Shirley Temple, “America’s Little Darling,” has passed away at age 85. She died of natural causes at her home in Woodside, Calif., “surrounded by family and caregivers,” according to a family statement.
“We salute her for a life of remarkable achievements as an actor, as a diplomat, and most importantly as our beloved mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and adored wife for 55 years of the late and much missed Charles Alden Black,” the statement continues.
Temple was one of the earliest cinematic child stars, first appearing on film at age 3. She’d appeared in multiple blockbusters by age 10, including “Bright Eyes,” “Curly Top,” “Heidi,” and “The Little Princess.” She ranked as Hollywood’s biggest draw for four years straight (1935-1938) according to a poll of theater owners. During the ‘30s, she commanded as much as $50,000 per picture, a rare sum at the height of the Great Depression. She received a special juvenile Academy Award in 1935 and remains the youngest person ever to receive an Oscar.
While Temple’s popularity began to wane as she grew older, she continued to act through the 1940s, appearing in “Fort Apache” with co-stars John Wayne and Henry Fonda, and “The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer” with Cary Grant and Myrna Loy.
She retired from film after marrying Charles Black, a San Francisco businessman, at age 22, ushering in a 20-year hiatus from life in the spotlight. In 1967, she returned to prominence, running as a republican candidate for congress. She lost the election, but continued in public service. From 1969 to 1974, she served in the U.S. delegation to the United Nations; she was U.S. ambassador to Ghana from 1974 to 1976 and U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia from 1989 to 1992.
Funeral arrangements are pending, but a remembrance guest book has been set up at shirleytemple.com.
Notable screenwriter and actor, Patrice Chereau, died on Monday in Paris, France due to complications of lung cancer. He was 68 years old.
Chereau was widely known for his role as the French director of opera, and served as a dominant figure in the French film industry for more than 40 years. He played a significant role in more than 20 French films throughout the tenure of his entire career. He also directed 9 operas, and 10 theatrical productions over a 38 year span.
In 1975, Chereau penned his first film production script for “The Flesh of the Orchid.” His 1984 screenplay, “The Wounded Man” was also another plausible production he was lauded for. He received a Cesar award in honor of his directional role in the play.
Some of his most prominent film and theatrical productions were “Queen Margot” and “Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train.” His “Queen Margot” production garnered two honorary prizes in the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar for Costume Design. The Cannes Film Festival commemorated “Queen Margot” this year, debuting a newly restored version of film.
In 2001, Chereau embarked into new film territory with his production “Intimacy.” The sexually charged film marked yet another successful milestone in Chereau’s career as it was his first and only English-language film production. The film went on to win a Berlin Film Festival award for Best Film.
Chereau’s latest work was a theatrical production of Richard Strauss’ “Elektra.” The New York Times reports that “Elektra” premiered at the Aux-en-Provence earlier this summer, and is slated to open at the Metropolitian Opera House in 2016.
Salustiano Sanchez-Blazquez, the world’s oldest man, has died at age 112. He had been a resident of a Grand Island, N.Y. nursing home since 2007.
Affectionately known as “Shorty”, Sanchez-Blazquez was born June 8, 1901 in El Tejado de Bejar, a small village province of Salamanca, Spain. Throughout his adolescent life, Sanchez-Blazquez developed a fervent admiration for music, and was also a self-taught musician. He was known for his musicianship playing the dulzaina, a Spanish double reed oboe. He’d used his skills playing the dulzaina as a source of income throughout his teenage years, performing for weddings and other celebrations around his village. He relocated to Cuba to work in numerous sugarcane fields at age 17.
By 1920, he immigrated to the United States to work in the Lynch, KY coal mines. Eventually, he settled in the Niagara Falls area of New York where he went on to marry his wife, Pearl, in 1934. He spent the majority of his adult life working diligently as a coal miner by trade.
Guinness World Records’ consultant Robert Young stated that Sanchez-Blazquez became the world’s oldest man three months ago in June when Jiroemon Kimura passed away at age 116. Young went on to say that Sanchez-Blazquez was a gin rummy enthusiast, which was one of his favorite hobbies. He played nearly every evening. He also enjoyed solving crossword puzzles and gardening. Sanchez-Blazquez handled the announcement of the record setting feat with docile ease saying, “living so long was not a special accomplishment.” He simply accredited his longevity to one banana a day and Anacin aspirin daily.
According to CBS New York, Sanchez-Blazquez is survived by his 76-year-old son named John, 69-year-old daughter, Irene, seven grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren, and five great-great-grandchildren.
John Colucci, spokesperson for M.J. Colucci and Son Funeral Chapels stated that the service will be private, and that Sanchez-Blazquez’s interment will be at Gate of Heaven cemetery located in Lewiston, N.Y.
In the third NYC subway-related death since early December, a woman has fallen to her demise after stumbling around on the platform near Times Square.
The victim–who hasn’t been identified–was in her early 20’s and died from her injuries after falling in front of the train at 34th Street and Seventh Avenue. Police haven’t confirmed whether drugs or alcohol might have been involved. The incident occurred around 5 a.m. on Tuesday morning.
According to Huffington Post, subway deaths aren’t all that unusual; however, a string of bizarre incidents involving New York’s transit system has left officials puzzled of late. Early in December, Ki-Suk Han was pushed to his death in front of a train, and the incident was captured on film by a photographer who happened to be standing on the platform. The story and accompanying photo ran on the cover of the New York Post the next day, much to the dismay of many who thought it was disrespectful to the man’s family.
On December 27th, 31-year old Erika Menendez pushed a man in front of a train in Queens and later confessed that the murder was a random hate crime.
“I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up,” Menendez told officials in her statement.
Besse Cooper was given the honor of being the world’s oldest person last year by the Guinness Book of World Records, saying the secret to her longevity was, “I mind my own business. And I don’t eat junk food.”
The feisty Mrs. Cooper was born on August 26th, 1896 and lived through many of the historical events most of us have to learn about through books or television. She was a suffragette in the days before women had the right to vote and campaigned in her Georgia town to get women’s voices heard. From then on, she only missed voting in two elections up until the day she died.
Described by her children as a fiercely bright woman who became a schoolteacher after graduating from East Tennessee State University. She married her husband, Luther, in 1924 and was widowed in 1963; she herself enjoyed excellent health right up until this week, when she began having difficulty breathing at the elder care facility she lived in. She passed away on Tuesday, December 4th.
Although her eyesight had begun to fail her a bit, Cooper loved to read and was known to be every bit as sharp as someone half her age. Robert Young, a senior consultant for Guinness, said he was surprised by her mental state when he met her five years ago. He, too, was touched by meeting the woman who had lived through so much.
Though the distinction of being the world’s oldest person has now been passed on to 115-year-old Dina Manfredini–of Johnston, Iowa–Besse Cooper’s legacy will live on, through the people who had the honor of meeting her and through the many generations of family she saw born after her.
Rich was born to a family of means in 1929; her father was a respected pathologist and professor at Johns Hopkins University, her mother a former concert pianist. Her father had very specific ideas about what he wanted for his daughter; she took his expectations to heart and excelled in academics. Her heart belonged to words from an early age, and her earliest work of poetry–“A Change Of World”–earned her the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Award. She later went on to receive a MacArthur “Genius” Award–one of many honors bestowed upon her–and made the news in 1997 when she refused the National Medal Of Arts from President Clinton, citing political reasons.
In fact, Rich’s work was very political and often earned her criticism for it’s harshness. She threaded themes of feminism and war with personal stories, like the fact that she was forced to keep her Jewish bloodline a secret for many years as a girl. Her 1976 collection “Of Woman Born: Motherhood As Institution And Experience” is widely regarded as the book that cemented her a place within the feminist hierarchy, although her “masterpiece” is considered to be “Diving Into The Wreck“.
What inspired and intensified Rich’s poetry was simply what was going on around her: war, the battle of the sexes, and where a woman’s place was…as well as how that changed over the years. She grew up in a time when women had very few rights and many expectations, and by the time she was an adult, her generation was ready to throw off the cloak of complacency and do their own thing for a change.
She served as a voice for women everywhere, but her works reached out to more than just those with feminist ideals; her collections have sold more than 750,000 copies.
“Some nights he had the stars of North Carolina shooting from his fingertips. Before him, no one had ever played the banjo like he did. After him, everyone played the banjo like he did, or at least tried.”–Steve Martin
North Carolina-born Scruggs was from a farming family, but they lived in a community well-known for a love of banjo music. His own father, George, was a banjo and fiddle player and passed on his love of the instruments to his son. In fact, the entire family was musically inclined, including Earl’s mother, Lula. Later, as an adult, Earl would pass on this tradition to his own children; his sons Gary and Randy are accomplished musicians and songwriters.
Sadly, George passed away when Earl was just four years old. It was around that time that he began picking the banjo, using either his sister’s or the one his father had used. Growing up in a small farming town during the Depression limited Earl’s options for fun, especially when there was so much work to be done. Music became his emotional outlet, the thing he turned to every day for comfort. And he got very, very good at it.
By the age of ten he had taught himself a picking style using three fingers–which came about because he was distracted by an argument with his brother and realized he was using his thumb, index and middle finger to play–that would become known as “Scruggs Style Picking”. Earl single-handedly revolutionized the way the banjo was played and brought new life to an old instrument…all before he could even drive a car.
In later years, Earl fostered his picking style and made it even more his own by executing a smooth roll with his fingers, which gave the banjo a more distinctive sound. In 1945, he joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys and stayed with them for three years, forming a tight bond with bandmate Lester Flatt. In 1948 the two of them left the band to form their own: The Foggy Mountain Boys.
They began to do what no one else had done before; they took the banjo–which until then had widely been regarded as something of a joke, to be used for comedic purposes rather than make good music–and brought it into the spotlight as an instrument to be revered, as well as the talent it takes to play one well.
The Foggy Mountain Boys had several different members, but Earl and Lester remained the core of the group. They became regulars at the Grand Ole Opry and found quite a bit of fame with their tune “The Ballad Of Jed Clampett”, which most of us know as the theme song for “The Beverly Hillbillies”. They went on to have their music featured in the film “Bonnie and Clyde” and became role models for many, including filmmakers Joel and Ethan Cohen–whose film “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” featured a bluegrass group called “The Soggy Bottom Boys” as well as a soundtrack full of amazing bluegrass musicians–and aspiring musicians, including actor and noted banjo player Steve Martin.
“A grand part of American music owes a debt to Earl Scruggs,” Steve Martin wrote in The New Yorker. “Few players have changed the way we hear an instrument the way Earl has, putting him in a category with Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong, Chet Atkins, and Jimi Hendrix.”
In fact, Scruggs shared a stage with many noted rock and folk musicians over the years, such as Bob Dylan, Elton John, John Fogerty, and The Byrds. Musicians of all genres appreciated his style and what he brought to a song; one didn’t have to play bluegrass to get it.
Though they ended their time with the Foggy Mountain Boys in 1969, Earl Scruggs and Lester Flatt were honored by an induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1985. And six years later, they were the first-ever inductees to the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. Their legacy will never be forgotten.
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