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Ray Lawler, Australian playwright best known for The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (filmed in 1959), on 24 July at age 103. I haven't seen anything online yet other than a Facebook post from his publisher.

ETA: Obituary from The Age

Ysanne Churchman, British actress, aged 99. She died on 4 July, but it was reported today.

Her best-known roles were voice ones - she was Grace Archer on BBC radio, and her death by fire was broadcast on ITV's first night as a spoiler for the new channel. For Doctor Who fans, she was the voice of Alpha Centauri in the two Pertwee serials, The Curse of Peladon (1972) and The Monster of Peladon (1974) and reprised the role in 2017. She was also a spider voice in Planet of the Spiders (also 1974).

Martin Phillipps of the Chills. (More accurately, he was the Chills.)

Per their official Facebook account:

It is with broken hearts the family and friends of Martin Phillipps wish to advise Martin has died unexpectedly.
The family ask for privacy at this time.
Funeral arrangements will be advised in due course.

Terrible news, the only positive spin on this is that given his health issues, he was arguably living on borrowed time and managed to get quite a bit of it. I feel extremely fortunate to catch their last U.S. tour, which deserved a much bigger audience. The same could be said of all of their records - one of the finest pop bands to come out of indie rock, one of the finest rock bands period.

Very sad news. The Chills are probably the band I’ve seen live the most times, from the mid-eighties up until a couple of years ago. Always fantastic, whatever version, but in the eighties they were on fire. The records don’t really reflect that live intensity.

I’m so saddened by this.

I credit Martin Phillipps and David Kilgour, back when I first heard The Chills and The Clean in the late nineties, as being the architects of one of my major musical life changes.

Those soft, rolling drums and low-fi jangly guitars that always seem to be trying to catch up to the beautiful everyday-life lyrics…

If the kiwi pop sound makes sense to you, it makes perfect sense for life. Thank you, Martin.

Irish novelist Edna O'Brien.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/artic ... brien-dies

Also wrote the screenplay for Girl with Green Eyes (based on her novel The Lonely Girl)
as well as X, Y, and Zee and Three into Two Won't Go.

What a terrible few weeks it’s been for rock music. Robyn Hitchcock just posted that Pat Collier passed away last night.

A bassist and later producer and engineer, he co-founded the Vibrators, later produced the Soft Boys, then Katrina and the Waves’ original first two albums and much of Hitchcock’s solo work as well.

JSC wrote: Sun Jul 28, 2024 10:35 pm Irish novelist Edna O'Brien.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/artic ... brien-dies

Also wrote the screenplay for Girl with Green Eyes (based on her novel The Lonely Girl)
as well as X, Y, and Zee and Three into Two Won't Go.

Losing her and Alice Munro less than 3 months apart is a huge blow for literature

Filmmaker Walter Ungerer, back in June. His subtly creepy The Animal, which I kind of love, is available on his Vimeo channel.

Actress of stage and screen Pat Heywood 92: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie ... 235959069/

Two of her best known performances where The Nurse in Romeo and Juliet (1968) and Richard Attenborough's wife in 10 Rillington Place (1971).

Patti Yasutake, who most recently appeared in Netflix’s Beef. Also costarred in The Wash, which was part of the Criterion Channel’s Asian-American series

beamish14 wrote: Tue Aug 06, 2024 9:36 pm Patti Yasutake, who most recently appeared in Netflix’s Beef. Also costarred in The Wash, which was part of the Criterion Channel’s Asian-American series

And voiced the main character's mother in the English dub version of the latest entry in the Yakuza series Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth.

John Carpenter regular Charles Cyphers.

colinr0380 wrote: Wed Aug 07, 2024 5:21 am

beamish14 wrote: Tue Aug 06, 2024 9:36 pm Patti Yasutake, who most recently appeared in Netflix’s Beef. Also costarred in The Wash, which was part of the Criterion Channel’s Asian-American series

And voiced the main character's mother in the English dub version of the latest entry in the Yakuza series Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth.

I instantly recognized the name for her recurring role in 16 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and 2 of the films as Nurse Ogawa.

thirtyframesasecond wrote: Thu Aug 08, 2024 7:07 pm Jack Karlson, AKA Mr Democracy Manifest.

“He walked a full and colourful path and, despite the troubles thrown at him, he lived by his motto – to keep on laughing,” his family said in statement.

Kevin Sullivan, “the devil himself” as Dusty Rhodes used to call him

flyonthewall2983 wrote: Fri Aug 09, 2024 4:25 pm Kevin Sullivan, “the devil himself” as Dusty Rhodes used to call him

Coincidentally some friends and I have been revisiting 1995 WCW shows, which means lots of Sullivan’s Dungeon of Doom stable goofing around (for the uninitiated, imagine wrestlers dressed as hokey movie monsters like a Ugandan savage, a shark man, a giant mummy (weirdly named The Yeti, even more weird after he turned into a giant ninja named the Yeti), etc. Sullivan was the Taskmaster of the group).

Thankfully most of his ideas were much better than THAT. Although it did get him a feud with Hulk Hogan, so I guess the money was good.

Pianist and composer Sarah Gibson, far too early at the age of 38.

Her new piece, entitled “beyond the beyond,” was nearly finished for its world premiere but she grew too ill to finish it in time. (The BBC Philharmonic is now scheduled to play one of her earlier compositions, “warp & weft” (2021), on Aug. 8.) The world premiere of “beyond the beyond” will happen at a BBC-sponsored concert in 2025, in a version completed by a friend and longtime colleague, the composer and pianist Thomas Kotcheff.

Producer Margaret Ménégoz - and it's pretty much inconceivable that regulars here won't have seen at least one of her films and most likely several.

In particular, she was midwife to a substantial chunk of Eric Rohmer's output, but her filmography also includes work by Jacques Rivette (Le Pont du Nord), Andrzej Wajda (Danton, The Possessed), Agnieszka Holland (Europa Europa) and latterly Michael Haneke (multiple films from Time of the Wolf to Happy End).

This is several months late, but I just noticed that Venezuelan film director and archivist Margot Benacerraf passed away this May at the age of 97. She is best known for her extraordionary 1959 documentary feature Araya which was released on DVD by Milestone and has been discussed elsewhere on this site. Just a couple years ago, Sight & Sound solicited her list of favorite films.

Charles R. Cross, a Seattle-based music journalist who edited the city’s alt-weekly, the Rocket, and penned best-selling biographies on Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix and others, died Friday at age 67.

hearthesilence wrote: Mon Aug 12, 2024 3:36 am Charles R. Cross, a Seattle-based music journalist who edited the city’s alt-weekly, the Rocket, and penned best-selling biographies on Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix and others, died Friday at age 67.

Heavier Than Heaven is excellent. Many anecdotes about Cobain that had never been published in any other sources. The story about Eddie Van Halen’s racist ravings is just horrifying