic style kept her at the top for decades

More recently, she starred in US tours of The Wizard of Oz, and Cinderella, and appeared as the Fairy Godmother in The New York City Opera production.

Her distinctive voice and great versatility enthralled an entirely new generation of fans when she lent her services to the role of Yzma, the villain, in Disney’s animated feature The Emperor’s New Groove.

In 1994 she also was part of BBC Radio’s adaptation of The Jungle Book, where her role as Kaa the python was performed with a ferocity and bite.

She visited England many times throughout her career, firstly in the early 1950s and, most recently, for Follies in 1988, which she followed with a one-woman show in March 1989.

Eartha Kitt will be remembered as a distinguished and charismatic performer who, up to her death, could boast she had worked in more than 100 countries.

Alongside her cabaret performances, her singing career and her roles in film and television, Kitt was also a prominent jazz singer to which the “sex kitten” in her voice seemed aptly suited.

She appeared at legendary venues, such as The Cafe Carlyle, Detroit’s Music Hall and Seattle’s Jazz Alley, where she became the epitome of chic.

Her strong onscreen independence was mirrored off screen, since Kitt spent most of her life alone.

She was married briefly, from 1960 to 1965, from which a daughter, Kitt McDonald, was born in 1961. She became her mother’s manager.

December 27th, 2008 in Entertainment

Leave a comment

Your comment

About Entertainment – Magazine – Obituary

About Entertainment – Magazine –

Noel Redding, Jimi Hendrix and Mitch Mitchell.

Mitch Mitchell (right) performed on Hendrix classics such as Are You Experienced? Electric Ladyland and Axis: Bold As Love


Mitch Mitchell, the British drummer in the seminal 1960s band the Jimi Hendrix Experience, has been found dead in his US hotel room.

His frenetic drumming was the bedrock of Hendrix’s music. Mitchell treated the drums more like a lead instrument than the rhythm section.

The late 61-year-old provided a brilliant counterpoint for Hendrix’s unique guitar sound.

But Mitchell’s career faltered after Hendrix died in 1970.

He never quite recaptured the heights achieved with the Experience.

Established reputation

Born in Ealing, west London on 9 July 1947, John ‘Mitch’ Mitchell taught himself to play drums as a boy.

He honed his skills while working in Jim Marshall’s music shop in central London.

By his late teens Mitchell had established a reputation as a session musician, playing with a number of bands including the Tornados.



We met in this sleazy club. We did some Chuck Berry and took it from there. I suppose it worked

Mitch Mitchell on meeting Jimi Hendrix

His big break came when he joined Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames, a well-established jazz based outfit.

In 1966, he was invited to audition for a new band being formed to back Hendrix, who had arrived in the UK as a complete unknown.

“We met in this sleazy club,” he later recalled. “We did some Chuck Berry and took it from there. I suppose it worked.”

Together with bassist Noel Redding, the band became one of the innovators of the ‘power trio’ style of rock.

This format allowed Mitchell to indulge his extrovert style, and contribute far more to the band than the traditional drummer’s role as a timekeeper.

As well as the music, the band set out to make a visual statement, with psychedelic clothes and outrageous perms.

Power trio

The band really hit the headlines with their performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, when Hendrix set fire to his guitar.

Mitchell played on all five of the Hendrix hit singles, including Hey Joe and Purple Haze, as well as the bands three best-selling albums.

But Hendrix was feeling constrained by the power trio format, and the band broke up after their performance at the Denver Pop Festival in June 1969.

Mitch Mitchell

Mitchell had been touring with the Experience Hendrix Tour

Mitchell returned two months later as part of a new, much bigger, line-up which backed Hendrix at Woodstock.

He played in a brief reincarnation of the three-man Experience in 1970 but any thoughts of repeating earlier success ended when Hendrix died later that year.

Mitchell worked on a number of uncompleted Hendrix tracks – which were later released – before forming his own band with limited success.

Mitchell and Redding had been paid a salary by Hendrix ‘s manager and were not entitled to any royalties from the recordings.

And by the mid 1970′s Mitchell was facing severe financial problems, and the work was drying up.

He failed the audition for Paul McCartney’s new band, Wings, and spent the following 20 years doing low-key session work.

Just five days before his death he had been playing a series of dates with the Experience Jimi Hendrix tour in the US, reaching a new generation of fans.

Mitchell brought the concept of drums as a lead instrument from jazz, to set a new trend in rock music.

His style blended perfectly with Hendrix’s revolutionary playing, to create a sound that is still unique in rock music.

November 13th, 2008 in Entertainment

Leave a comment

Your comment

About Entertainment – Magazine – Obituary

About Entertainment – Magazine –

Miriam Makeba



During her life Miriam Makeba, who has died aged 76, reached the heights of international success and fell into tragic lows many times.

“One minute I’m dining with presidents and emperors; the next I’m hitch-hiking,” she told an interviewer in 2000.

The Johannesburg club singer became a voice for the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa.

Despite saying many times her songs were not political, she paid a high price for her activism.

The South African government revoked her passport, effectively sending her into exile for 31 years.

After her 1968 engagement to Stokely Carmichael in 1968, a leader of the radical Black Panthers, American record labels dropped her and her performance bookings were cancelled.



I picked up my passport. It was stamped ‘Invalid’. They have done it, I told myself. They have exiled me

Miriam Makeba

“I just told the world the truth, and if the truth then becomes political, I can’t do anything about that,” she told culture website Salon.com in 2000.

Her career was also blighted by poor financial management, which meant she had to keep performing no matter what else was happening in her life.

She said she couldn’t cancel concerts – in 1998 she missed Mr Carmichael’s funeral in Guinea because of her singing commitments.

Breakthrough

She was born in 1932 in Johannesburg to a sangoma, or traditional healer.

Her father died when she was six.

MIRIAM MAKEBA
1932: Born Johannesburg, South Africa
1959: Stars in the jazz opera King Kong and anti-apartheid film Come Back, Africa, met Harry Belafonte
1962: Performs at President Kennedy’s birthday party
1960: Barred from returning to South Africa
1963: Testifies against apartheid at the United Nations
1966: Becomes the first African woman to win a Grammy award
1968: Marries Black Panther Stokely Carmichael and moves to Guinea
1974: Performs as the warm-up for Rumble in the Jungle boxing match between Mohammed Ali and George Foreman
1985: Moves to Brussels after death of her daughter
1990: Returns to South Africa after personal request from Nelson Mandela
2005: Begins a “farewell tour” of the world that lasts three years
2008: Dies in Caserta, Italy following a concert, aged 76

In the 1950s she sang with township jazz bands but didn’t make much money from playing clubs and bars.

Despite being a successful recording artist, she didn’t receive any royalties from her records.

In her early career, she and her band were involved in a car crash and the police rescued only the white victims in the other car and left her and her band-mates on the road, where three of them died.

The only money was in touring Africa, playing jazz clubs from Rhodesia to the Belgian Congo.

It wasn’t until 1959 that she came to the world’s notice.

She played a leading role in an all-black musical about South African boxing legend Ezekiel “King Kong” Dlamini.

“That was the only time my mother saw me on stage,” she told friend and journalist Gamal Nkrumah in 2001.

“At one point in the play I am strangled and my mother jumped from her seat and screamed: ‘No. You will not get away with murder. You cannot do this to my daughter.’ Friends explained to her that this was not for real – that we were acting. But she made such a fuss. Everyone was so embarrassed. On stage my heart sank.”

Also in the cast was trumpet player Hugh Masakela, who would become her second husband. Her first spouse was a South African policeman.

In the same year she starred in the anti-apartheid drama-documentary Come back, Africa, about the lives of migrant workers living in Johannesburg’s townships.

It was filmed around the Johannesburg neighbourhood of Sophiatown, partly with secret cameras and partly under the pretence of being a film about street music.

The film was smuggled out of South Africa and shown at the Venice film festival, where she got permission to travel for the premier.

From Venice she and Mr Masakela travelled to London.

It was there while singing on the BBC radio show In Town Tonight that Makeba met Harry Belafonte, who would open up the road to world stardom for her.

The US Years

She became a massive hit in the US. People packed her concerts and she performed with stars.

Her blend of African rhythms and jazz in songs like Pata Pata appealed to both conventional audiences and the trendy jazz crowd.


You must try not to be a tornado – be like a submarine

Harry Belafonte

In 1962 she played at the US President John F Kennedy’s legendary birthday party, where Marilyn Monroe sang Happy Birthday.

But the South African government had hit back for her role in Come Back, Africa.

In 1960 she found they would not let her home to attend her mother’s funeral.

“The man at the desk took my passport. He did not speak to me. He took a rubber stamp and slammed it down. Then he walked away. I picked up my passport. It was stamped ‘Invalid’. ‘They have done it,’ I told myself. ‘They have exiled me,” she said in 2001.

She was shocked by the racial tensions she found in 1960s America, and called it “apartheid by another name”.

But Harry Belafonte advised her to play a less confrontational role in the civil rights movement.

“He was a good teacher and looked after me,” she told the Guardian earlier this year.

“He said: ‘You have such great talent, you must try not to be a tornado – be like a submarine. It was good advice when I found myself speaking at the UN Committee Against Apartheid and then the UN General Assembly.”

But her relationship with racial firebrand Stokely Carmichael ended her career in the US.

Another exile

They moved to Guinea and were given a home by President Sekou Toure who paid her a salary to write and perform.

She also worked as a UN representative for Guinea for many years, for which she was given the Dag Hammarskjold peace prize in 1986.

By then, stricken by grief at the death of her only child Bongi in 1985, she had left Guinea and moved to Brussels. Her relationship with Mr Carmichael had ended in 1973.

Bongi died in childbirth and Makeba has two grandchildren, Nelson Lumumba Lee and Zenzi Monique Lee, and three great-grandchildren Lindelani, Ayanda and Kwame.

In 1990 she returned to South Africa for the first time after Nelson Mandela asked her to come back.

In her increasing old age “Mama Africa” as she was known, began suffering from osteoarthritis and shortage of breath.

She began a “farewell tour” in 2005 before retiring, but it stretched out for three years more.

“Everybody keeps calling and saying: ‘You have not come to say goodbye to us,” she told an interviewer in May.

November 10th, 2008 in Entertainment

Leave a comment

Your comment

About Entertainment – Magazine – Obituary

About Entertainment – Magazine –

Studs Terkel

Terkel was inspired by the magic of the ordinary

After more than half a century at the radio microphone, Studs Terkel was an entertainer, lecturer, Pulitzer Prize winner, and the established spokesman for everyday Americans.

The prolific author recorded the minutiae of motions and emotions that make up daily life. But, with his gravelly voice, ready wit, gingham shirt and consistently red socks, Terkel cut as distinctive a character as any in his books and broadcasts.

After a foray into radio acting, the young Louis Terkel, nicknamed “Studs” after a James T Farrell character, was given his own show on Chicago’s WFMT station.

Taped history

He was one of the first radio entertainers to be given the title of disc jockey, but he did far more than speak between the records.

Studs Terkel at the microphone

Terkel’s radio show ran for more than 45 years

His producer realised the value of Terkel’s personality and told him: “Do what you like for an hour a day, and I’ll never make you break for a commercial.”

Terkel’s radio show was on the air for more than 45 years, and his broadcasts were as integral a part of Chicago as the Sears Tower and Al Capone.

He later archived all his taped interviews for the town’s Historical Society, calling them a journey through the 20th Century.

This was despite his aversion to technology, which meant he never drove a car or sent an e-mail, and once almost wiped an interview with the celebrated philosopher Bertrand Russell.

Terkel's archived collection of taped interviews

Terkel’s archives tell the story of the 20th Century

It was the man in the street, not the great leader, that Terkel was at pains to immortalise. For his 1967 book, In Division Street: America, he interviewed people about contemporary life in Chicago, America and the world.

For his 1984 tome, The Good War: An Oral History of World War Two, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. His optimism, good humour and wisdom were evident even when he dealt with the theme of death in his book, Will the Circle Be Unbroken?

“Mythical experience”

Although he interviewed thousands of people in his long career, the veteran broadcaster remained convinced that all were equally important, and gave everyone his full attention.

Certainly, he remained a chronicler of humanity which, under his forensic gaze, managed to reveal a spiritual dimension.

He always said, “Curiosity did not kill this cat” and, despite more than 50 years of social investigation, Studs Terkel remained inspired by the magic of the ordinary.

November 1st, 2008 in Entertainment

Leave a comment

Your comment