I really hate how the media sometimes summarize someone’s life in a few words.
Many times they will look at an incredible actor and only see a few of the more popular roles he played and miss the greater body of work. They are doing that now with Alan Rickman.
Actor Alan Rickman took his Final Taxi at age 69 because of cancer. He has done so many wonderful films that have touched our lives but the news mostly focuses on the franchises, Harry Potter and Die Hard.
I first took notice of Rickman as an actor in the movie “Truly, Madly, Deeply” in 1990. This was two years after Die Hard. In it he plays Jamie, a dead musician so in love that death cannot keep him apart from his lover. It was kind of a thinking man’s “Ghost.”
One of my daughter’s favorite Rickman films is Ang Lee’s ” Sense and Sensibility” from 1995. This adaption of Jane Austin’s book has Rickman playing Colonel Brandon as a rich and worthy suitor for Marianne, played by Kate Winslet. This would not be the only time Winslet and Richman worked together. In 2015 Rickman directed ” A Little Chaos” with her as his lead ( He gives a great portrayal of King Louis XIV.)
Many fans will remember his role in 1999’s Galaxy Quest. Playing Alexander Dane, a Shakespearean actor who had found himself trapped and most fondly remembered for an alien on a silly sci-fi TV show. He did not hide the fact he hated it and we all thought it was hilarious as it echoed reality with a great spoof of Star Trek’s Spock. ( “By Grabnar’s Hammer!” )
I will always remember Rickman’s voice. It conveyed a wide range – from dripping sarcasm to great comic pomposity. He proved that in one of my favorite roles as Marvin the paranoid robot in 2005’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. With a brain as big as a Volkswagen, Marvin was utterly depressed by having to hanging out with other life forms that were less intelligent than him. Rickman was actually one of the best at that kind of deadpan comic delivery. He used his voice only again in 2010’s Alice In Wonderland as the Blue Caterpillar a role that he repeated for the 2016 sequel.
There are so many other great films by Rickman you should see- The Cohen Brother’s “Gambit,” “Bottle Shock” Lee Daniel’s “The Butler” and “Something The Lord Made”. Alan Rickman will be missed for many reasons — his dry wit, incredible English humor, and most importantly for his ability to completely capture our attention on the big screen with his incredible performances. ..and that unforgettable voice.
Ziggy Stardust. Halloween Jack. The Thin White Duke. Thomas Jerome Newton. Aladdin Sane. Major Jack Celliers. The Cracked Actor. The Elephant Man. The Goblin King. These are just some of the many faces of David Bowie. Bowie was a chameleon of an artist – always changing his looks, his musical style and his outlook on life.
I was awoken on Monday morning January 11th 2016 by a text from my youngest son telling me that David Bowie had taken his Final Taxi because of cancer. He knew what Bowie’s music meant to me. How the music Bowie made took me through difficult times – growing up an oddball in a small Southern town to surviving heart surgery. It seemed like whenever I felt like an alien, David Bowie understood and had already put the feeling into words.
Being a pre- teen in the early 1970’s I was stuck somewhere in the middle of the 60’s hippy movement and punk rock scene of the late 70’s. David Bowie was making rock music that was mainstream enough to get airplay but strange enough to be interesting.
David Bowie was born David Robert Jones in London in 1947. He changed his name to Bowie as to not to be confused with The Monkees’ lead singer Davy Jones. The first song I remember hearing on early FM radio was Bowie’s “Space Oddity” which introduced the recurring character Major Tom. It was his striking androgynous looks as well as the music from “Ziggy Stardust” that launched Bowie as leader of the early 1970s glam rock era. The stuttering rock sound of “Changes” gave way to the disco soul of “Fame,” co-written with The Beatles’ John Lennon. Other collaborators included Freddie Mercury, Marc Bolan, Brian Eno, Trent Reznor and Pat Methany but his closest partner in music would have to be Iggy Pop. Together Pop and Bowie molded a new direction for each other as well as helping each other out of their respective drug addictions.
Bowie had some of his biggest successes in the early 1980s with the “Let’s Dance,” an LP that took the world by storm with pop hits and MTV music videos. My wife, Lesa, worked at Captial records at the time and she recalls the huge promotion campaign for the record.
I also loved David Bowie as an actor. I could not wait to see “The Man Who Feel To Earth” when it was released. I don’t know how I did it but I got in to see it even though it was rated “X” and I was 15. (This film is very tame by today’s standard and was X because of pubic hair being seen.) In it Bowie plays Thomas Newton, an alien trapped on Earth trying to get home to his family. This spoke to those of us who felt like we were all aliens too, in a world of Legionnaires’ disease ,Tomahawk cruise missiles and Gerald Ford politics.
The ‘cracked actor’ emerged again in several films including ‘Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence’ playing Major Jack ‘Strafer’ Celliers and as the goth vampire John Blaylock in ‘The Hunger,’ both from 1983. It was 1986’s Labyrinth that struck a chord with most people as Bowie was both actor and singer in the family musical. Playing Jareth- The Goblin King Bowie wrote and sang most of the music for the film.
He also had film roles including historical figures Nicolas Testla, Andy Warhol and Pontius Pilate.
Returning to music it is fitting that David Bowie’s last single, Lazarus, was a ‘parting gift’ for fans – a skillfully craftedfinale. The producer of his new CD Blackstar confirms David Bowie had planned his poignant final message, with videos and lyrics show how he approached his death- as a work of art.
As a friend of mine posted on Facebook, ” Rock and roll used to be for outsiders, rebellion against the mainstream.. he(Bowie) helped embrace alienation. That meant you were more accepting of the different. Rock isn’t like that anymore. It’s heartbreaking. Bowie’s gone and we’ll never see a combination of rebellion, innovation and art like that again...”
David Bowie was 69.
The generation before me asked “Where were you when JFK died?” Will Bowie’s death be as poignant to my generation?
Thanks to Marlesa Burson for editing this and to Marjorie Boykin for the quote.
Back in 1974 director George Lucas created a fad with the film “American Graffiti”. Nostalgia for the 1950’s echoed throughout the movie and soon all the media were recalling the decade. Movies, music and TV series started popping up recreating that innocent chapter in American life. One of the more popular TV shows was “Happy Days”, starring Ron Howard and Henry Winkler. This series was so popular that it spawned several others including “Laverne & Shirley”, “Joanie Loves Chachi” and “Mork & Mindy”, among others. In “Mork & Mindy” a space alien lands on Earth to report observations on its inhabitants back to his home planet, Ork. The only thing the show had going for it was a fresh faced comedian, Robin Williams. Williams’ wild antics and manic improvisational comedic talent made the show worth watching.
Sadly, Robin Williams, often labeled the “Funniest Man in the World”, has taken his Final Taxi.
Two entertainers shine the brightest in my memories of high school in the 70’s. Steve Martin in his white suit, with his “wild and crazy guy” act, and Robin Williams sporting rainbow suspenders while delivering an Orkiain handshake, saying “Na-Nu Na-Nu” as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The catchphrase among my classmates back in the day was “Shazbot”, a made-up swear word from the show that made us feel like we were all in on the joke.
Robin McLaurin Williams was born on July 21, 1951 in Chicago, Illinois, a great-great-grandson of Mississippi Governor and Senator Anselm J. McLaurin. Robin briefly studied political science before enrolling at Juilliard School to study theatre. After he left Juilliard, he performed in nightclubs, which is where he was discovered for the role of Mork.
In 1980 the first movie Williams did was Robert Altman’s “Popeye” based on the comic / cartoon created by E.C. Segar. He was able to capture the style of the early Popeye and the comedy came from the low mutterings under his breath. It was a great role from him but the film did not do so well at the box office.
I was lucky to be working as a theatre manager for a chain in 1982 when “The World According to Garp” came out. The trailer made the film look like a comedy- and several people came to the movie excepting to see “Mork” on the big screen. The film was very dark and preachy with a few black comedy bits scatter about. I had many people walk out during the movie. This was Williams telling the public he was not “Mork” and making it clear he wanted more serious roles. “Garp” continues to be one of my favorite Robin Williams movies – giving us what life is really like. It has ups and downs, happy and sad moments and before you know it – it’s over.
From that point on Williams was able to mix comedy and drama. He knew how to wear the mask. There was a palpable energy around him. Whether he was Adrian Cronauer of “Good Morning, Vietnam” or Patch Adams, there was that fine balance of drama and comedy. Even with “Mrs. Doubtfire” he so eloquently portrayed the sadness of a father missing his children while hamming it up as the crazy nanny he played just to be near them. The balance was there. It echoed throughout “Hook,” Bicentennial Man” and “The Fisher King.”
William played pure comedy roles in “The Survivors,” “Aladdin,” “Flubber,” “Night At The Museum,” and “RV” to name a few. He could also play very creepy and dark characters such as twisted Seymour Parrish in “One Hour Photo” or villains in “Insomnia” and TV shows like “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and “Homicide: Life on the Street.”
After being nominated for an Academy Award several times for films ( including my favorite, “Dead Poet’s Society”) William won the Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his portrayal of Sean Maguire in 1997’s “Good Will Hunting“.
Robin Williams has always been one of my favorite actors. While my policy here on the Final Taxi has been to never write about someone who took their own life, this is different. Williams suffered from a sickness which was kept in the shadows up until his death. Depression can make you do things you would not normally do and we need to not judge him by this.
I thought about Juan de Dios Peza‘s famous poem about English actor David Garrick, “To Laugh While Crying.” The poem is about a man who is depressed and goes to see a doctor.
It reads: “Nothing holds any enchantment or attractiveness; I don’t care about my name or my fate I die living an eternal melancholy and my only hope is that of death”.
The doctor tells him go to see Garrick. He will make him laugh and forget his worry and pains. The man begins to cry that he is Garrick.
The last lines are moving and remind me of Williams:
How many are there who, tired of life, ill with pain, dead with tedium, make others laugh as the suicidal actor, without finding a remedy for their illness!
Ay! How often we laugh when we cry! Nobody trust the merriment of laughter, because in those beings devoured by pain, the soul groans when the face laughs!
If faith dies, if calm flees, if our feet only step on thistles, the tempest of the soul hurls to the face, a sad lighting: a smile.
The carnival of the world is such a trickster, that life is but a short masquerade; here we learn to laugh with tears and also to cry with laughter.
God Bless Robin Williams—Thanks for all the joy you gave us.
Quote from Robin Williams in the movie” Jack”:
“Please, don’t worry so much. Because in the end, none of us have very long on this Earth. Life is fleeting. And if you’re ever distressed, cast your eyes to the summer sky when the stars are strung across the velvety night. And when a shooting star streaks through the blackness, turning night into day, make a wish, and think of me. Make your life spectacular.”
In 1978 just as actor Peter Falk was leaving his most famous role – that of Lt. Columbo – he took a part in a comedy called “The Cheap Detective.” I was excited about seeing Falk in a different role than I had seen him in before. I laughed at Falk throughout the film, but one actress kept stealing my attention. She was playing the role of Betty DeBoop, who I had seen only a few months earlier in a film called “FM.” In it she played a sexy voiced DJ named ‘Mutha’. This actress was Eileen Brennan.
Eileen Brennan, 80, has taken her Final Taxi.
Eileen Brennan was best known for her supporting role as tough-talking drill captain Doreen Lewis in the film ” Pvt. Benjamin”
The actress played memorable roles as the brothel madam in “The Sting”, as a café waitress in “The Last Picture Show” and in “Scarecrow” alongside Gene Hackman and Al Pacino.
Brennan scored an Oscar nomination for her supporting role in 1980’s “Private Benjamin,” and won both an Emmy and Golden Globe for the role in the subsequent TV series adaptation in the early 1980s. She also had a memorable turn as Tess Skeffington, the blonde sidekick to Peter Falk’s San Francisco gumshoe Sam Diamond, in the all-star Agatha Christie spoof “Murder by Death”.
Other films include “Stella,” “Texasville” and “Jeepers Creepers” along with TV appearances in the likes of “Will and Grace,” “7th Heaven,” “E.R.,” and “Blossom”.
I will always remember Brennan for her brilliant work as Mrs. Peacock in one of my favorite films: 1985’s cult comedy classic “Clue”.
No matter where you go in the US you can turn the radio on and listen to classic rock or classic soul. The “classic” music format features a large but limited playlist of songs ranging from the early-1960s through the early-1980s with more emphasis on the earlier hits by artists associated with the loosely-defined “classic era”.
One song that falls into the genre of music is the soul song from the 1970’s called “Show and Tell.” It is still played on radio today due to the singer and songwriter’s style in a blend of earthiness and sophistication. His name was Al Wilson and his wide range of pop & jazz, gospel, rock, blues and funk shows the sensitivity and strength that mark him as an enduring star even in today’s music scene.
It is Al Wilson who has taken his Final Taxi at the age of 68.
Born on 19 June, 1939, in the city of Meridian,Mississippi, Al Wilson showed little interest in education but performed in school plays, sung in talent shows and won first prize in a local art contest. Wilson began his career at the age of 12 leading his own spiritual quartet and singing in the church choir, even performing covers of country and western hits as circumstances dictated. While he was in high school, Wilson and his family relocated to San Bernardino, California, where he worked odd jobs and taught himself to play drums; after graduation he spent four years touring with Johnny Harris and the Statesmen before joining the U.S. Navy and singing with an enlisted men’s chorus.
After the Navy Wilson join several groups including the Jewels, the Rollers and an instrumental group, the Souls.
In 1966, he was spotted by manager Marc Gordon, who introduced him to singer Johnny Rivers, who signed him to his Soul City label. Wilson’s first single, “The Snake” in 1968, was a hit and was followed by “Do What You Gotta Do” in 1969.
Wilson largely disappeared from sight until 1973, when he issued the platinum-selling Weighing In — the album’s success was spurred by the shimmering “Show and Tell,” a Johnny Mathis castoff that sold well over a million copies.
Wilson charted with several other 1970s singles, including “La La Peace Song,” “I’ve Got a Feeling (We’ll Be Seeing Each Other Again)” and “Count the Days.”
In 1999 Wilson was honored by the California State Assembly in recognition of the state’s Juneteenth Holiday, for being a Freedom Fighter for Musical Arts along with fellow entertainers Joe Vincent and Rickey Ivie.
If a dead mouse in a beer bottle sounds like a plot in a 80’s comedy movie its because it is.
The Adventures of Bob & Doug McKenzie: Strange Brew is a 1983 film starring the popular SCTV characters Bob & Doug McKenzie. The McKenzie brothers were a pair of fictional Canadian brothers who hosted “The Great White North”, a sketch which was introduced on SCTV for the show’s third season in 1980. Bob is played by Rick Moranis and Doug is played by Dave Thomas. It created a fad in the 80’s that sparked two comedy records and film. They also had a hit song called “Take Off” which featured fellow Canadian Geddy Lee of the rock group Rush.
In the movie two unemployed brothers, Bob and Doug McKenzie, are in a bind when they give away their father’s beer money, then run out of beer. The brothers place a mouse in a beer bottle in an attempt to get free Elsinore beer from the local beer store, but are told by the no-nonsense clerk—under threat of being shoved into a bottle themselves—to take up the matter at the Elsinore brewery instead. After presenting the evidence to management at Elsinore brewery, the brothers are given jobs on the line inspecting the bottles for mice. They take this opportunity to drink lots of free beer off the line; later, they surprise their parents with a van full of Elsinore products.
So it sounds like a good comedy plot right? Tell that to Mihai Stanescu, 32, a Romanian man who ended up in an emergency hospital with food poisoning after finding a dead mouse in his bottle of beer.
He said: “I simply opened the bottle and took a few gulps. The taste was very strange and when I looked closer I noticed the mouse floating in my beer.”
The man alerted local consumer protection officials who have launched an investigation.
Chief trading standards inspector Mihai Miclaus said: “We will check the whole batch of beer to see if there are other such cases. Then we’ll contact the producer and see who is responsible for this.”
I wonder if Stanescu saw the Bob and Doug McKenzie movie? Strange brew indeed.
I was a loyal Cingular customer. They treated me right and when I talked to someone over the phone the customer service as good. I never had a problem until AT&T bought them out. WE now have more dropped calls, bad service and if you try to talk to someone in customer service you might as well know you will be getting into an argument with them. After being with the same network for 10 years we have now started shopping around for another cell phone company.
We narrowed it down and Sprint was one of them we have been looking into. Sure I heard about the time they charged someone a $14,062.27 phone bill incorrectly, but accidents happen, right?
Maybe not- now there is news coming out that the ignorance -plagued “organization” has refused to humanely cancel the account of a subscriber who had just passed away.
Story goes back to December 21, when a 66 year-old man in Framingham, Mass., died of a brief illness. After what had to be a really sad Christmas, the deceased man’s son-in-law, Bill Stewart, called Sprint to cancel his father-in-law from the family cell phone plan.
“They said his contract wasn’t up and to pay the fee or keep it activated,” Bill Stewart told WCVB-TV in Boston. “They said my father had upgraded his phone, so we can’t cancel unless we pay the early termination fee or give the phone to somebody else,” Stewart added.
The uncaring Sprint salesperson first suggested to Bill Stewart that they add someone else to the plan. That suggestion didn’t go well with Stewart. Then, the customer “service” rep offered to reduce the monthly fee for his deceased father-in-law’s phone from $20 to $10 until the contract ends in September 2008. That didn’t go over too well with Bill Stewart either.
Finally, a TV news reporter got Sprint spokesperson Mark Elliott on the line. He said that with a death certificate from the Stewart’s, that they would make it right five days or so.
What Sprint saying to a grieving son-in-law is we hear what you’re saying about your loss, but prove it. I might expect this from a clueless India customer service rep.( That is another rant.) Have we been reduced to this for a company to do this to longtime, loyal customer?
When growing up in the 70’s we had an afternoon TV program called “Dialing For Dollars”. I was suppose to be doing homework but my afternoon was watching the host as he called a house and asked them the ‘count and the amount” of the money they had to give. To get us to watch this show, besides winning cash, we were asked to watch old movies. Many were bad “B” movie sci-fi but we were graced once a week to a Tarzan movie.
One of these classics was the film “Tarzan Finds a Son (1939) ” with Johnny Weissmuller playing Tarzan. In the film the plane of a young couple and their baby crashes in the jungle. Everyone on the plane dies, except for the baby who is rescued, by Cheeta, Tarzan’s chimpanzee. Tarzan and Jane adopt the child and name him “Boy”. Jane was played by the legendary Maureen O’Sullivan and the mother of the child was played by a new actress whose name was Laraine Day.
Laraine Day has taken her Final Taxi at age 87. Day appeared in over 80 films and TV shows during her career. She was also voted most promising film star in 1940 by American distributors.Day began her stage career with the Long Beach Players in 1931. A talent scout saw her there and got her a contract with the Goldwyn studios, for whom she made her cinema debut in the celebrated Barbara Stanwyck drama, Stella Dallas (1937). She had four lines. RKO offered her the female lead, billed as Laraine Johnson, opposite George O’Brien in three minor westerns: Border G-Men, Painted Desert and Arizona Legion, before she went to MGM in 1939 and became Laraine Day. Her first role there was as a lively Irish lass, the adopted daughter of cop Wallace Beery in “Sergeant Madden.” That same year she signed with the Dr Kildare series. (These were films that were replaced with TV soap operas.)
“Calling Dr Kildare (1939)”, in which Day played Mary Lamont, a nurse who becomes involved in a murder case with Dr Kildare (Lew Ayres), was the second of the studio’s series featuring the young doctor and his gruff mentor Dr Gillespie (Lionel Barrymore), and Day remained as Kildare’s love interest for six more films until, in “Dr Kildare’s Wedding Day (1941)”, Mary was fatally struck by a truck on the day she was to wed the doctor.
Day’s performance was so affecting that the studio was inundated with letters from grieving fans. In order to console them, MGM cast her again opposite Lew Ayres in “Fingers at the Window (1942)”, hoping to create a husband-and-wife detective duo to rival “The Thin Man.”
Day was lent out to United Artists for Alfred Hitchcock’s second Hollywood movie, Foreign Correspondent (1940). She played the daughter of Herbert Marshall, who heads a peace organization, although she does not know that it is a front for fifth columnists. Joel McCrea, on the run with her from Nazi agents, says: “I’m in love with you and I want to marry you.” She replies: “I’m in love with you and I want to marry you!” “That cuts our love scene down quite a bit, doesn’t it?” he retorts. The film received 6 Oscar nominations.
Day was excellent as a rich socialite whom gambler Cary Grant tries to fleece in Mr Lucky (1943), and, in Cecil B DeMille’s The Story of Dr Wassell (1944), she provided sterling support as a nurse to Gary Cooper’s missionary doctor in Java during the war.
Other credits include “I Take This Woman” with Spencer Tracy, “Unholy Partners” with Edward G. Robinson and John Wayne’s “The High and the Mighty.” She also hosted a TV program called “The Laraine Day Show (1951)”
For her contribution to the motion picture industry, Laraine Day has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Down here in the South people tend to depend on their farm tools a lot and will grow attached to them. Many people love their trucks and tractors and it shows with the rise in clothing with the John Deer logo on it. But it is not just a Southern U.S. thing as a man in the UK has asked that his Final Taxi be a‘final tractor.’
A Yorkshire farmer, Jimmie Haythornthwaite , owned three vintage Massey Fergusons and used an adapted 1960s model to go shopping and pick up his pension.
A tractor fanatic, Haythornthwaite told his son that his last wish was to have his body towed to his funeral on his favorite tractor. That wish was granted when he died and his coffin was pulled to a crematorium on a trailer attached to his beloved red 1956 model driven by pal Colin Moses.
Daughter Vicky, 35, said: “It was his last wish to be towed behind his favorite tractor and that his ashes should be scattered at the farm.”
Her father was a well known character in the area and could often be seen standing outside his home surveying the countryside.
She said he lived an old-fashioned life alone in his house that had hardly changed in decades. It was several hundred years old and still had a butchery area and between 1870 and 1878 was a brewery serving the men who built nearby Ponden reservoir.
It has been a week since Halloween and my podcasts of ‘ true stories of horror ‘ went over well this year it seems. I couldn’t help but laugh a bit when I read a news story this morning. It would fit in my true horror tales and also the death history stories I tell.
It seems the German city of Hanover is getting slammed for featuring an axe wielding serial killer on a children’s Christmas advent calendar. Tourism officials have defended the move by saying mass murderer Fritz Haarmann was part of the German city of Hanover’s history.
Haarmann killed 24 young men, chopped up their corpses and dumped their remains in the local river Leine. He appears on the Advent calendar hiding behind a tree on the river bank.
Haarmann stalked Hanover more than 80 years ago and his victims were aged between 13 and 20. Rumors had it that he would then peddle meat from the bodies of his victims as black market pork. His accomplice, Hans Grans, sold the clothing of his victims. Haarmann was sentenced to death and beheaded in 1925.
The calendar is already on sale at tourism offices and shows children singing Xmas carols and laughing as Santa hands out Xmas gifts – and the Star of Bethlehem twinkles over the rooftops.
But over the first door of the calendar, a trilby wearing man peeks out from behind a tree with a meat cleaver in his left hand.
Head of the Hanover tourism board, Hans-Christian Nolte, has defended the calendar, saying: “He is part of our city’s history. Even on guided tours the serial killer’s story is told.”
The Final Taxi 