Those Lipton Bravo interviews were fantastic, so different from the glib 'late-night show, look at what I'm promoting now' interviews. Funny, thoughtful, insightful. Hope they're still accessible for young actors coming through the pipeline.
Max von Sydow, Star of 'Seventh Seal' & 'Exorcist', Dies at 90 - N.Y. Times https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/movies/max-von-sydow-dead.html Max von Sydow, the tall, blond Swedish actor who cut a striking figure in American movies but was most identified with the signature work of a fellow Swede, the director Ingmar Bergman, has died on Sunday. He was 90. No cause was given. Widely hailed as one of the finest actors of his generation, Mr. von Sydow became an elder pop culture star in his later years, appearing in a “Star Wars” movie in 2015 as well as in the sixth season of the HBO fantasy-adventure series “Game of Thrones.” He even lent his deep, rich voice to “The Simpsons.” By then he had become a familiarly austere presence in popular movies like William Friedkin’s “The Exorcist,” Steven Spielberg’s “Minority Report,” Woody Allen’s “Hannah and Her Sisters” and, more recently, Julian Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.” But to film lovers the world over he was most enduringly associated with Bergman. If ever an actor was born to inhabit the World According to Bergman, it was Mr. von Sydow. Angular and lanky at 6-foot-3, possessing a gaunt face and hooded, icy blue eyes, he not only radiated power but also registered a deep sense of Nordic angst, helping to give flesh to Bergman’s often bleak but hopeful and sometimes comic vision of the human condition in classics like “The Seventh Seal” and “The Virgin Spring.” In “The Seventh Seal” (1958), Mr. von Sydow played Antonius Block, a strapping medieval knight who returns from the Crusades to his plague-ravaged homeland only to encounter the stern, ghostly pale, black-hooded figure of Death, played by Bengt Ekerot. To stave off the inevitable, Block challenges Death to a game of chess, and in the long intervals between moves he searches the countryside for some shred of human goodness. The two grim figures hunched over a chessboard in a desolate north-country landscape made for an unforgettable cinematic image, which has been both imitated and parodied. Over the next few years Mr. von Sydow appeared in many Bergman films, becoming an important member of what was essentially the director’s repertory company, whether in lesser roles (in “Wild Strawberries” and “Brink of Life”) or lead ones (in “The Magician,” “Through a Glass Darkly” and “The Virgin Spring”). In “The Virgin Spring” (1960), he played a wealthy man whose daughter is raped and murdered by two local shepherds. When he discovers the identity of the killers, he methodically plans and executes a bloody revenge. By the early 1960s Mr. von Sydow was getting offers from Hollywood and turning them down, saying he was happy enough with his work in Sweden. Then he was offered the role of Jesus in “The Greatest Story Ever Told,” and he went to Hollywood, embarking on an international career. Sustained Hollywood stardom eluded Mr. von Sydow, despite his promising introduction to a wide audience in the lead role of George Stevens’s biblical epic, released in 1965. Though that movie turned out to be less than a blockbuster, Mr. von Sydow’s performance as Jesus was good enough to bring a flood of offers his way. In one of his most commercially successful films, “The Exorcist” (1973), an adaptation of William Peter Blatty’s best seller, Mr. von Sydow played a grimly resolute Jesuit priest summoned in the film’s last scenes to rescue a girl possessed by Satan. More typically, though, and to his mounting frustration, he played the villain — a neo-Nazi in “The Quiller Memorandum” (1966), a power-hungry Russian in “The Kremlin Letter” (1970), a fedora-wearing hired assassin in “Three Days of the Condor” (1975), the otherworldly emperor Ming the Merciless in the cartoonish “Flash Gordon” (1980), the archenemy Ernst Stavro Blofeld in the James Bond film “Never Say Never Again” (1983). More challenging roles awaited him back in Sweden, and in the late 1960s he returned there to make another series of films with Bergman and another master Swedish director, Jan Troell. He appeared in Bergman’s “Hour of the Wolf” (1968), “Shame” (1968), “The Passion of Anna” (1969) and “The Touch” (1971) and went on to star with Liv Ullmann in “The Emigrants” (1971) and “The New Land” (1972), Mr. Troell’s two-part saga about 19th-century Swedish settlers in the United States. Mr. von Sydow earned his first Academy Award nomination in 1988 — some 40 years after his movie debut — for his work in “Pelle the Conqueror.” A Danish film directed by Bille August, it told the story of Lasse, a down-at-heels widowed Swedish laborer who brings his young son, Pelle, to Denmark at the turn of the century in search of a better life, only to encounter still more hard times. Mr. von Sydow remained among a select group of actors to have formed symbiotic relationships with directors, in which one helps the other achieve a high level of artistry. Mr. von Sydow recalled his last conversation with Bergman, who died in Sweden in 2007 at 89: “He said, ‘Max, you have been the first and the best Stradivarius that I have ever had in my hands.’”
Oh wow, I just saw their show last night and thought how young Lyle Waggoner looked! 'Carol Burnett Show' Star Lyle Waggoner Dead at 84 - TMZ.com
Kenny Rogers dies at 81. https://variety.com/2020/music/obituaries-people-news/kenny-rogers-dead-dies-1203541233/
The Bee Gees used to sing it in concerts. According to Barry and Robin Gibb the original approach to the song was as an R&B tune intended for Marvin Gaye.
https://www.playbill.com/article/tony-award-winning-playwright-terrence-mcnally-dies-at-81 Terrence McNally, a five-time Tony Award recipient whose plays often featured explorations of contemporary gay life and a reverence for classical music, died March 24 at Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Florida. He was 81. The playwright, who just last year received the Tony Awards' Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre Honor, faced complications due to coronavirus; he was a lung cancer survivor and lived with COPD. Mr. McNally won two Tony Awards for penning books for musicals—Kiss of the Spider Woman in 1993 and Ragtime in 1998—but his love for the musical form shined on the dramatic stage as well. His other two Tonys are for Love! Valour! Compassion!—a character study of eight gay friends, including a Broadway choreographer and a musical-loving costume designer—and Master Class, a fictional depiction of soprano Maria Callas and her students. "I’m tone-deaf; if I try to sing, it’s horrible," he told Playbill in a 2019 interview. "But I consider myself a musical person. I responded to opera at a very early age. It was like ice cream; I just heard it when I was 10 years old, and I loved it. It’s been a great companion in my life, and I hope my writing can, in a sense, be operatic. I’m very aware of musical form when I’m writing."