Passages

[colinr0380]

Björn Andrésen, 70, who was an icon as Tadzio in Visconti's Death in Venice.

It's tragic how many people get such a difficult start in life: he was abandoned by his mother at an early age, never knew who his father was, and was raised by a grandmother who was a complete stage-mother. Despite that family background, a documentary about his life released a few years ago, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, claims that it was specifically the fame that followed Death in Venice that ruined Andrésen's life.

The film doesn’t move in strict chronological order. Instead, Lindström and Petri follow Andrésen over five years as he struggles with his life today and returns to the key locations in his career....The first act cuts between memories of his work on Death in Venice...and the struggle to avoid eviction from his apartment. He travels to Japan, where his performance as Tadzio made him the first Western star to become a teen idol there; then to France, where he was kept for a year by a series of men who simply wanted to be seen with him in public.

(source)

I have my doubts about the motivations behind the claims that were made in The Most Beautiful Boy In The World, but it only helped to ironically emphasise how indelible that the Death In Venice role was, not as a great actor per se but as the ultimate muse figure, perhaps for cinema itself in its reaching out to new horizons, in the final sequence of the film.

[hearthesilence]

The great, great jazz drummer Jack DeJohnette. It looked like a hoax due to comments all over social media, but it's definitely been confirmed by those who know him. Will probably make the news in the morning. An enormous loss in what's already been a brutal year, quite possibly worse than even 2016.

[ellipsis7]

Prunella Scales

[JSC]

Prunella Scales

Basil!

RIP

[MichaelB]

Someone in my year at school had, in all innocence at the time, been christened Basil.

Post-1975, his life must have been absolute hell.

[JSC]

Hopefully, no one ever tried to throw fully-laden cash box at him as in The Builders!

[colinr0380]

For anyone in the UK, Prunella Scales turns up in the 2000 TV movie The Ghost of Greville Lodge, which serendipitously Channel 5 are showing on Friday afternoon as their contribution to the Halloween schedules! A Criterion connection here is that one of her earliest roles is in David Lean's 1953 Hobson's Choice. And she is in the BBC Shakespeare cycle with Judy Davis as one of the two titular Merry Wives of Windsor, although I only really liked the end of that play when the tables get turned on not just Falstaff but the 'Merry Wives' themselves!

And despite turning up in Howard's End she gamely satirised E.M. Forster and Merchant-Ivory in general in Stiff Upper Lips!

(Plus, yes, she is inevitably also in that 2012 Danny Dyer "Run For Your Wife" film along with seemingly every other comedic British actor of the time! Here's our current role call of mentions of that film in this thread)

[colinr0380]

Someone in my year at school had, in all innocence at the time, been christened Basil.

Post-1975, his life must have been absolute hell.

Probably before as well, what with Basil Brush being a thing too!

[brundlefly]

Philly radio legend Pierre Robert.

[Gregory]

Maria Riva, 100, Marlene Dietrich's only child, who had acting credits and wrote numerous books

[Matt]

Peter Watkins (discussion moved here)

[domino harvey]

Tcheky Karyo discussion split here

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

Legendary Hong Kong actor Stanley Fung.

[andyli]

Legendary Hong Kong actor Stanley Fung.

It's sad to see two veteran actors and good friends Stanley Fung and Hui Siu-hung pass away. Both had long careers of memorable supporting roles. Some of Fung's later roles include those in Milkyway's Accident and Vengeance and in Ann Hui's Our Time Will Come. And of course Hui's been ever present in Milkyway films.

[Gregory]

Ralph Senensky, 102—He started working in television in the 1950s on the office staff of Playhouse 90 and later directed seven episodes of Star Trek, seven of Hart to Hart, and directed the Twilight Zone episode where Burgess Meredith sells his soul to save his failing newspaper, among many other credits.
He was about the same age as Rod Serling (slightly older, even) but outlived him by half a century.

[Orlac]

He was about the same age as Rod Serling (slightly older, even) but outlived him by half a century.

Not a hard feat when you see Serling barely going 2 seconds without a smoke!

[MichaelB]

The Film Polski database has posted its usual exhaustive annual round-up of Polish film and TV industry deaths, spanning November 2024-October 2025.

Glancing down the list, I don't think we missed any big names - in fact, the great documentary-maker Marcel Łoziński is the only one that really leaps out, and his passing was noted at the time.

[jt938]

Adam Greenberg

https://deadline.com/2025/11/adam-green ... 236604687/

[Gregory]

He was about the same age as Rod Serling (slightly older, even) but outlived him by half a century.

Not a hard feat when you see Serling barely going 2 seconds without a smoke!

Chesterfield Kings: the great taste of 21 vintage tobaccos, grown mild, aged mild, and blended mild—no wonder they satisfy so completely

[beamish14]

He was about the same age as Rod Serling (slightly older, even) but outlived him by half a century.

Not a hard feat when you see Serling barely going 2 seconds without a smoke!

Chesterfield Kings: the great taste of 21 vintage tobaccos, grown mild, aged mild, and blended mild—no wonder they satisfy so completely

Now factory rolled!

[beamish14]

Adam Greenberg

https://deadline.com/2025/11/adam-green ... 236604687/

It is interesting how the same guy behind Israeli sex comedy phenom Lemon Popsicle also lensed both “true” Terminator features (and T-2 3-D)

[Gregory]

Ralph Senensky, 102—He started working in television in the 1950s on the office staff of Playhouse 90 and later directed seven episodes of Star Trek, seven of Hart to Hart, and directed the Twilight Zone episode where Burgess Meredith sells his soul to save his failing newspaper, among many other credits.
He was about the same age as Rod Serling (slightly older, even) but outlived him by half a century.

Clearly it's been far too long since I saw Burgess Meredith's final appearance on The Twilight Zone: he played the Devil, not the newspaperman. Anyway, the reason for my follow-up is that Senensky remembered something interesting about the scene in that episode where Meredith snaps his fingers and one bursts into flame to light his cigarette (Chesterfield King?):

They had him wired. There was a wire that went onto a battery and ran up his pantleg, through his shirt to his hand. Then they stuck his finger into a coffee can of ice water. It would just get good and cold. They poured lighter fluid over it [and when he snapped his fingers], thry would hit the switch, the spark would ignite it, and the lighter fluid would burn. The finger was literally a step from being frozen, so that it wouldn't hurt. (Zicree, The Twilight Zone Companion, 2nd ed.)

[MichaelB]

Diane Ladd.

[hearthesilence]

1970s-era Grateful Dead singer Donna Jean Godchaux-MacKay.

Prolific jazz bassist and educator Ray Drummond.

Lô Borges, MPB legend of Clube da Esquina fame.

[Matt]

Going from her first TV credit to her final role, Diane Ladd had an incredible 66-year career. Her Marietta Fortune in Wild at Heart is one of my favorite go-for-broke film performances, but her role as Helen Jellicoe in "Enlightened" is quietly heartbreaking, especially the episode from her POV, "Consider Helen." It's very sweet that she got to perform with her own daughter several times in her career, getting Oscar-nommed twice for doing so. (Laura Dern also appears as an extra in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, so it's really sort of thrice.)