2025 In Memoriam

Jeff Baena was born on 29 June 1977 in Miami, Florida, USA. He was a writer and producer, known for The Little Hours (2017), Life After Beth (2014) and Joshy (2016). He was married to Aubrey Plaza. He died on 3 January 2025 in Los Feliz, Los Angeles, California, USA.

James Lee Williams was born on 12 April 1992 in Colwyn Bay, Wales, UK. He was an actor, known for Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016), Morning T&T (2019) and This Is Going to Hurt (2022). He was married to David Ludford. He died on 5 January 2025 in Chorlton-by-Backford, Cheshire, England, UK.

Bill Byrge worked for the Metro Nashville Public Library in Nashville, Tennessee, for over 20 years. He has had a successful career with the library, but retired in the summer of 1995 to work full-time on his movie career. He appeared in several movies with Jim Varney (Ernest). He also appeared in a few music videos with Ray Stevens, such as "Sitting up with the Dead", wherein he was the one in the coffin.

Sam Moore was born on 12 October 1935 in Miami, Florida, USA. He was an actor, known for The Great Outdoors (1988), Blues Brothers 2000 (1998) and Julia (2008). He was married to Joyce McRae. He died on 10 January 2025 in Coral Gables, Florida, USA.

Phyllis Dalton was born on 16 October 1925 in London, England, UK. She was a costume designer, known for Doctor Zhivago (1965), The Princess Bride (1987) and Henry V (1989). She was married to Christopher Synge Barton and James Whiteley. She died on 9 January 2025 in Somerset, England, UK.

Leslie Charleson was born on 22 February 1945 in Kansas City, Missouri, USA. She was an actress, known for General Hospital (1963), Cannon (1971) and Kung Fu (1972). She was married to George William Demms. She died on 12 January 2025 in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, Claude was the son of a railroad accountant. With no intentions of becoming a screen actor at the time, 12-year-old Claude Jarman, Jr. was discovered during an MGM nationwide talent search for their upcoming film, The Yearling (1946), and won the coveted role of Jody Baxter in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' classic story. The critics raved over Claude's tremendously moving debut, and the boy was awarded a miniature Oscar on Academy Awards night.

His family moved to California permanently, and Claude studied at the MGM studio school while being built up as a child star. Sad to say, his film success would not last all that long. He seemed to lack the requisite good looks and natural boyish appeal necessary to forge on ahead. His follow-up films were mediocre, however, including High Barbaree (1947) with Van Johnson, The Sun Comes Up (1949) with Jeanette MacDonald, and Roughshod (1949) starring Robert Sterling. His next best role would be in Intruder in the Dust (1949) with David Brian and Juano Hernandez, but it wasn't enough to sustain his career.

By the early 1950s, MGM was loaning him out to Republic Studios in minor programmers and the now-awkward teen lost ground rapidly. Discouraged, Claude returned to Nashville to complete high school and then attended Vanderbilt University where he took a pre-law course. Following his studies, he served three years in the Navy. By the time he returned to Hollywood in 1959, he found no film work at all but did manage to guest on a few TV shows. He later moved to behind-the-scenes work and made minor strides as a producer and film-festival executive director. He once served as director of Cultural Affairs for the City of San Francisco.

Jeannot Szwarc gained a cult following for his time-travelling romantic fantasy Somewhere in Time (1980). It starred Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour, both very much at the peak of their popularity. The director himself regarded this and the spy thriller Enigma (1982) as his two best feature films.

Paris-born Szwarc (pronounced "Schwartz") spent his early years in Argentina before studying in the U.S., where he obtained a Master's Degree in political science from Harvard University. Having settled in Paris, he began working for a production company on documentaries and commercials, eventually advancing to the position of second unit director. Upon his return to America in the early sixties, he toiled for several years as a freelance scriptwriter. By the end of the decade, Szwarc had graduated to directing prime-time television. He seamlessly adapted to every genre but always maintained a certain predilection for fantasy and science fiction. Helming episodes of top-rating TV shows for the next five decades, Szwarc amassed multiple credits for episodes of, among others, Night Gallery (1969), Kojak (1973), JAG (1995), Without a Trace (2002),Heroes (2006), Smallville (2001), Fringe (2008), Supernatural (2005) and Bones (2005). His occasional big screen forays were somewhat less consistent in quality, including tepid material like Jaws 2 (1978), Bug (1975) and Supergirl (1984).

Jeannot Szwarc was married to the production coordinator Cara de Menual. He died on January 15 2025, aged 85.

Bob Uecker's first career was professional baseball. He played six seasons in the majors (1962-1967), playing catcher for three different National League teams: Braves (Milwaukee, WI, and Atlanta, GA), Cardinals (St. Louis, MO), and Phillies (Philadelphia, PA). His batting, never stellar, declined steadily over his career: he finished with a .200 lifetime average. He wrote a humorous autobiography entitled "Catcher in the Wry". He appeared in a popular series of Lite beer commercials before landing his first movie role.

Born in precisely the kind of small-town American setting so familiar from his films, David Lynch spent his childhood being shunted from one state to another as his research scientist father kept getting relocated. He attended various art schools, married Peggy Lynch and then fathered future director Jennifer Lynch shortly after he turned 21. That experience, plus attending art school in a particularly violent and run-down area of Philadelphia, inspired Eraserhead (1977), a film that he began in the early 1970s (after a couple of shorts) and which he would work on obsessively for five years. The final film was initially judged to be almost unreleasable weird, but thanks to the efforts of distributor Ben Barenholtz, it secured a cult following and enabled Lynch to make his first mainstream film (in an unlikely alliance with Mel Brooks), though The Elephant Man (1980) was shot through with his unique sensibility. Its enormous critical and commercial success led to Dune (1984), a hugely expensive commercial disaster, but Lynch redeemed himself with the now classic Blue Velvet (1986), his most personal and original work since his debut. He subsequently won the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival with the dark, violent road movie Wild at Heart (1990), and achieved a huge cult following with his surreal TV series Twin Peaks (1990), which he adapted for the big screen, though his comedy series On the Air (1992) was less successful. He also draws comic strips and has devised multimedia stage events with regular composer Angelo Badalamenti. He had a much-publicized affair with Isabella Rossellini in the late 1980s.

Shôji Ueda was born on 1 January 1938 in Funabashi, Chiba, Japan. He was a cinematographer, known for Ran (1985), Dreams (1990) and Kagemusha: The Shadow Warrior (1980). He died on 16 January 2025 in Yokohama City, Japan.

Dame Joan Ann Plowright, the Baroness Olivier, is one of the most distinguished actors of her generation. She may be best remembered as the third wife and widow of Laurence Olivier, generally considered the greatest anglophone actor of the 20th Century, but she had a distinguished career of her own on stage and screen spanning six decades.

Born in Brigg, Lincolnshire on October 28, 1929, she received her training at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School and made her professional stage debut at Croydon in 1948. Her London debut came in 1954, and two years later, she joined George Devine's English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre, which would change her life just as the drama at the Royal Court revolutionized the English theater.

The Royal Court's 1956 production of John Osborne's 'Look Back In Anger' was a watershed in English theatrical history, ushering in the 'Angry Young Man" era in British cultural life. In 1957, Plowright first co-starred with her future husband Olivier in the Royal Court's production of Osborne's The Entertainer (1960) when she took over the role of Archie Rice's daughter Jean Rice when the play transferred to a commercial venue in the West End. She recreated the role in Tony Richardson's 1960 film of the play.

To escape the notoriety from Olivier's divorce from Vivien Leigh, Plowright and Olivier went to New York, where they appeared on Broadway, he in Becket (1964) and she in A Taste of Honey (1961). For her performance as Josephine, which Rita Tushingham played in the movie version, she won a 1961 Tony Award as Best Actress in a Play. (She had first appeared on Broadway in a twin bill of Eugène Ionesco's "The Chairs" and "The Lesson" in January 1958, a month before she appeared with Olivier in "The Entertainer".) When his divorce from Leigh came through, they were married in March 1961 in New York with Richard Burton as Larry's best man.

From 1963 onward, she was a member of the National Theatre, which was headed by Olivier. Plowright created a distinguished stage career and was acclaimed when she began appearing more frequently in movies and television starting in the the 1980s. She was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, the female equivalent of a knighthood, in the 2004 Queen's New Year Honours.

Plowright divorced her first husband, the actor Roger Gage, to marry Olivier in 1961 and they had three children, Richard Kerr Olivier, Tamsin Olivier and Julie Kate Olivier.

Ronnie Yeskel was a casting director and producer, known for The Sessions (2012), Pulp Fiction (1994) and Igby Goes Down (2002). She died on 4 January 2025 in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California, USA.

Lynne Taylor-Corbett was born on 2 December 1946 in Denver, Colorado, USA. She was a writer, known for Vanilla Sky (2001), Footloose (1984) and Bewitched (2005). She was married to Michael Corbett. She died on 12 January 2025 in Rockville Centre, New York, USA.

Claire van Kampen was born on 3 November 1953 in Muswell Hill, London, England, UK. She was a composer and director, known for Days and Nights (2014). She was married to Mark Rylance and Chris Perret. She died on 18 January 2025 in Kassel, Hesse, Germany.

Rory Sykes is just a guy with cerebral palsy, who plays too much RuneScape and likes to build things on the web. Co-founded Happy Charity to help others.

He previously spent a lot of his time traveling the world and worked on various projects in England, Australia, across Europe, Asia, and the United States.

Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer-Prize and Oscar-winning cartoonist, playwright and screenwriter, was born on 1929 in the New York City borough The Bronx. During the 1940s, the young Jules apprenticed with comic strip artist Will Eisner on his "The Spirit" strip at the Quality Comics Group. The strip had floundered during the war, after Eisner had been drafted in 1942, but upon his return, Eisner -- with the aid of assistants such as Feiffer -- reinvigorated the strip. Under Eisner, Feiffer learned how to tell a story in illustrations and words. Feiffer is most famous for his cartoons for The Village Voice, which was opened for business in a Greenwich Village in October 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher and Norman Mailer. Feiffer's cartoons, which ran in The Voice for 42 years, were syndicated to a wide variety of Sunday papers. He also has the distinction of being the first opinion-editorial page cartoonist employed by The New York Times, a post he held from 1997 through the year 2000.

In addition to his cartoons, Feiffer wrote the 1967 play Little Murders (1971), which was turned into a film in 1971 despite being a flop on Broadway, lasting but one week of seven performances with a cast that included Heywood Hale Broun and Elliott Gould. Feiffer wrote the screenplay for the film, which was directed by Alan Arkin; despite having Gould, then at the height of his fame during the student social upheavals that were cresting and would soon abate, the film was not a success at the box office.

However, Feiffer did taste great cinema success that same year with his screenplay for Mike Nichols, masterpiece Carnal Knowledge (1971), an acerbic look at the sexual mores of men who came to maturity just after World War II. Feifer's first foray with motion pictures was the animated short film 'Munro (1961) (I)', which won the 1961 Academy Award for Best Short Subject, Cartoons.

Feiffer has published over 20 books, including the children's classic The Phantom Tollbooth (1970), which he illustrated and which was made into a movie in 1970.

Feiffer's cartoons for the Voice have been collected in 19 volumes; he also has written the acclaimed children's books "The Man in the Ceiling" and "A Barrel of Laughs, A Vale of Tears".

After teaching at the Yale School of Drama and Northwestern University and serving as a Senior Fellow at Columbia University's National Arts Journalism Program, Feiffer took a post at Southampton College (the graduate school of Long Island University). Among his many honors are membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1995), the National Cartoonist Society Milton Caniff Lifetime Achievement Award (2004), and being named the Creativity Foundation's 2006 Laureate.

Barry Michael Cooper is a producer and writer, known for New Jack City (1991), Sugar Hill (1993) and Above the Rim (1994) and She's Gotta Have It (2017-2019). A former investigative reporter for the Village Voice and Spin Magazine, Cooper was one of the first journalists to report on the crack-cocaine epidemic in the mid-1980s.

Jim Tauber was a producer, known for Gone (2012), I, Frankenstein (2014) and The Place Beyond the Pines (2012). He was married to Laura Newman. He died on 22 January 2025 in the United States.

Lee Joo-Sil was born on 8 March 1944 in Bucheon, Gyeonggi-do , Japanese Colonial Period. She was an actress, known for Train to Busan (2016), The Uncanny Counter (2020) and Commitment (2013). She died on 2 February 2025 in Uijeongbu, South Korea.

Daughter of Eva, the Baroness Erisso, and Major Glynn Faithfull, a WWII British spy. Recorded the first song written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, "As Tears Go By" (1964). Involved in a major drug scandal with Jagger, Richards, and others, which ultimately turned public opinion favorably towards the Rolling Stones and other rock groups. In the '70s she became addicted to heroin and was homeless in London's Soho district for a couple of years. Recorded numerous albums in the '80s while struggling with cocaine and alcohol. Has remained sober and productive since.

Joe Hale was born on 4 June 1925 in Newland, Indiana, USA. He was a writer, known for The Black Hole (1979), The Black Cauldron (1985) and Sleeping Beauty (1959). He was married to Beverly Hale. He died on 29 January 2025 in Atascadero, California, USA.

Olga James was born on 16 February 1929 in Washington, District of Columbia, USA. She was an actress, known for Carmen Jones (1954), Sealab 2020 (1972) and The Bill Cosby Show (1969). She was married to Cannonball Adderley and Len Chandler. She died on 25 January 2025 in Los Angeles, California, USA.

Irv Gotti was born on 26 June 1970 in Hollis, Queens, New York City, New York, USA. He was a producer and director, known for Romeo Must Die (2000), The Fast and the Furious (2001) and Rush Hour (1998). He was married to Deb Lorenzo. He died on 5 February 2025 in New York City, New York, USA.

Versatility and ability to portray a variety of characters over four decades on stage, screen, and television have made Tony Roberts one of the busiest actors in America. He is a graduate of the High School of Music and Arts, which merged with the High School of Performing Arts to become LaGuardia High School for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, where he majored in theater and studied acting with Alvina Krause. Tony is the son of Radio and Television announcer Ken Roberts, one of the founding members of AFTRA, and has himself served as a member of the Board of Directors of the Screen Actor's Guild and Actor's Equity Association. He is currently the President of Theatre Authority - an organization established by the entertainment unions to oversee benefit performances. Tony has appeared in dozens and dozens of films including Stardust Memories (1980), Star Spangled Girl (1971), The Million Dollar Duck (1971), The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), Popcorn (1991), Amityville 3-D (1983), Key Exchange (1985), Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Radio Days (1987) and Switch (1991). His theater credits included "Sugar", "Don't Drink the Water", "Arsenic and Old Lace" and "South Pacific".