Passages

[PfR73]

Brian Johnson

Not the AC/DC singer.

[Feego]

Ann Blyth

[The Curious Sofa]

Ann Blyth

RIP, best worst daughter.

[domino harvey]

She held on a long time. One of the OG Hollywood Catholics and yes, she gave the single best bratty daughter perf in film history in Mildred Pierce

[Feego]

It’s interesting that in the novel Mildred Pierce, her character has ambitions of being an opera singer. Had they kept that in the film, Blyth still would have been ideal casting because she actually was a trained opera singer, showing off her chops in several musicals later.

[dwk]

Suzanne Desrocher-Romero

[Matt]

Some of Blyth's line deliveries ring in my head like they're on Memorex tape.

"My mother... a waitress," like she's spitting the last word out.

"With this money I can get away from you. From you and your chickens and your pies and your kitchens and everything that smells of grease. I can get away from this shack with its cheap furniture. And this town and its dollar days, and its women that wear uniforms and its men that wear overalls."

"You think just because you made a little money you can get a new hairdo and some expensive clothes and turn yourself into a lady. But you can't, because you'll never be anything but a common frump whose father lived over a grocery store and whose mother took in washing."


And, of course, the slap heard round the world.

I really like her in Our Very Own, which is a very strange movie that veers from almost sitcom-like comedy with a young Natalie Wood annoying the hell out of TV delivery man Farley Granger, to the high camp drama of Ann Dvorak chewing the scenery as the mother who gave Blyth up for adoption.

[hearthesilence]

Pains me to say this, but if you adjust the dialogue so that the mother and daughter are switched around, that would actually sound like something a poisonous relative of mine was prone to say.

[JSC]

Penelope Keith, best known for the television series The Good Life and To the Manor Born.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2ey1pjx0z9o

[flyonthewall2983]

Daveigh Chase (voice of Lilo, Samera from The Ring remake, and Donnie Darko's sister among a number of other things from that period), possibly from meningitis and a blood infection.

AIDS

[colinr0380]

Penelope Keith, best known for the television series The Good Life and To the Manor Born.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2ey1pjx0z9o

I always like the comment I read once that one of the most successful aspects of The Good Life is how it appeals to many different viewer bases, where a younger viewer watching the show would sympathise most with Tom and Barbara as the rebels against the system, deciding to appall their snobby neighbours by setting up a self-sufficient farm in their back garden; whilst older viewers might instead end up sympathising more with Jerry and particularly Margot as the long-suffering neighbours having to put up with the hare-brained schemes of the people next door!

Plus there is that classic Christmas episode where under the influence Margot gets to let her hair down and inhibitions to the wind and shows that she may have a Lady Chatterley's Lover or Wuthering Heights interest in Tom's swarthy, earthy prole!

[Buttery Jeb]

Victor Willis, of the Village People.

[CSM126]

Kjell Nilsson, bodybuilder who played The Humungus in Mad Max 2.

[dadaistnun]

Louise Lasser

[beamish14]

Louise Lasser

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman/Fernwood 2Nite are probably the single best American television shows of the 70’s, and her performance in the former is just perfection

[domino harvey]

Tony Rayns discussion here

[CSM126]

Bonnie Tyler

[colinr0380]

Bonnie Tyler

One filmic legacy she leaves is that her song Here She Comes is part of the Giorgio Moroder version of Metropolis.

[Glowingwabbit]

Surprised this wasn't posted yet, but we lost Yervant Gianikian - a renowned Italian experimental filmmaker who usually collaborated alongside partner Angela Ricci Lucchi (who passed away in 2018).

[dekadetia]

Bonnie Tyler

One filmic legacy she leaves is that her song Here She Comes is part of the Giorgio Moroder version of Metropolis.

Also, "Total Eclipse of the Heart" was originally composed for a musical adaptation of Nosferatu.

[bad future]

Bonnie Tyler

One filmic legacy she leaves is that her song Here She Comes is part of the Giorgio Moroder version of Metropolis.

Another MUCH more minor filmic legacy is that for the longest time I had seen Future World, the sequel to West World, but not West World, motivated by a seemingly reliable assertion I'd read (which I can no longer even find!) that the Russell Mulcahy video for "Total Eclipse of the Heart" was directly inspired by that film. The connection, if real, was not obvious upon watching the film.

Anyway, that video has long been my favorite music video. It feels like the apotheosis of 80s excess of imagery, in service of an inscrutable center, effectively meaningless but evocative and with enough odd specificity to feel like a deeply personal dream to someone. Thoroughly silly AND low-key actually haunting (there is this one shot/reverse shot where Tyler and a boy make eye contact and then the boy flies which is somehow as effective a horror image for me as anything in a Kiyoshi Kurosawa film lol).. perfect recipe for the kind of ephemera I cherish.

RIP

[Orlac]

Bonnie Tyler

One filmic legacy she leaves is that her song Here She Comes is part of the Giorgio Moroder version of Metropolis.

She is my favourite singer, and that is how I discovered her, when I was just 10 years old!