The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

STEPHEN JONES & KIM NEWMAN Necrology: 2011

AS WE ENTER THE second decade of the twenty-first century, we are losing many of the writers, artists, performers and technicians we grew up with and who, during their lifetimes, helped shape the horror, science fiction and fantasy genres.

AUTHORS/ARTISTS/COMPOSERS

Best-selling British children’s author Dick King-Smith OBE (Ronald Gordon King-Smith) died in his sleep on 4 January after a long illness. He was eighty-eight. The former farmer’s more than 100 books included the 1983 novel The Sheep-Pig, which was filmed as Babe (1995), and The Water Horse (which was made into a film in 2007). His other titles include The Invisible Dog and The Witch of Blackberry Bottom.

Ruth Evelyn Kyle, who was married to SF fan/writer/publisher David A. Kyle for fifty-three years, died after a brief illness on 5 January, aged eighty-one. The couple met at a science fiction convention. Ruth Kyle was Secretary of the 14th World Science Fiction Convention held in New York City in 1956.

American author and dealer Jerry Weist died of multiple myeloma after a long illness on 7 January, aged sixty-one. Initially inspired by Famous Monsters of Filmland in the late 1950s, he began publishing the fanzines Nightmares and Movieland Monsters, and in 1967 he founded the famed EC comics fanzine Squa Tront, which ran until 1983. His books include three editions of The Comic Art Price Guide, The R. Crumb Price Guide, The Underground Price Guide, Bradbury: An Illustrated Life and The 100 Greatest Comic Books, and he contributed (with Robert Weinberg) a bibliographical index to the revised editions of From the Pen of Paul: The Fantastic Images of Frank R. Paul. In 1974 Weist opened The Million Year Picnic in Boston, one of the first specialty comic stores in the US.

American SF artist and illustrator Gene Szafran (Eugene Szafran) died on 8 January, aged sixty-nine. During the late 1960s and early ’70s he painted more than seventy-five covers for books by Robert A. Heinlein, Robert Silverberg, Poul Anderson, Ray Bradbury and others. His work also appeared in numerous magazines, including Playboy. Szafran’s career was curtailed in the late 1970s when he developed multiple sclerosis.

Prolific American SF, mystery and Western author Edward [Paul] Wellen died on 15 January, aged ninety-one. He began contributing to the SF digest magazines in the early 1950s (including Galaxy, Imagination, Science Stories, Universe and Infinity), while his 1971 novel Hijack was described as “The Mafia takes to space”.

British occultist Kenneth Grant, who claimed to be the “heir” to “the wickedest man in the world”, Aleister Crowley (1875–1947), died the same day, aged eighty-six. After Crowley’s death, he edited and published many of his mentor’s works, but he also became involved in a lengthy controversy over his succession to Outer Head of Crowley’s self-styled Order of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Grant liberally borrowed from Crowley and H. P. Lovecraft in his own novels, poems and occult treatises.

American writer, poet and artist Melissa Mia Hall died of a heart attack on 29 January, aged fifty-five. A former creative writing teacher at the University of Texas Arlington’s Continuing Education programme, she started publishing in 1979, and her more than sixty stories appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Twilight Zone, Shayol, Realms of Fantasy, Shadows 12, 100 Hair-Raising Little Horror Stories, Masques 3 and Cross Plains Universe. Hall also collaborated on stories with Douglas E. Winter and Joe R. Lansdale, edited the 1987 anthology Wild Women, and wrote hundreds of reviews and interviews for Publishers Weekly.

John Barry [Prendergast] OBE, perhaps Britain’s finest and most influential film composer and arranger, died of a heart attack in New York on 31 January. He was seventy-seven. Among many memorable scores, Barry is perhaps best known for his work on the James Bond movies Dr No (uncredited), From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Thunderball, You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Diamonds Are Forever, The Man with the Golden Gun, Moonraker, Octopussy, A View to a Kill and The Living Daylights. The four-time Oscar winner’s numerous other credits include They Might Be Giants, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1972), The Day of the Locust, King Kong (1976), The White Buffalo, The Deep, Starcrash, Disney’s The Black Hole, Raise the Titanic, Somewhere in Time (based on the novel by Richard Matheson), The Legend of the Lone Ranger, Murder by Phone, Svengali (1983), Howard the Duck (aka Howard: A New Breed of Hero) and Peggy Sue Got Married. He also composed the theme music for the 1973 TV series Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries. The second of Barry’s four wives was actress Jane Birkin.

Children’s fantasy writer and radio broadcaster [James] Brian Jacques died following emergency heart surgery on 5 February. He was seventy-one. He was best known for his popular “Redwall” animal fantasy series, which began in 1987 and ran for more than twenty books. The series, which sold twenty million copies around the world and was translated into almost thirty languages, was adapted into a Canadian animated TV series in 1999. Jacques also published various picture books, “Redwall” spin-offs, and the “Castaways of the Flying Dutchman” series, while his short fiction was collected in Seven Strange and Ghostly Tales and The Ribbajack & Other Curious Yarns.

American TV writer Donald S. Sanford died on 8 February, aged ninety-two. His many credits include episodes of Thriller (including “The Incredible Doctor Markesan” starring Boris Karloff) and The Outer Limits, and the 1979 post-apocalyptic movie Ravagers (set in 1991).

Joanne Siegel (Jolan Kovacs) died on 12 February, aged ninety-three. As a teenager in the late 1930s she advertised her availability in a local newspaper and became the model for “Lois Lane” in the Superman comic book series cartoonists Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel were hoping to sell. She married Siegel in 1948 and in later years campaigned to reclaim her husband’s copyright in the character after he sold all rights to DC Comics in 1937 for just $130.

American children’s book editor and publisher Margaret K. (Knox) McElderry, who created her own eponymous children’s imprint in 1971, died on 14 February, aged ninety-eight. In 1952, while working for Harcourt Brace and Company, she became the first editor to publish both the Newbery and Caldecott award-winning books in the same year. Her authors included Mary Norton, Susan Cooper, Andre Norton, Ursula K. Le Guin and Margaret Mahy.

Sixty-seven-year-old German SF author, editor, translator and literary agent Hans Joachim Alpers (aka “Jurgen Andreas”) died of hepatic cancer after a short illness on 16 February. He edited around fifty anthologies, published numerous juvenile novels under a variety of pseudonyms, and co-edited several reference works, including Lexicon der Science Fiction Literatur (1980).

Comics and animation writer Dwayne McDuffie died on 21 February, the day after his forty-ninth birthday, from complications due to a surgical procedure. He was a co-founder of the Milestone Media imprint, a coalition of African-American comics writers and artists, through which he helped create such characters as “Static Shock” and “Icon”. He also worked for DC and Marvel on such titles as Damage Control, Fantastic Four, Justice League of America, Firestorm and Beyond. In the field of animation McDuffie’s credits include episodes of Static Shock, Ben 10: Alien Force, Justice League Unlimited, Teen Titans, What’s New Scooby-Doo? and the cartoon features Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths and All-Star Superman.

American author Lisa Wolfson (Lisa Kay Madigan), who published YA novels as “L. K. Madigan”, died of pancreatic cancer on 23 February, aged forty-seven. Her books include the 2010 fantasy The Mermaid’s Mirror.

Brazilian literary fantasy author Moacyr Scliar, who had more than seventy books to his credit, died on 27 February following a stroke. He was seventy-three.

Dutch fantasy and SF author Wim Stolk, who wrote as “W. J. Maryson”, died of heart problems on 9 March, aged sixty. An artist and musician, his books include the six-volume “Master Magician” series and the “Unmagician” trilogy.

Reclusive American writer, editor and collector Bill Blackbeard (William Elsworth Blackbeard) died on 10 March, aged eighty-four. Widely credited with having one of the most comprehensive newspaper comic strip collections ever assembled — comprising more than 2.5 million strips published between 1893 and 1996 — he co-edited (with Martin Williams) The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics (1977). His other books include The Comic Strip Art of Lyonel Feininger, R. F. Outcault’s the Yellow Kid and Sherlock Holmes in America. Blackbeard’s story “Hammer of Cain” (co-written with James Causey) appeared in the November 1943 issue of Weird Tales. His archive was acquired by Ohio State University in 1997.

Hollywood and Broadway songwriter Hugh Martin who, with Ralph Blane (who died in 1995), composed the songs “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”, “The Boy Next Door” and “The Trolly Song” for the 1944 MGM movie Meet Me in St. Louis, died on 11 March, aged ninety-six. In 1964 Martin wrote High Spirits, a musical version of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, and he was a vocal arranger and accompanist for Judy Garland, Lena Horne and Debbie Reynolds.

J. K. Rowling’s former school chemistry teacher, John Nettleship, who was the original inspiration for “Severus Snape” in the Harry Potter books, died on 12 March, aged seventy-one.

Sixty-four-year-old English-born Canadian fanzine editor and mathematics teacher Mike Glicksohn (Michael David Glicksohn) died of a stroke on 18 March, following treatment for bladder cancer. A founding member of the Ontario Science Fiction Club, he won the Hugo Award in 1973 for his fanzine Energumen, which he co-published with his wife, Susan Wood. Glicksohn also published the fanzine Xenium and was Fan Guest of Honour at a number of conventions, including Aussiecon in 1975.

American graphic artist Jim Roslof (James Paul Roslof) who was TSR’s art director for the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s, died on 19 March, aged sixty-five. He also provided artwork for adventure modules and scripted gaming scenarios. After leaving TSR, Roslof contributed art for Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics.

Publisher April R. (Rose) Derleth, the daughter of Arkham House co-founder August Derleth (who died in 1971), died on 21 March, aged fifty-six. She was co-owner of the imprint with her brother, Walden.

British fantasy writer Diana Wynne Jones died after a long battle with lung cancer on 26 March, aged seventy-six. She published more than forty books, mostly for children and young adults, including The Ogre Downstairs, Dogsbody, Power of Three, The Time of the Ghost, The Homeward Bounders, Fire and Hemlock, Black Maria, A Sudden Wild Magic, Hexwood and Enchanted Glass. She was also the author of the “Dalemark”, “Chrestomanci”, “Howl”, “Magids” and “Derkholm” series. Jones’ short fiction was collected in Warlock at the Wheel and Other Stories, Everard’s Ride, Minor Arcana (aka Believing is Seeing), Mixed Magics and Unexpected Magic; she edited the anthologies Fantasy Stories (aka Spellbound) and Hidden Turnings, and wrote the non-fiction study The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Archer’s Goon was adapted by the BBC into a six-part TV series in 1992, while Howl’s Moving Castle was turned into an Oscar-nominated anime by Hayao Miyazaki. A winner of the Mythopoeic Award and the British Fantasy Society Special Award, she was a Guest of Honour at the 1988 World Fantasy Convention in London and was a recipient of the 2007 World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement.

Prolific British crime writer and critic H. R. F. Keating (Henry Reymond Fitzwalter Keating) died on 27 March, aged eighty-four. Best known for his books featuring Detective Inspector Ghote, he also wrote the SF novels The Strong Man and A Long Walk to Wimbledon.

Welsh author Craig Thomas (aka “David Grant”), whose eighteen novels include the techno-thrillers Firefox (filmed by Clint Eastwood in 1982) and Firefox Down, died of leukemia on 4 April, aged sixty-nine.

American writer Larry [Eugene] Tritten died after a long illness on 6 April, aged seventy-two. His first SF story appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1974, and he went on to contribute fiction to numerous magazines and anthologies over the next three decades. Tritten also wrote more than 1,500 reviews, columns and travel articles for newspapers and non-genre periodicals.

American TV scriptwriter and producer Sol Saks, who created the pilot episode of Bewitched (1964–72), died on 16 April, aged 100.

British TV, radio and film scriptwriter Ken Taylor (Kenneth Heywood Taylor) died 17 April, aged eighty-eight. In 1983 he scripted three episodes of the Granada TV series Shades of Darkness based on stories by Edith Wharton (“The Lady’s Maid’s Bell”), C. H. B. Kitchin (“The Maze”) and Walter De La Mare (“Seaton’s Aunt”).

British TV and radio comedy writer Bob Block (Timothy Robert William Block) died the same day, aged eighty-ine. He created and scripted such children’s TV series as Pardon My Genie (1972–73), Robert’s Robots (1973–74), Rentaghost (1976–80) and Galloping Galaxies! (1985–86). A Rentaghost: The Musical was produced on stage in 2006 starring Joe Pasquale, and a movie version of the series is currently in development.

American artist Doug (Douglas) Chaffee died on 26 April, aged seventy-five. After leaving his job as head of IBM’s Art Department, he became a freelance illustrator, working for NASA and contributing to such TSR role-playing games as Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering.

Wiescka Masterton (Wiescka Walach), the Polish-German wife and literary agent of horror writer Graham Masterton, died on 27 April, aged sixty-five. She had been suffering from a long illness and died of complications from a fall. The couple met when they were both working at Penthouse magazine in the early 1970s, and Masterson’s first horror novel, The Manitou, was inspired by his wife’s pregnancy. In 1988 she sold the book to Poland, before the collapse of the Communist regime, and it became the first Western horror novel to be published in the country since World War II.

American feminist SF writer and ground-breaking critic Joanna [Ruth] Russ died on 29 April, following a series of strokes. She was seventy-four. Russ’ first story appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1959, and her short fiction is collected in Alyx (aka The Adventures of Alyx), The Zanzibar Cat, Extraordinary People and The Hidden Side of the Moon. Best known for her influential 1975 novel The Female Man, her other novels include Picnic on Paradise, And Chaos Died, We Who Are About To. , and The Two of Them. Her essays and criticism are collected in a number of volumes, and during her career she won the Hugo, Nebula, Tiptree and Pilgrim Awards.

British scriptwriter Jeremy Paul [Roche] died of pancreatic cancer on 3 May, aged seventy-one. His credits include Hammer’s Countess Dracula and episodes of TV’s Out of the Unknown, Journey to the Unknown, Tales of the Unexpected, Play for Today (“The Flipside of Dominick Hide” and “Another Flick for Dominick”), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (“The Last Vampyre”) and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. Paul also scripted the 1988 stage production The Secret of Sherlock Holmes starring Jeremy Brett.

British SF author and organic chemist Martin Sherwood, who published two novels with New English Library in the mid-1970s, Survival and Maxwell’s Demon, died on 10 May, aged sixty-nine.

Simon Heneage (Simon Anthony Helyar Walker-Heneage), co-founder of London’s Cartoon Museum and an expert on artist W. Heath Robinson, died on 14 May, aged eighty.

British psychologist, novelist, scriptwriter, engineer and artificial intelligence researcher Martin [Charlton] Woodhouse died on 15 May, aged seventy-eight. Credited with creating the first ebooks, his novels include the “Giles Yeoman” series of techno-thrillers: Tree Frog, Bush Baby, Mama Doll, Blue Bone and Moon Hill. In the 1960s Woodhouse scripted six early episodes of The Avengers featuring Honor Blackman and a later show featuring Diana Rigg. He also wrote twenty-two episodes of Supercar with his younger brother Hugh, and the children’s SF serial Emerald Soup.

Iconic fantasy artist Jeffrey [“Catherine”] Jones, who was once praised by Frank Frazetta as “the greatest living painter”, died of complications from emphysema, bronchitis and heart problems on 18 May, aged sixty-seven. He was reportedly severely underweight. A member of the legendary 1970s artists’ group The Studio (which also included Michael William Kaluta, Barry Windsor-Smith and Bernie Wrightson), Jones was one of the most prolific genre artists of the 1960s and ’70s, producing more than 150 covers for books by Fritz Leiber (notably the “Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser” series), Jack Vance, Andre Norton, Robert E. Howard, Karl Edward Wagner, Dean Koontz and many others, along with magazine and comics work. In 1998 Jones began hormone replacement therapy, and subsequently suffered an apparent nervous breakdown before returning to painting in the early 2000s. The World Fantasy Award-winning artist’s work is collected in The Studio, Age of Innocence: The Romantic Art of Jeffrey Jones, The Art of Jeffrey Jones, Jeffrey Jones Sketchbook and Jeffrey Jones: A Life in Art.

American author and music composer [Robert] Mark Shepherd committed suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot wound on 25 May. He was forty-nine. Shepherd was best known for his collaborations with Mercedes Lackey (whose personal secretary he was during the 1990s) on such fantasy novels as Wheels of Fire and Prison of Souls. His solo books set in the same worlds include Elvendude, Spiritride, Lazerwarz and Escape from Roksamur, while Blackrose Avenue was a dystopian SF novel.

British fan artist, writer and publisher [Byron] Terry Jeeves died on 29 May, aged eighty-eight. A founder of the British Science Fiction Association in 1958, he edited the group’s journal Vector from 1958–59. Jeeves also edited the fanzines Triode and ERG, and his articles and artwork appeared in numerous publications, winning him the Rotsler Award in 2007. He was also a recipient of the Doc Weir Award for services to British fandom, and he was inducted into the First Fandom Hall of Fame in 2010. Jeeves’ story “Upon Reflection” appeared in The 25th Pan Book of Horror Stories, and much of his fanzine writing was collected in the tribute magazine Wartime Days (2010).

Fifty-seven-year-old Canadian-born fantasy and SF author Joel Rosenberg, an outspoken gun advocate, died in Minneapolis on 2 June after suffering respiratory problems that resulted in a heart attack, brain damage and major organ failure. He made his writing debut in Asimov’s magazine in 1982, and his novels include The Sleeping Dragon (and nine sequels in his “Guardians of the Flame” series), Ties of Blood and Silver, D’Shai, The Fire Duke, The Silver Stone, The Crimson Sky, Home Front, the “Riftwar” novel Murder in LaMut (with Raymond E. Feist), Paladins and Knight Moves. In November 2010, Rosenberg, who also wrote Everything You Need to Know About (Legally) Carrying a Handgun in Minnesota, was arrested for carrying a holstered semi-automatic handgun into a meeting at City Hall.

American writer, editor, journalist and book critic Alan [Peter] Ryan died of pancreatic cancer in Brazil on 3 June, aged sixty-eight. His articles and reviews appeared in the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Village Voice and other periodicals. The author of such superior 1980s horror novels as Panther! The Kill, Dead White and Cast a Cold Eye, he won a World Fantasy Award for his story “The Bone Wizard”, and his short fiction is collected in Quadriphobia and The Bone Wizard and Other Stories. Ryan was also an accomplished editor whose anthologies include Perpetual Light, Night Visions 1, Halloween Horrors, The Penguin Book of Vampire Stories (aka Vampires) and Haunting Women. Following a twenty-year absence from the genre, and after suffering a stroke and a heart attack in recent years, he had begun contributing fiction to magazines and anthologies again.

Sixty-four-year-old British author, editor and journalist Tim (Timothy) Stout died in County Wexford, Ireland, on 5 June. He had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease for many years. Stout began his career in the genre with contributions to John Carpenter’s fanzine Fantastic Films Illustrated, and he edited the only two issues of the superior British horror film magazine Supernatural (1969). As an author, his short story “The Boy Who Neglected His Grass Snake” appeared in The 9th Pan Book of Horror Stories (1968), and during the 1970s and ’80s he had fiction published in such anthologies as Space 2, 5 and 8, Armada Sci-Fi 1 and 2, The Year’s Best Horror Stories: Series III, Spectre 2, 3 and 4, and The Jon Pertwee Book of Monsters, all edited by Richard Davis, along with Peter Haining’s Tales of Unknown Horror. Stout’s short fiction was collected in Hollow Laughter and The Doomsdeath Chronicles, and his only published novel was The Raging (1987).

Prolific British SF author, professional research chemist and astronomer John [Stephen] Glasby died of complications from a fall the same day, aged eighty-three. His first novel appeared in 1952 and, while working for ICI, over the next two decades he produced more than 300 novels and short stories in all genres, most of them published pseudonymously (under such shared bylines as “A.J. Merak”, “Victor La Salle”, “John E. Muller”, etc.) for the legendary Badger Books imprint. More recently, he published a new collection of ghost stories, The Substance of Shade (2003), the occult novel The Dark Destroyer (2005), and the SF novel Mystery of the Crater (2010). Glasby also wrote four novels continuing the late John Russell Fearn’s “Golden Amazon” series, and his short fiction was anthologized by, amongst others, Richard Dalby, Robert M. Price, Philip Harbottle and Stephen Jones.

American writer and bookseller Malcolm M. (Magoun) Ferguson died on 11 June following hip surgery. He was ninety-one. Between 1946 and 1950 he had five stories published in Weird Tales, and he was also a regular contributor to The Arkham Sampler. Ferguson was also an antiquarian bookseller, and his own collection reportedly contained around 30,000 volumes.

American scriptwriter David Rayfiel died of congestive heart failure on 22 June, aged eighty-seven. His credits include the allegorical war film Castle Keep (1969), Lipstick, Death Watch (based on the novel by David Compton) and two episodes of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery (“She’ll Be Company for You” and “Whisper”). Rayfiel was married to actress Maureen Stapleton from 1963–66.

American comics artist Gene Colon (Eugene Jules Colan) died of complications from a broken hip and liver disease on 23 June. He was eighty-four. Colan began his career in comics in 1944, but he is best remembered for his work for Marvel Comics on such titles as Daredevil, Captain America, Doctor Strange, The Avengers, Howard the Duck, Dracula Lives and The Tomb of Dracula. With Stan Lee he created the “Falcoln”, the first African-American superhero in mainstream comics, and also vampire-hunter “Blade”, whose exploits were adapted into a series of films and a TV series. During the 1980s the artist also worked at DC Comics on such titles as Batman and Detective Comics, along with Wonder Woman, Spectre, Elvira’s House of Mystery and the movie tie-in of Little Shop of Horrors.

American music composer and orchestrator Fred (Frederick) Steiner, who wrote the memorable theme for TV’s Perry Mason, died the same day in Mexico, aged eighty-eight. The son of noted film composer George Steiner, he worked (often uncredited) on Run for the Sun, The Colossus of New York, Teenagers from Outer Space, Snow White and the Three Stooges, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, The Greatest Story Ever Told, Project X, Return of the Jedi, Cloak & Dagger and Gremlins 2: The New Batch, along with episodes of The Twilight Zone, The Wild Wild West and the original Star Trek.

Prolific anthologist, packager and author Martin H. (Harry) Greenberg died on 25 June after a long battle with cancer. He was 70. Greenberg — who used his middle initial to differentiate himself from Gnome Press publisher Martin Greenberg — worked on more than 1,000 anthologies in all genres, many of them published through his own Tekno Books business. His first anthology, Political Science Fiction (co-edited with Patricia Warrick), appeared in 1974, and his other collaborators included Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Arthur C. Clarke, Peter Crowther, Ed Gorman, Andre Norton, Frederik Pohl, Robert Silverberg, Robert Weinberg and numerous others. Greenberg won the Milford Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1989 and the Life Achievement Award from the Horror Writers Association in 2004.

Belgian SF and crime author, anthology editor and comics historian Thierry Martens (aka “Yves Varende”) died on 27 June, aged sixty-nine. He also edited the comic Journal de Spirou.

British novelist, poet and short story writer Francis [Henry] King CBE died on 3 July, aged eighty-eight. Three of his early novels were published by Herbert van Thal, who also included King’s story “School Crossing” in The 20th Pan Book of Horror Stories.

American author Theodore Roszak, best known for his 1991 novel Flicker, died of liver cancer on 5 July, aged seventy-seven. Among his other novels are Pontifex, Bugs, Dreamwatcher, The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein and The Devil and Daniel Silverman. A professor emeritus of history at Cal State East Bay, his scholarly works include the ground-breaking study The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society (1969).

Japanese anime artist Shinji Wada (Yoshifumi Iwamoto) died of ischaemic heart disease the same day, aged sixty-one. He was best known for creating the Sukeban Deka franchise in 1979, which was turned into TV series and movies.

Veteran American comedy TV writer and producer Sherwood [Charles] Schwartz died on 12 July, aged ninety-four. Best known for creating such shows as Gilligan’s Island, It’s About Time and The Brady Bruch, he also co-scripted the 1983 TV movie The Invisible Woman.

Philip J. Rahman, one half of the publishing imprint Fedogan & Bremer, took his own life on 23 July, aged fifty-nine. He had been in declining health for some years and suffering personal difficulties. F&B was set up in the late 1980s by Rahman and Dennis Weiler (who named the imprint after nicknames they had in college — Weiler was “Fedogan” and Rahman was “Bremer”) to produce the kind of books they no longer felt Arkham House was publishing. Following an audio version of H. P. Lovecraft’s Fungi from Yuggoth, the first F&B book title was Colossus: The Collected Science Fiction of Donald Wandrei, and they went on to publish collections and novels by Robert Bloch, Hugh B. Cave, Howard Wandrei, Carl Jacobi, Basil Copper, Karl Edward Wagner, Richard L. Tierney, Brian Lumley, R. Chetwynd-Hayes, Richard A. Lupoff and Adam Niswander, along with anthologies edited by Robert M. Price and Stephen Jones. The imprint won the World Fantasy Award — Non-Professional, and many of the titles it published were also award winners or nominees.

Cryonics advocate Robert C. (Chester) W. (Wilson) Ettinger, who wrote a number of non-fiction books about extending life through cryonic freezing, died the same day, aged ninety-two. He also published some SF stories, beginning with “The Penultimate Trump” in Startling Stories (1948). Not surprisingly, his body was cryopreserved at the Cryonics Institute, which he founded in 1976.

Eighty-year-old Japanese SF writer Sakyo Komatsu (Minoru Komatsu), best known for his 1973 disaster novel Nippon Chinbotsu (Japan Sinks, filmed in 1974 and 2006), died of pneumonia on 26 July. He was also a prolific writer of short stories, articles and anime scripts.

Best-selling urban fantasy and paranormal romance writer L. A. Banks (Leslie Esdaile Banks) died of a rare form of adrenal cancer on 2 August, aged fifty-one. The author of more than forty books since her debut in 1996, her popular “Vampire Huntress Legends” series began in 2003 with Minion and continued with The Awakening, The Hunted, The Bitten, The Forbidden, The Damned, The Forsaken, The Wicked, The Cursed, The Darkness, The Shadows and The Thirteenth. She also wrote the “Crimson Moon” werewolf series, comprising Bad Blood (2008), Bite the Bullet, Undead on Arrival, Cursed to Death, Never Cry Werewolf and Left for Dead. Surrender the Dark and Conquer the Dark were the first two books in a new series about angels. Banks also wrote romance, crime and media tie-ins under various pseudonyms.

American children’s and young adult author William Sleator (William Warner Sleator III) died in Thailand the same day, aged sixty-six. His more than thirty books include The Angry Moon, Blackbriar, House of Stairs, Fingers, Interstellar Pig, Singularity, The Duplicate, The Boy Who Reversed Himself, Rewind, The Boy Who Couldn’t Die and The Phantom Limb. Sleator was also an accomplished pianist, playing for a number of ballet schools.

American comics writer and editor Del Connell died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease on 12 August, aged ninety-three. He started out as a character sculptor for the Walt Disney Studio in 1939, where he worked on the stories for The Three Caballeros and Alice in Wonderland (1951). After moving to Western Publishing’s Dell Comics in 1954, he wrote thousands of comics (usually uncredited), including Space Family Robinson (which was turned into the TV series Lost in Space) and numerous Disney titles. For more than twenty years Connell also wrote the daily and Sunday Mickey Mouse newspaper strip.

Fifty-year-old British fantasy and SF author Colin Harvey died on 15 August, having suffered a massive stroke the day before. His novels include Vengeance, Lightning Days, The Silk Palace, Blind Faith, Winter Song and Damage Time, and his stories appeared in such magazines and anthologies as Albedo One, Interzone, Apex, Daily Science Fiction, Fearology and Gothic.net. His short fiction was collected in Displacement, and he also edited the anthologies Killers, Future Bristol, Dark Spires and Transtories. While working for Unilever, Harvey helped launch Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream in Iceland.

British artist John Holmes, best known for his iconic cover for Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970), died on 17 August, aged seventy-six. His other credits include the cover of Peter Benchley’s Jaws, the Ballentine editions of H. P. Lovecraft, the Peter Haining anthologies The Evil People and The Midnight People, plus reissues of Pan’s two volumes of The Hammer Horror Omnibus and various editions of The Fontana Book of Horror edited by Mary Danby.

Veteran Hammer scriptwriter, producer and director Jimmy Sangster (James Henry Kimmel Sangster, aka “John Sansom”) died on 19 August, aged eighty-three. He began his career at the studio as an assistant director on Man in Black, Dick Barton Strikes Back, Room to Let, Stolen Face and Spaceways. However, starting as a scriptwriter with X: The Unknown in 1956, Sangster was responsible (with director Terrence Fisher and others) for ushering the Hammer House of Horror era with The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula (aka Horror of Dracula), The Revenge of Frankenstein, The Snorkel, The Man Who Could Cheat Death, The Mummy (1959), The Brides of Dracula, The Terror of the Tongs, Taste of Fear, Paranoiac, Maniac, Nightmare, Hysteria, The Nanny, Dracula Prince of Darkness, The Anniversary and Crescendo. For Hammer he also directed The Horror of Frankenstein, Lust for a Vampire and Fear in the Night, and he novelised a number of his screenplays. Sangster worked for other production companies, and his film credits also include Blood of the Vampire, The Trollenberg Terror (aka The Crawling Eye), Jack the Ripper (1959), The Hellfire Club, Deadlier Than the Male, A Taste of Evil, Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? Scream Pretty Peggy, Maneater, Good Against Evil, The Legacy, The Billion Dollar Threat, Phobia, Once Upon a Spy, Disney’s The Devil and Max Devlin and Flashback — Mörderisc Ferien. During the 1970s he wrote numerous scripts for American TV shows, including Ghost Story, The Six Million Dollar Man, Kolchak: The Night Stalker and Wonder Woman. His autobiography, Do You Want it Good or Tuesday? was published in 1997.

Sixty-three-year-old American bookseller Bill Trojan (William T. Trojan) died of a massive heart attack in his hotel room on 21 August, the final day of Renovation, the 2011 World Science Fiction Convention in Reno, Nevada. He had been suffering with health problems for several years. Trojan was one of the chairs of the 1996 World Horror Convention in Eugene, Oregon, and was a major financial supporter of Pulphouse Publishing in the late 1980s.

Fifty-nine-year-old American SF fan Dan Hoey, who chaired the 1995 Disclave convention in Washington DC, committed suicide on 31 August.

American journalist and cartoonist Bill Kunkel (William Henry Patrick Kunkel), who co-created Electronic Games, the first video and computer game magazine, died of an apparent heart attack on 4 September, aged sixty-one. He also wrote comic books for Marvel and DC Comics and created video games.

Digital publishing pioneer Michael S. (Stern) Heart, the founder of Project Gutenberg, the world’s oldest digital library, died of a heart attack on 6 September, aged sixty-four. He is often credited as the “creator” of the ebook, having made an electronic copy of the American Declaration of Independence available for download at the University of Illinois in Urbana in 1971.

Former US Army soldier and shipyard worker Charles E. Hickson died of a heart attack on 9 September, aged eighty. On 11 October, 1973, Hickson and another man were fishing off the west bank of the Pascagoula River, Mississippi, when they claimed they were abducted by aliens. This became known as the “Pascagoula Abduction”. Hickson appeared in the 1978 feature documentary, The Force Beyond, and in 1983 he wrote a book about his experience, UFO Contact in Pascagoula.

American comics artist Jack Adler died on 18 September, aged ninety-four. He was a staff member of DC Comics’ production department from 1946 to 1981, working as a cover artist and colourist on such titles as Sea Devils, Green Lantern and G.I. Combat.

American horror short fiction writer and editor Mark W. (Whitney) Worthen died on 19 September, aged forty-nine. He created the online magazine Blood Rose (1998–2005) and co-edited Desolate Souls, the souvenir anthology of the 2008 World Horror Convention, with his second wife, Jeannie Eddy (aka “J. P. Edwards”). Worthen was closely involved with the Horror Writers Association, as both a webmaster and co-chair of the awards committee. He received the HWA’s Richard Laymon President’s Award for Services in 2007.

Eighty-nine-year-old British author John [Frederick] Burke died on 21 September following a fall in his home. He became a SF fan in the 1930s, writing letters to Weird Tales and founding the early UK fanzine The Satellite with David McIlwain (aka “Charles Eric Maine”). Sam Youd (aka “John Christopher”) was also a regular contributor to the magazine. Burke’s short stories appeared in Authentic Science Fiction, Science Fantasy, Nebula, New Worlds, the 6th and 9th Pan Book of Horror Stories, Tandem Horror Three, the 6th and 8th Ghost Book, New Terrors 2, After Midnight, Scare Care, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Nine, Don’t Turn Out the Light, Brighton Shock! and many other magazines and anthologies. His first novel, published in 1949, won an Atlantic Award in Literature from the Rockefeller Foundation, and he worked for Museum Press before becoming European story editor for 20th Century-Fox Productions in 1963. Best known for his 1970s trilogy of novels featuring psychic investigator “Dr Caspian” (The Devil’s Footsteps, The Black Charade and Ladygrove), he wrote more than 150 books (under his own name and a variety of pseudonyms), many of them film and TV novelisations, including the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night, Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, The Hammer Horror Film Omnibus, The Second Hammer Horror Film Omnibus, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Privilege, Moon Zero Two and two tie-ins to Gerry Anderson’s U.F.O. (as “Robert Miall”). Burke also edited three anthologies for Pan Books (Tales of Unease, More Tales of Unease and New Tales of Unease), and some of his best short stories are collected in We’ve Been Waiting for You, edited by Nicholas Royle for Ash-Tree Press. A new macabre collection, Murder, Mystery and Magic, and a new SF collection, The Old Man of the Stars, were published in 2011, and he had completed a new horror novel, The Nightmare Whisperers, shortly before he died. Burke also scripted the 1967 Boris Karloff movie The Sorcerers, but only received credit for the original idea.

Best-selling Australian fantasy author Sara Douglass (Sara Mary Warneke) died of ovarian cancer on 26 September, aged fifty-four. Best known for the “Wayfarer Redemption” series, which began in 1995 with the best-seller BattleAxe and continued with Enchanter, Starman, Sinner, Pilgrim and Crusader, her other series include the “Crucible” trilogy, “Darkglass Mountain” and “Troy Game”. Douglass also wrote Beyond the Hanging Wall, Threshold and The Devil’s Diadem, and some of her short stories were collected in The Hall of Lost Footsteps.

American playwright and screenwriter David Z. (Zelag) Goodman died of progressive supranuclear palsy the same day, aged eighty-one. His credits include Hammer’s The Stranglers of Bombay, Straw Dogs, Man on a Swing, Logan’s Run and Eyes of Laura Mars.

Italian comics writer and publisher Sergio Bonelli also died on 26 September, aged seventy-nine. His Sergio Bonelli Editore imprint published the psychic-investigator title Dylan Dog.

Italian editor and writer Vittorio Curtoni died of a heart attack on 4 October, aged sixty-two. He had been suffering from cancer. Between 1970–75 he co-edited the Galassia paperback line, founded the Italian SF magazine Robot in 1976 and translated more than 300 novels. Curtoni’s own short stories were collected in Bianco su nero (White on Black) and he wrote the novel Dove stiamo volando (Where Are We Flying To).

American lawyer and civil rights activist Derrick Bell (Derrick Albert Bell, Jr.) died of carcinoid cancer on 5 October, aged eighty. His SF story “The Space Traders” was adapted by HBO for the 1994 anthology TV show Cosmic Slop.

British author Jack D. Shackleford died of lung cancer on 13 October, aged seventy-three. A former professional heavyweight boxer, professional cricketer, folk-singer and practising traditional witch, he wrote the novels Tanith (1970), The Strickland Demon (1977) and The House of the Magus (1979), and he had a short story in The 17th Pan Book of Horror Stories.

Veteran American comic book writer Alvin Schwartz, who is credited for inventing the “Bizarro World” concept in Superman, died of heart-related problems in Canada on 28 October, aged ninety-five. He also scripted copies of Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash and House of Mystery. Schwartz wrote the newspaper strips for a number of DC Comics heroes and worked on rival Fawcett’s Captain Marvel.

Comic book writer, artist and editor Mick Anglo (Maurice Anglowitz), the creator of British superhero “Marvelman”, died on 31 October, aged ninety-five. Over the years he re-vamped the character (and often the same artwork) as “Captain Universe”, “Captain Miracle” and Miracle Man”. Anglo produced a 1966 hardcover annual for TV’s The Avengers; the short-lived mid-1960s comics Fantasy Stories, Macabre Stories, Spectre Stories and Strange Stories for John Spencer & Co., and he also illustrated the tie-in strips “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea” and “Green Hornet” for TV Tornado, which he edited.

American author, journalist and musician Les Daniels (Leslie Noel Daniels, III) died of a heart attack on 5 November, aged sixty-eight. Best known for his centuries-spanning series of books about the vampire Don Sebastian de Villanueva (The Black Castle, The Silver Skull, Citizen Vampire, Yellow Fog and No Blood Spilled), he was also the author of the non-fiction study Living in Fear: A History of Horror in the Mass Media and edited the anthology Dying of Fright: Masterpieces of the Macabre, illustrated by the Lee Brown Coye. Daniels was also an authority on comic books, and he wrote Comix: A History of Comic Books in America (1971) and definitive guides to Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, along with authoritative histories of Marvel and DC Comics. His short fiction appeared in such anthologies as Best New Horror 4, Dark Voices 4 and 5, and Dark Terrors 5.

Hollywood screenwriter, producer and director Hal Kanter died of pneumonia on 6 November, aged ninety-two. He was the son of Albert L. Kanter, who founded the Classic Comics (later Classics Illustrated) line in 1941. Kanter wrote the screenplays for such Bob Hope comedies as My Favorite Spy, Road to Bali, Here Come the Girls and Casanova’s Big Night, and in 1953 he began regularly scripting the Annual Academy Awards show.

American composer, bandleader and trumpeter Russell Garcia, who composed the music scores for the George Pal productions The Time Machine (1960) and Atlantis the Lost Continent, died of cancer in New Zealand on 20 November, aged ninety-five.

American science fiction author Anne [Inez] McCaffrey died of a massive stroke at her home in Ireland on 21 November, aged eighty-five. She began her writing career in 1953, and is best known for her best-selling “Pern” series, which began with the “fix-up” novel Dragonflight in 1968 and continued for more than twenty further volumes, with later titles co-written with her son, Todd McCaffrey. Her more than 100 books also include the “Talents”, “Doona”, “Dinosaur Planet”, “Killashandra” and “Catteni” series, along with such stand-alone novels as The Mark of Merlin, The Coelura, Nimisha’s Ship and Catalyst. McCaffrey’s short fiction is collected in The Ship Who Sang and Get Off the Unicorn, she edited two anthologies and wrote two cookbooks, while Dragonholder (1999) is a biography written by her son. She was the first woman to win both the Nebula and Hugo Awards, and her “Pern” book The White Dragon (1978) was the first SF novel to appear on the New York Times bestseller list. She was also a recipient of the British Fantasy Society’s Karl Edward Wagner Award, and was named a SFWA Grand Master in 2005.

Robert E. Briney (Robert Edward “Bob” Briney, Jr.), an expert on Sax Rohmer and mystery and supernatural fiction, died on 25 November, aged seventy-seven. A co-founder of the Advent: Publishing imprint in 1956, he edited the 1953 anthology Shanadu and also contributed a novella under the pseudonym “Andrew Duane” (written with Brian J. McNaughton). Briney edited the 1972 reference book SF Bibliographies: An Annotated Bibliography of Bibliographical Works on Science Fiction and Fantasy Fiction along with eighteen issues of The Rohmer Review (1970–83).

Japanese anime artist and director Shingo Araki died on 1 December, aged seventy-two. Among his credits are Ulysses 31, Inspector Gadget and The Mighty Orbots.

Sixty-three-year-old American fanzine publisher Bob Sabella died of an inoperable brain tumour on 3 December. He edited 170 issues of Visions of Paradise and wrote the 2000 study Who Shaped Science Fiction?

American artist Darrell K. (Kinsman) Sweet died on 5 December, aged seventy-seven. Best known for his work with such imprints as Ballantine Books and Del Rey in the 1970s, he produced the cover art for Robert Jordan’s “Wheels of Time” series, Stephen R. Donaldson’s “Chronicles of Thomas Covenant” series, and Piers Anthony’s “Xanth” series. His artwork was collected in Beyond Fantasy: The Art of Darrell K. Sweet (1997).

American comic book artist and historian Jerry Robinson died in his sleep on 7 December, aged eighty-nine. Originally hired as an inker at the age of seventeen by “Batman” creator Bob Kane, Robinson went on to co-create “Robin, the Boy Wonder” and was a primary influence on the creation of the duo’s arch-nemesis “The Joker” (modelled after Conrad Veidt in the 1928 movie The Man Who Laughs), “Two-Face” and Bruce Wayne’s butler, “Alfred Pennyworth”. In later years he moved into newspaper comic strips and became an advocate for the rights of artists. Robinson’s 1974 book, The Comics, was one of the first books about newspaper strips.

Scottish writer, critic and translator Gilbert Adair died on 8 December, aged sixty-six. In the 1980s he wrote the children’s sequels Alice Through the Needle’s Eye and Peter Pan and the Only Children.

British fantasy author Euan Harvey died of cancer on 9 December, aged thirty-eight. He began his writing career in 2007 and sold eight stories to Realms of Fantasy magazine.

French SF author Louis Thirion died the same day, aged eighty-eight. He published more than thirty novels, starting in 1964 with Waterloo, morne plaine. He also contributed several scripts to the radio series Théâtre de l’Étrange.

American-born author and illustrator Russell [Conwell] Hoban, best known for his post-holocaust novel Riddley Walker (1980), died of congestive heart failure in London on 13 December, aged eighty-six. He began publishing in 1959, and produced more than twenty titles for children and adults, including Pilgerman, The Medusa Frequency, Turtle Diary, The Mouse and His Child and the “Frances the Badger” series.

American SF author and medical doctor T. J. Bass (Thomas J. Bassler) died in Honoloulu the same day, aged seventy-nine. Starting in 1968, he had a number of stories published in If and Galaxy magazines, and his linked novels Half Past Human (1971) and The Godwhale (1974) were both nominated for Nebula Awards.

Legendary comic book creator Joe Simon (Hymie Simon, aka Joseph Henry “Joe” Simon) died after a brief illness on 14 December, aged ninety-eight. He created (with Jack Kirby) such characters as Captain America, the Newsboy Legion, the Boy Commandos, Manhunter, Fighting American and the Fly. The duo also worked on Adventure Comics, Detective Comics, Sandman and numerous other titles in all genres, including the horror comics Black Magic and The Strange World of Your Dreams. Titan Books recently published the huge retrospective volume of their work, The Best of Simon and Kirby, along with the autobiographical work Joe Simon: My Life in Comics.

Fifty-year-old Italian fantasy and horror author and magazine editor Gianluca Casseri, known for his extreme right-wing views, killed himself the same day after shooting dead two Senegalese street traders and wounding three others in Florence.

French SF and espionage author Richard Bessiere died on 22 December, aged eighty-eight. His first science fiction series, “Conquérants de l’universe” (1951–54), was followed by a number of stand-alone SF/horror novels, including Les maîtres du silence and Cette lueur qui venait des ténèbres, along with a series about a futuristic James Bond named “Dan Seymour”.

American SF fan, book dealer and collector James L. “Rusty” Hevelin died on 27 December, aged eighty-nine. Instantly recognisable from his Gandalf-style beard, he edited such fanzines as Aliquot, H-1661 and Badly, and was Fan Guest of Honour at the 1981 World Science Fiction Convention.

Ninety-one-year-old British illustrator Ronald [William Fordham] Searle CBE, whose famous St. Trinian’s cartoons often rivalled those of Charles Addams for macabre humour, died after a short illness at his home in the south of France on 30 December. Besides the St. Trinian’s titles, his many other books include Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (1961), James Thurber’s The 13 Clocks and the Wonderful O, Scrooge (1970), Dick Deadeye (filmed in 1975), Marquis de Sade Meets Goody Two-Shoes and Something in the Cellar.

American agent, editor and publisher Glenn [Richard] Lord, best known for his work as agent for the Robert E. Howard Estate, died on 31 December, aged eighty. He edited The Howard Collector magazine from 1961–73, and the 1979 compilation The Howard Collector: By and About Robert E. Howard. His non-fiction volumes include the still-indispensable The Last Celt: A Bio-Bibliography of Robert Ervin Howard and two volumes of Robert E. Howard: Selected Letters. Lord received a World Fantasy Special Convention Award in 1978.

PERFORMERS/PERSONALITIES

Dependable British character actor Pete Postlethwaite OBE (Peter William Postlethwaite) died in his sleep after a long battle with cancer on 2 January, aged sixty-four. A former drama teacher, his credits include Split Second (1992), Alien³, The Usual Suspects, James and the Giant Peach, DragonHeart, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Alice in Wonderland (1999), Animal Farm (1999), Dark Water (2005), Æon Flux, The Omen (2006), Lamberto Bava’s Ghost Son, Solomon Kane, Clash of the Titans (2010) and Inception.

Hollywood leading lady Anne [Lloyd] Francis, who memorably starred as “Altaira” in the SF classic Forbidden Planet (1956), died of pancreatic cancer the same day, aged eighty. A former child model, she also appeared in the films Portrait of Jennie (uncredited), The Satan Bug, Brainstorm and the TV movies Haunts of the Very Rich and Mazes and Monsters. From 1965– 66 Francis portrayed the sexy private detective with a pet ocelot in ABC’s Honey West (a spin-off series from Burke’s Law) and she also appeared in episodes of Suspense, Lights Out, Climax! The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Invaders, Search Control, Wonder Woman, Fantasy Island (both the original series and 1990s revival) and Conan.

Early American talkies star Mirian Seegar also died on 2 January. She was 103 years old. Seegar’s credits include RKO’s 1929 version of Seven Keys to Baldpate. In the early 1930s she married director Tim Whelan and retired from the screen.

British-born actress [Valeria] Jill Haworth died in her sleep at her apartment in Manhattan on 3 January, aged sixty-five. The first actress to portray “Sally Bowles” in Cabaret on the Broadway stage, during the late 1960s and early ’70s she appeared in the British horror films It! The Haunted House of Horror (aka Horror House), Tower of Evil (aka Horror on Snape Island/Beyond the Fog) and The Mutations (aka The Freakmaker). Haworth was also in episodes of The Outer Limits (“The Sixth Finger”) and The Most Deadly Game (“Witches’ Sabbath”), along with the TV movie Home For the Holidays.

American actor Aron Kincaid (Norman Neale Williams II), who was in a number of “Beach Party” movies during the 1960s, died of heart-related complications on 6 January, aged seventy. He also appeared in Roger Corman’s The Wasp Woman, Dr Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (with Vincent Price), The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (with Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone), Creature of Destruction, Planet Earth, Brave New World, Silent Night Deadly Night and The Golden Child, along with episodes of TV’s Thriller, Get Smart, The New People, The Immortal and Mr Merlin. His voice-work in cartoons included playing “Killer Croc” on Batman: The Animated Series and “Sky Lynx” on Transformers. In later years Kincaid became a model and artist.

American TV actor John [Carroll] Dye, who starred as the celestial “Andrew” in CBS’ Touched by an Angel (1994–2003), died of a heart attack on 10 January, aged forty-seven. He was also in the fantasy TV movies Once Upon a Christmas and Twice Upon a Christmas.

American actor [Horace] Paul Picerni, a regular on TV’s The Untouchables (1959–63), died of a heart attack on 12 January, aged eighty-eight. He appeared in House of Wax (with Vincent Price), only the trailer for The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the last “Bomba the Jungle Boy” movie, Lord of the Jungle, and Capricorn One, along with episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Men Into Space, Batman, The Immortal, The Sixth Sense, Ghost Story, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Project U.F.O., Fantasy Island, The Incredible Hulk and The Powers of Matthew Star.

Susannah York (Susannah Yolande Fletcher) died on 14 January after a long battle with bone marrow cancer. She was seventy-two. The British actress and author starred in Jane Eyre (1970), Robert Altman’s Images (based on her own children’s book, In Search of Unicorns), The Shout, Superman (1978) and sequels II and IV (as the Man of Steel’s mother “Lara”), The Golden Gate Murders, The Awakening (based on The Jewel of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker), A Christmas Carol (1984), Daemon, Mio in the Land of Faraway (with Christopher Lee), Visitors and Franklyn. On TV she appeared in episodes of ITV Play of the Week (“The Crucible” with Sean Connery), Mystery and Imagination (“The Fall of the House of Usher” as “Madeleine Usher”), Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries (with Peter Cushing) and The Ray Bradbury Theatre.

Sixty-nine-year-old TV horror host Dr Creep (Barry Lee Hobart, aka “Dr Death”) died the same day, following a series of strokes. He hosted Shock Theater on Dayton, Ohio’s WKEF from 1972–85, and later on public-access TV between 1999–2005. The character also appeared in the shorts Joe Nosferatu: Homeless Vampire and Casting Bruce Campbell, along with the direct-to-DVD movie Necrophagia: Through Eyes of the Dead, and he was featured in the 2006 documentary American Scary. Hobart was the nephew of horror film make-up artist and stuntman Doug Hobart.

American actress Patti Gilbert (Patti Friedman) died on 15 January, aged seventy-nine. She played the wife of Victor Buono’s villainous “King Tut” in a 1967 episode of TV’s Batman, appeared in a couple of episodes of Get Smart and voiced “Princess of Sweet Rhyme” in The Phantom Tollbooth (1970).

Gruff American character actor Bruce Gordon, another regular on TV’s The Untouchables, died on 20 January, aged ninety-four. His credits include Roger Corman’s Curse of the Undead and Tower of London (1962), Hello Down There, Piranha (1978) and Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann, along with episodes of One Step Beyond, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. (“The Mother Muffin Affair” with Boris Karloff), The Flying Nun, Get Smart and Tarzan (1968). Gordon also appeared alongside Karloff in the long-running Broadway play Arsenic and Old Lace (1941–44).

American physical fitness guru Jack LaLanne (François Henri LaLanne) died of respiratory failure and pneumonia on 23 January, aged ninety-six. Along with his own TV show (1951– 85), he appeared in More Wild Wild West, Repossessed, The Year Without Santa Claus (as “Hercules”), and episodes of such 1960s TV shows as Mr Ed, The Addams Family and Batman.

American comedian Charlie Callas (Charles Callias), best remembered for his zany sound effects, died in Las Vegas on 27 January. He was eighty-three. A TV talk show favourite and “Rat Pack” associate, the rubber-faced Callas’ credits include such movies as The Snoop Sisters, Silent Movie, Disney’s Pete’s Dragon (as the voice of “Elliott”, the dragon), High Anxiety, History of the World: Part I, Hysterical (as “Dracula”), Amazon Women on the Moon, Vampire Vixens from Venus, Dracula Dead and Loving It and Horrorween, along with episodes of TV’s The Munsters, The Monkees, Legends of the Superheroes (as the voice of “Sinestro”), Silk Stalkings and A. J.’s Time Travelers.

TV character actor Michael Tolan (Seymour Tuchow) died of heart disease and kidney failure on 31 January, aged eighty-six. He appeared in episodes of Inner Sanctum, Diagnoses: Unknown (“The Curse of the Gypsy”), Play of the Week (“The Dybbuk”), The Outer Limits (“The Zanti Misfits”), Tarzan, The Invaders, Hammer’s Journey to the Unknown and Ghost Story.

Welsh-born TV character actress Margaret John died after a short illness on 2 February, aged eighty-four. She began her career in 1960 and appeared in episodes of Suspense, Mysteries and Miracles, Doctor Who (in 1968 and 2006), Menace, Doomwatch, Dead of Night, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, The Ghosts of Motley Hall, Blakes 7, Shadows, The Boy Merlin, Tardisodes, Being Human, and Game of Thrones. John also portrayed “Mrs Hudson” in the early 1990s TV movies Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady and Incident at Victoria Falls, both starring Christopher Lee as Holmes and Patrick Macnee as Dr Watson.

French actress Maria Schneider, best known for her role opposite Marlon Brando in Bernardo Bertolucci’s controversial Last Tango in Paris (1972), died of cancer on 3 February, aged fifty-eight. Her other film credits include Mama Dracula and Franco Zeffirelli’s 1996 version of Jane Eyre.

Japanese-born American actress, exotic dancer and martial arts expert Tura Satana (Tura Luna Pascual Yamaguchi), who starred in Russ Myer’s cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) died of heart failure on 4 February, aged seventy-two. She also appeared in Our Man Flint (uncredited), The Astro-Zombies, The Doll Squad, Mark of the Astro-Zombies, Astro-Zombies M3: Cloned and an episode each of TV’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.. Her life stories included being gang-raped when she was nine years old, first marrying at thirteen, posing for nude for photographs taken by silent screen comic Harold Lloyd, working as a stripper, turning down a marriage proposal from Elvis Presley, being shot by a former lover and breaking her back in a car accident.

American character actress Peggy Rea died of complication from congestive heart failure on 5 February, aged eighty-nine. She appeared in 7 Faces of Dr Lao, What’s the Matter with Helen? Lipstick, and episodes of TV’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Wild Wild West, The Immortal and Monsters.

J. Paul Getty, III, the grandson of oil magnate J. Paul Getty, died after a long illness the same day, aged fifty-four. After being kidnapped and held to ransom in Italy for four months in 1973, he appeared in the Portuguese horror film The Territory (aka O Território, 1981).

Hollywood character actress Myrna Dell (Marilyn Adele Dunlap) died on 11 February, aged eighty-six. While under contract to RKO Pictures she appeared in three Falcon movies, along with The Spiral Staircase (as an uncredited murder victim). The former showgirl was also in an episode of the Jungle Jim TV series and had a small role in an episode of Batman. Along with actress Marguerite Chapman, Dell is credited with originating the idea of autograph shows.

American character actor Kenneth Mars, best known for his comedy roles in Mel Brooks’ The Producers and Young Frankenstein (as the one-armed “Inspector Kemp”), died of pancreatic cancer on 12 February, aged seventy-five. His other film credits include Superman (1975), Full Moon High, Get Smart Again!, Disney’s The Little Mermaid and The Little Mermaid 2: Return to the Sea, Shadows and Fog, We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story, and as the voice of “Grandpa Longneck” in The Land Before Time sequels. He appeared in episodes of Get Smart, The Ghost & Mrs Muir, Wonder Woman, Tabitha, Project U.F.O., Supertrain, Tucker’s Witch, Misfits of Science, The Twilight Zone (1986), Shades of LA, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, M.A.N.T.I.S., The New Adventures of Superman, Weird Science and The Pretender. Mars also supplied voices for numerous cartoon shows, including The Jetsons, Challenge of the GoBots, The 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, Teen Wolf, The Flintstone Kids, A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, Duck Tales, Tiny Toon Adventures, Darkwing Duck, Captain Planet and the Planeteers, Animaniacs, The Little Mermaid, Batman (1994–95), Freakazoid! The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest, Godzilla: The Series, The Legend of Tarzan and The Land Before Time TV series.

Hollywood actress and singer Betty Garrett died the same day, aged ninety-one. Best know for her role as the man-hungry taxi driver in the classic musical On the Town (1949), later in her career she also appeared in an episode of the children’s TV show Mr Merlin, along with Larry Blamire’s low budget genre comedies Trail of the Screaming Forehead and Dark and Stormy Night. Garrett was married to actor Larry Parks from 1944 until his death in 1975. During the 1950s both their careers were derailed by the anti-Communist witch-hunts.

Irish character actor T. (Thomas) P. (Patrick) McKenna died in London after a long illness on 13 February, aged eighty-one. He always brought class to the roles he played in such movies as Tigon’s The Beast in the Cellar, Straw Dogs, Percy’s Progress (with Vincent Price), Britannia Hospital, The Doctor and the Devils and Jack the Ripper (1988). McKenna’s TV credits include The Avengers, Adam Adamant Lives! Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), BBC Play of the Month (“Rasputin”), Thriller, Nigel Kneale’s Beasts, Blakes 7 and Doctor Who.

British character actor Alfred Burke, who portrayed down-at-heel private eye “Frank Marker” in the popular TV series Public Eye (1965–75), died on 16 February, aged ninety-two. Although he appeared in such films as Children of the Damned, Hammer’s The Nanny, The Night Caller (aka Blood Beast from Outer Space), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1996) and Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Burke was much better known for his numerous appearances on TV in shows like Colonel March of Scotland Yard (starring Boris Karloff), Invisible Man (1959), One Step Beyond, The Indian Tales of Rudyard Kipling, The Avengers, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Tales of the Unexpected and Shades of Darkness.

American character actor Len Lesser (Leonard King Lesser) died of cancer-related pneumonia the same day, aged eighty-eight. Best known for playing “Uncle Leo” on Seinfeld (1991–98), Lesser appeared in such movies and TV shows as How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, Blood and Lace, Ruby, Someone’s Watching Me! Through the Magic Pyramid, Sorority Girls and the Creature from Hell, The Werewolf Reborn! Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, The Wild Wild West, The Munsters, My Favorite Martian, Get Smart, The Monkees, Land of the Giants, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The Ghost Busters, The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, The Amazing Spider-Man, Amazing Stories (“Mummy Daddy”) and Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

British actor Nicholas Courtney (William Nicholas Stone Courtney), best known for his recurring role as UNIT leader “Brigadier Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart” in BBC-TV’s Doctor Who, died on 22 February, aged eighty-one. The Egyptian-born actor first appeared in the show in a 1965 episode entitled “The Dalek’s Master Man”, but he became a semi-regular when he took over the role of the Brigadier (after actor David Langton pulled out) in the 1968 serial “The Web of Fear”. Courtney appeared in 107 episodes of Doctor Who and recreated the character of Lethbridge-Stewart in a number of short films, audio dramas, a video game and a 2008 two-part episode of The Sarah Jane Adventures. He also appeared in episodes of The Avengers, The Indian Tales of Rudyard Kipling, The Champions, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Doomwatch and The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, and had uncredited roles in the films The Brides of Fu Manchu, Doppelgänger (aka Journey to the Far Side of the Sun) and Endless Night. Courtney also portrayed “Inspector Lionhart” in four episodes of the radio drama The Scarifyers, broadcast on BBC Radio 7 (2007–10). His 1998 autobiography was entitled Five Rounds Rapid! after a line of dialogue he had as the Brigadier in “The Dæmons” (1971). A revised autobiography, Still Getting Away with It (co-written with Michael McManus), appeared in 2005.

American character actor Frank Alesia, who appeared in the AIP “Beach Party” movies Bikini Beach, Pajama Party, Beach Blanket Bingo and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, died on 27 February, aged sixty-five. He also appeared in episodes of Bewitched and The Flying Nun before becoming a TV director.

Hollywood star Jane Russell (Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell) died on 28 February, aged eighty-nine. A former dentist receptionist and discovery of Howard Hughes (who orchestrated her screen debut in his controversial 1943 Western The Outlaw), she mostly appeared in musical-comedies during the 1950s, including an uncredited cameo appearance in Road to Bali. In 1967 she had a small roll in the “Billy Jack” motorcycle exploitation movie The Born Losers. With the first of her three husbands, quarterback Bob Waterfield, she formed Russ-Field Productions, who produced The Most Dangerous Game remake, Run for the Sun (1956). During the 1970s Russell was the TV spokesperson for Playtex bras.

Former beauty queen turned actress Darlene Lucht (Darlene Brimmer), who was crowned Miss Wisconsin in 1961, died on 5 March, aged seventy-two. She had small roles in The Haunted Palace, Muscle Beach Party, Bikini Beach, Beach Blanket Bingo and Al Adamson’s Five Bloody Graves (as “Tara Ashton”), which starred her husband, Robert Dix.

Japanese voice actor Kan Tokumaru died on 6 March, aged sixty-nine. His many anime, TV and game credits include Vampire Hunter D, Legend of the Galactic Heroes and Vampire Savior EX Edition. In the Japanese dub of Live and Let Die (1973) he was the voice of “M”.

Distinguished British stage actor and iconic horror film star Michael Gough died on 17 March, aged ninety-three. Best known to modern audiences for his role as faithful butler “Alfred Pennyworth” in the 1980s–90s Batman films (Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever and Batman & Robin) and his later collaborations with director Tim Burton (Sleepy Hollow, Corpse Bride and Alice in Wonderland), the Malaysian-born Gough’s many other movies also include The Man in the White Suit, Hammer’s Dracula (aka Horror of Dracula) and The Phantom of the Opera (1962), Horrors of the Black Museum, Konga, What a Carve Up! (aka No Place Like Homicide!), Black Zoo, Dr Terror’s House of Horrors, The Skull, They Came from Beyond Space, Berserk, Curse of the Crimson Altar (aka The Crimson Cult), Trog, The Corpse (aka Crucible of Horror), Horror Hospital, The Legend of Hell House (uncredited), Satan’s Slave (aka Evil Heritage), The Boys from Brazil, Venom, A Christmas Carol (1984), Arthur the King (aka Merlin and the Sword), The Serpent and the Rainbow, Nostradamus and the TV movie The Haunting of Helen Walker (based on “Turn of the Screw” by Henry James). He also appeared in episodes of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Wednesday Play (“Alice in Wonderland”), Doctor Who, The Avengers (“The Cybernauts”), Hammer’s Journey to the Unknown, The Champions, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Moonbase 3, Blakes 7, The Little Vampire (1986–87) and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

American dancer and novelist Dorothy Young, who worked as an assistant to stage magician Harry Houdini from 1925–26, died on 20 March, aged 103. She made her debut as the futuristic “Radio Girl of 1950”, but left the act two months before the escapologist’s death on 31 October, 1926. Young was the last surviving member of Houdini’s touring show.

Legendary Hollywood star Dame Elizabeth [Rosemond] Taylor died of complications from congestive heart failure on 24 March, aged seventy-nine. She had been hospitalised for six weeks. Born to American parents in London, England, Taylor’s family relocated to Los Angeles in 1939 where, within a few years, she became a child star at MGM. In later years she developed into one of the screen’s most iconic figures, winning two Academy Awards for Best Actress. Her films include Jane Eyre (1943), Suddenly Last Summer, Doctor Faustus (1967), Hammersmith is Out, Night Watch, The Blue Bird (1976) and The Flintstones (1994). She also contributed voice work to the animated TV series Captain Planet and the Planeteers, The Simpsons and God, the Devil and Bob, and in later years became a spokesperson for AIDS research. Taylor was almost as well-known for her eight marriages as her movies, and her husbands included Michael Wilding, Michael Todd, Eddie Fisher and, most famously, Richard Burton (twice). It was revealed that the scheduled start time was delayed for almost fifteen minutes, after the actress left instructions that she wanted to be late for her own funeral.

American leading man Farley [Earle] Granger [II] died on 27 March, aged eighty-five. Best remembered for his roles in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and Strangers on a Train (1951), he also appeared in Behave Yourself! (with Lon Chaney, Jr.), Full House (“The Gift of the Magi”), Hans Christian Andersen, Something Creeping in the Dark (aka Qualcosa striscia nel buio), Amuck! (aka Hot Bed of Sex), So Sweet So Dead (aka Penetration), Arnold and The Prowler (aka Rosemary’s Killer), along with episodes of TV’s The United States Steel Hour (“The Bottle Imp”), Dow Hour of Great Mysteries (“The Inn of the Flying Dragon”), Get Smart, Wide World Mystery (“The Haunting of Penthouse D”), The Six Million Dollar Man, Matt Helm, The Invisible Man (1975), Tales from the Dark Side and Monsters. In 1980 Granger also starred on Broadway in Ira Levin’s Deathtrap.

American child actress and singer Donna Lee [O’Leary], who appeared in Val Lewton’s The Body Snatcher and Bedlam, both starring Boris Karloff, died on 3 April, aged eighty-one. She also appeared (uncredited) as a member of the Donna Lee Trio in the 1936 mystery thriller A Face in the Fog.

Angela [Margaret] Scoular, the second wife of actor Leslie Phillips, died on 11 April, aged sixty-five. The bi-polar and alcoholic British actress feared that her bowel cancer would return (despite a successful operation in 2009) and killed herself by drinking drain cleaner. Scoular appeared in two James Bond films, Casino Royale (1966) and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, an episode of The Avengers, and starred as “Cathy” opposite Ian McShane’s “Heathcliff” in a 1967 BBC-TV serial of Wuthering Heights (the inspiration for the Kate Bush song and video).

British character actor Trevor [Gordon] Bannister, best known for his role as “Mr Lucas” in the BBC sitcom Are You Being Served?, died of a heart attack while repairing his allotment shed on 14 April, aged seventy-six. He also appeared in such TV series as Object Z, Object Z Returns, The Man in Room 17 (“The Black Witch”), The Avengers, Doomwatch, The Tomorrow People, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and Woof!.

American actor Jon Cedar died the same day, aged eighty. He appeared in episodes of TV’s The Girl from U.N.C.L.E., The Invisible Man (1975), The Incredible Hulk, The Greatest American Hero and Tales from the Darkside, along with the movies Stowaway to the Moon (with John Carradine), Time Travelers (1976), Day of the Animals, Capricorn One, The Manitou (based on the novel by Graham Masterton), By Dawn’s Early Light and Asteroid.

Canadian-born leading man Michael Sarrazin (Jacques Michel André Sarrazin) died in Montreal of cancer on 17 April, aged seventy. He starred in Eye of the Cat, The Groundstar Conspiracy, Frankenstein the True Story (as “The Creature”), The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, Earthquake in New York, The Second Arrival (aka Arrival II) and FeardotCom, and appeared in episodes of the 1988 Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Ray Bradbury Theatre, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Outer Limits, Poltergeist: The Legacy, Mentors (as Edgar Allan Poe) and Earth: Final Conflict. Sarrazin was in a relationship with actress Jacqueline Bisset for fourteen years.

British actress Elisabeth [Claira Heath] Sladen, who starred as “Sarah Jane Smith” in the BBC’s Doctor Who and her own spin-off series, died of cancer on 19 April, aged sixty-five. She first joined John Pertwee’s Doctor in the 1973 series “The Time Warrior”, and went on to appear alongside Tom Baker’s incarnation of the Time Lord until 1976. She recreated the role for the TV specials K-9 and Company: A Girl’s Best Friend (1981), Doctor Who: “The Five Doctors” (1983) and Doctor Who: “Dimensions in Time” (1993), along with the independent video, Downtime (1995), and various radio serials. She returned to Doctor Who as the inquisitive journalist in 2006 and subsequently got her own children’s spin-off series, The Sarah Jane Adventures (2007–11). Sladen also appeared in the TV movies Gulliver in Lilliput (1982) and Alice in Wonderland (1986), as well as an episode of Doomwatch.

British character actor Terence Longdon (Hubert Tuelly Longdon) died of cancer on 23 April, aged eighty-eight. He appeared in the first four Carry On films, along with What a Whopper, The Return of Mr Moto, and episodes of The Avengers, The New Avengers, The Martian Chronicles and The Return of Sherlock Holmes. Longdon also starred as the titular charter pilot in the BBC children’s adventure series Garry Halliday (1959–62). He was married to actress Barbara Jefford from 1953 to 1960.

Sixty-six-year-old French actress, novelist and director Marie-France Pisier was found dead in the swimming pool at her home in Saint Cyr sur Mer on 24 April. Born in French Indochina (now Vietnam), her credits include The Vampire of Dusseldorf (1965), Luis Buñuel’s surreal The Phantom of Liberty and Céline and Julie Go Boating.

Cult American B-movie star Yvette Vickers (Iola Yvette Vedder) was found dead from heart failure in an upstairs room of her dilapidated Bendedict Canyon home in Los Angeles on 27 April. The mummified state of the eighty-one-year-old actress’ body indicated that she could have been dead for nearly a year. The July 1959 Playboy Playmate appeared in Sunset Boulevard (uncredited), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), Attack of the Giant Leeches (aka Demons of the Swamp), Beach Party (uncredited), What’s the Matter with Helen? The Dead Don’t Die! (scripted by Robert Bloch) and Evil Spirits, along with an episode of TV’s One Step Beyond.

William Campbell, who portrayed Klingon commander “Koloth” in the classic Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”, died on 28 April, aged eighty-seven. He appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dementia 13 (aka The Haunted and the Hunted), Hush. Hush Sweet Charlotte, Portrait in Terror, Blood Bath (aka Track of the Vampire), Pretty Maids All in a Row and The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman, along with episodes of TV’s The Wild Wild West, Star Trek (“The Squire of Gothos”), Shazam! The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, The Next Step Beyond, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (reprising his role as “Koloth”) and Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. From 1952 to 1958 he was married to Judith Campbell Exner, a paramour of President John F. Kennedy and Mafia figure Sam Giancana.

Veteran Hollywood character actor and director Jackie Cooper (John Copper, Jr.) died after a short illness on 3 May, aged eighty-eight. He began his career as a child actor in 1929, and is best known for portraying Daily Planet newspaper editor “Perry White” in Superman (1978) and its three sequels. He was nominated for an Oscar in 1931 when he was just nine years old, and his other credits include Chosen Survivors, The Invisible Man (1975) and episodes of TV’s Tales of Tomorrow, Suspense, The Twilight Zone and Ghost Story. Cooper was also an Emmy Award-winning director, with the Holmes and Yo-Yo pilot and the TV movie The Night They Saved Christmas to his credit.

American actress Mary Murphy, who co-starred with Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953), died of heart disease on 4 May, aged eighty. A former shop assistant, she began her acting career with uncredited appearances in When Worlds Collide, My Favorite Spy and The Atomic City, before moving on to such films as The Mad Magician (with Vincent Price) and episodes of TV’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, Honey West and Ghost Story. In 1956 she was married to actor Dale Robertson for just three months.

German-born actress Dana Wynter (Dagmar Winter), who helped Kevin McCarthy battle the pod people in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), died of congestive heart failure in California on 5 May, aged seventy-nine. Her other credits include the Gene Roddenberry TV movie The Questor Tapes and episodes of Suspense, Colonel March of Scotland Yard (with Boris Karloff), The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Wild Wild West, The Invaders, Get Smart, Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries and Fantasy Island.

Rugged American character actor Ross Hagen (Leland Lando Lilly) died of prostate cancer on 7 May, aged seventy-two. His films include Wonder Women, Night Creature (with Donald Pleasence), Angel, Avenging Angel, Prison Ship (aka Star Slammer), Warlords, B.O.R.N. (which he also co-scripted and directed), The Phantom Empire, Alienator, Time Wars (which he also wrote and directed), Dinosaur Island, Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfolds, Bikini Drive-In, Cyberzone (aka Phoenix 2), Night Shade, The Elf Who Didn’t Believe, Invisible Dad, Jungle Boy, The Kid with X-ray Eyes and Sideshow, along with episodes of Captain Nice, The Wild Wild West, The Invaders and Kung Fu. Hagen made around twenty films with director Fred Olen Ray, and he also directed Reel Terror (1985) featuring footage of John Carradine and Victor Buono.

Dolores Fuller (Dolores Agnes Eble), who was director Edward D. Wood, Jr.’s muse and leading lady in such cult classics as Glen or Glenda (aka I Led Two Lives), Jail Bait and Bride of the Monster, died after a long illness on 9 May, aged eighty-eight. Her other films include Mesa of Lost Women, The Ironbound Vampire and The Corpse Grinders 2, along with an episode of TV’s Adventures of Superman. As a lyricist, Fuller also co-wrote thirteen songs for Elvis Presley, including “Rock-a-Hula Baby” for the film Blue Hawaii. Her autobiography, A Fuller Life: Hollywood, Ed Wood and Me (co-written with Stone Wallace and her husband, Philip Chamberlin) was published in 2008. Sarah Jessica Parker portrayed Fuller in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994).

British character actor Edward [Cedric] Hardwicke, the son of actor Sir Cedric Hardwicke, died of cancer on 16 May, aged seventy-eight. Following the departure of David Burke, in 1986 he took over the role of “Dr John Watson” opposite Jeremy Brett’s consulting detective in the series The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1968–88), The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1991–93), The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1994) and the TV movies The Sign of Four (1987) and The Hound of the Baskervilles (1988). He also recreated the role on the West End stage in The Secret of Sherlock Holmes in 1989. Hardwicke began his career as a child actor, and his other films include A Guy Named Joe (uncredited), Full Circle (aka The Haunting of Julia), Venom, Disney’s Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend, Photographing Fairies (as “Sir Arthur Conan Doyle”), Shadowlands, Appetite, The Alchemists (based on the novel by Peter James) and yet another remake She (2001), plus episodes of TV’s Invisible Man (1959), Sherlock Holmes (1968), Hammer’s Journey to the Unknown, Wessex Tales, Thriller (1974) and Supernatural (“The Werewolf Reunion”).

Veteran Australian actor Bill Hunter died of cancer on 21 May, aged seventy-one. His credits include The Return of Captain Invincible (with Christopher Lee), Moby Dick (1998) and On the Beach (2000), along with episodes of Space: Above and Beyond and Two Twisted (“Arkham’s Curios and Wonders”). Hunter also contributed voice work to Disney’s Finding Nemo and Legends of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole.

American actress Tallie Cochrane (Lillian Rose Cochrane) died of cancer the same day, aged sixty-six. Under various pseudonyms, such as “Toni Talley”, “Viola Reeves”, “Dandy Thomas”, “Chic Jones”, “Talie Wright” and “Silver Foxx”, she appeared in a number of sexploitation films, including Wam Bang Thank You Spaceman, Tarz & Jane Cheeta & Boy and Devil’s Ecstasy. She also had small roles in Slapstick (of Another Kind) and Frightmare (aka The Horror Star). Cochrane worked as a make-up artist on Track of the Moon Beast.

Sixty-year-old American actor Jeff Conaway (Jeffrey Charles William Michael Conaway) died of pneumonia exacerbated by substance abuse on 27 May. Having battled drug and alcohol addiction since he was a teenager, Conaway was found unconscious at his home sixteen days earlier and remained in a medically induced coma until his family terminated his life-support. He appeared in Disney’s Pete’s Dragon, Bay Coven, Elvira: Mistress of the Dark, Ghost Writer, The Sleeping Car, Mirror Images, Alien Intruder and Curse of the Forty-Niner. On TV Conaway was a regular on Wizards and Warriors (1983) and Babylon 5 (1994–98), and he also guest-starred in episodes of Tales from the Darkside (“My Ghostwriter — the Vampire”), Monsters, Freddy’s Nightmares, Shades of LA and three Babylon 5 spin-off movies.

American actress Clarice Taylor, who played Bill Cosby’s mother on TV’s The Cosby Show, died of heart failure on 30 May, aged ninety-three. Her other credits include Change of Mind and Play Misty for Me. Taylor portrayed “Addaperle, the Good Witch of the North” in the 1970s Broadway musical The Wiz.

American leading man James Arness (James King Aurness), best remembered for his role as “Marshall Matt Dillon” on the long-running Western series Gunsmoke (aka Gun Law, 1955– 75) and a number of spin-off TV movies, died on 3 June. He was eighty-eight. Arness’ film credits include Two Lost Worlds, The Thing from Another World (as “The Thing”) and Them!. His younger brother was actor Peter Graves.

British character actress and comedienne Miriam Karlin OBE (Miriam Samuels) died after a long battle with cancer the same day, aged eighty-five. She appeared in The Goons’ comedy Down Among the ‘Z’ Men, Hammer’s Phantom of the Opera (1962), A Clockwork Orange, Jekyll & Hyde (1990) and Children of Men. On TV, Karlin starred in the supernatural sitcom So Haunt Me (1992–94).

Ninety-year-old Wally Boag (Wallace Vincent Boag) and ninety-one-year-old Betty Taylor, who co-starred as sweethearts Pecos Bill and Slue-Foot Sue five days a week for nearly three decades in Disneyland’s Golden Horseshoe Revue, died on 3 and 7 June, respectively. The show is officially the longest-running stage production in entertainment history (1955–86). Boag also appeared in Disney’s The Absent-Minded Professor, Son of Flubber and The Love Bug (1968).

British TV actor Donald [Marland] Hewlett died of pneumonia on 4 June, aged ninety. He had suffered from epilepsy and Alzheimer’s disease for many years. Hewlett appeared in episodes of Sherlock Holmes (1965), The Avengers, Doctor Who (“The Claws of Axos”) and The New Avengers.

Canadian-born actor Paul Massie (Arthur Dickinson Massé), best known for playing an ugly Dr Jekyll and a handsome Mr Hyde in Hammer’s The Two Faces of Dr Jekyll (aka Jekyll’s Inferno, 1960), died of lung cancer in Nova Scotia on 8 June, aged seventy-eight. He also appeared in an episode of TV’s The Avengers. He retired from acting at the age of forty to teach drama at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

Seventy-nine-year-old voice and theatre actor Roy [William] Skelton, who not only voiced the popular British children’s TV puppet characters George and Zippy for Rainbow (1973–92), but also the Daleks and Cybermen in Doctor Who, died of pneumonia the same day. He had suffered a stroke five months earlier. Skelton was also the voice of a robot in an episode of Out of the Unknown, the “Mock Turtle” in a BBC version of Alice in Wonderland (1986), “Henry Swift” in the two Ghosts of Albion animated webseries and George and Zippy again in 2008 for the first episode of Ashes to Ashes. He started supplying voices for the various aliens on Doctor Who in 1966, and he continued until “Remembrance of the Daleks” in 1988.

Seventy-two-year-old Indian-born British character actor Badi Uzzaman (Mohammed Badji Uzzaman Azmi) died of a lung infection on 14 June in Pakistan. He appeared in The Sign of Four (1987), Stephen Gallagher’s Chimera, and Gulliver’s Travels (1996), along with episodes of The Singing Detective, Screen One (“Frankenstein’s Baby”) and Torchwood.

Thirty-four-year-old stuntman Ryan [Matthew] Dunn, best known as one of the moronic Jackass team on MTV, died on 20 June when he crashed the Porsche he was driving drunk at 3 a.m., killing himself and his passenger, twenty-nine-year-old Zachary Hartwell. The car had been travelling at speeds of up to 140 mph and the crash turned the vehicle into a fireball. Dunn also had small roles in Invader and Welcome to the Bates Motel.

Just one more thing. veteran Hollywood actor Peter [Michael] Falk, best known for his Emmy Award-winning role as the wily raincoat-wearing, cigar-smoking police Lieutenant in NBC-TV’s Columbo (1971–2003), died on 23 June, aged eighty-three. He had been suffering from Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Falk’s movie credits include Brigadoon (1966), Castle Keep, Murder by Death, The Great Muppet Caper, Wings of Desire (1987), The Princess Bride, Vibes, The Lost World (2001), Shark Tale, When Angels Come to Town and Next. He also appeared in episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Falk’s right eye was surgically removed at the age of three because of cancer.

British stage and screen actress Margaret [Maud] Tyzack CBE died of cancer on 25 June, aged seventy-nine. Her credits include 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, The Legacy, Quatermass (aka The Quatermass Conclusion), Until Death and The Thief Lord, along with episodes of TV’s The Indian Tales of Rudyard Kipling and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

Indian-born British leading man Michael Latimer, who starred in Hammer’s Slave Girls (aka Prehistoric Women), died the same day, aged sixty-nine. He also appeared in episodes of the TV series Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Avengers (“A Touch of Brimstone”), Sexton Blake, The New Avengers and Hammer House of Horror, along with Gene Roddenberry’s TV pilot movie Spectre and the SF film Project: Alien (aka Fatal Sky).

American child actress Edith [Marilyn] Fellows died on 26 June, aged eighty-eight. She had made around thirty films by the age of thirteen and was the subject of a high-profile custody case in 1936. Her credits include Jane Eyre (1934), Lilith and The Hills Have Eyes Part II (1985), and she also appeared in four episodes of TV’s Tales of Tomorrow.

Eighty-one-year-old Hollywood actress Elaine Stewart (Elsy H. Steinberg) died after a long illness on 27 June. A former 1950s Playboy pin-up turned TV hostess, she starred opposite Gene Kelly in MGM’s Brigadoon (1954) and her other movie credits include The Adventures of Hajji Baba and Most Dangerous Man Alive.

British actress Anna [Raymond] Massey OBE died of cancer on 2 July, aged seventy-three. The daughter of actor Raymond Massey and the younger sister of Daniel Massey, she appeared in Peeping Tom, ITV Play of the Week (“A Midsummer Night’s Dream”), Bunny Lake is Missing, De Sade, Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, The Vault of Horror (based on the EC comics), Rebecca (1979), Around the World in 80 Days (1989) and Haunted (based on the novel by James Herbert), as well as episodes of TV’s Dead of Night, Tales of the Unexpected, Mistress of Suspense, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and Strange. She was married to actor Jeremy Brett from 1958 to 1962, and her godfather was director John Ford.

American character actor, poet and playwright Roberts [Scott] Blossom, who memorably played psychopathic backwoods killer “Ezra Cobb” in Deranged (1974), died on 8 July, aged eighty-seven. He was also in Slaughterhouse-Five, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Resurrection, Christine (based on the novel by Stephen King) and Always, along with episodes of Amazing Stories, Tales from the Darkside and the 1980s The Twilight Zone series.

Indian-born British actress Googie Withers (Georgette Lizette Withers) CBE died in Australia on 15 July, aged ninety-four. Her credits include Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938), Dead of Night (1945) and Miranda.

Eighty-nine-year-old British character actress Sheila [Mary] Burrell died on 19 July, after a long illness following a serious stroke two years earlier. Sir Laurence Olivier’s cousin and a long-standing member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, she appeared in such films as Hammer’s Man in Black and Paranoiac, Afraid of the Dark and Jane Eyre (1996), plus episodes of Colonel March of Scotland Yard (starring Boris Karloff), Adam Adamant Lives! Out of the Unknown, The Avengers, Spooky, Tales of the Unexpected and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Burrell was married to actor Laurence Payne from 1944 to 1951.

Mexican-born actress Linda Christian (Blanca Rosa Welter), described as “The Anatomic Bomb” by Life magazine, died of colon cancer on 22 July in California, aged eighty-seven. A former beauty contest winner, her credits include Tarzan and the Mermaids and The Devil’s Hand (with her younger sister Ariadna Welter), along with episodes of Climax! (“Casino Royale”, the first James Bond adaptation) and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Best known for her various romantic liaisons with wealthy playboys, racing drivers and bullfighters, she married and divorced actors Tyrone Power and Edmund Purdom.

A former corporate lawyer, independent oil producer, cattle rancher and local politician before he became a character actor, G. (Gervase) D. (Duan) Spradlin died on 24 July, aged ninety. He appeared (usually as authority figures) in Hell’s Angels ’69, Zabriskie Point, Maneaters Are Loose! Apocalypse Now, The Formula, Intruders, Ed Wood (as “Reverend Lemon”) and episodes of TV’s Search Control, Kung Fu, The Greatest American Hero and Dark Skies.

Dukes of Hazzard star Christopher Mayer (George Charles Mayer III, aka “Chip Mayer”) died the same day, aged fifty-seven. He also appeared in episodes of TV’s Weird Science, Xena: Warrior Princess, Sliders, Silk Stalkings and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

Val Warren (Valmore Warren), who won a National Horror Makeup Contest in Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine to play a teenage werewolf in the AIP film Bikini Beach (1964), died of complications from cancer on 25 July, aged sixty-nine. An author, illustrator and musician, he edited the early 1960s fantasy film fanzine Kaleidoscope and wrote the 1979 book Lost Lands, Mythical Kingdoms and Unknown Worlds. Warren was also an authority on Buddy Holly and the Crickets.

Welsh-born character actor Richard [de Pearsall] Pearson died on 2 August, aged ninety-three. His films include Scrooge (1951), Svengali (1954), How I Won the War, Macbeth (1971), Alice Through the Looking Glass (1973), Disney’s One of Our Dinosaurs is Missing, The Blue Bird (1976), Whoops Apocalypse and Men in Black II (as the voice of “Gordy”), and he appeared in episodes of Stranger from Space, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1960), Mystery and Imagination (M. R. James’ “Lost Hearts”), Sherlock Holmes (1968), Out of the Unknown, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Hammer House of Horror (“The Thirteenth Reunion”) and Tales of the Unexpected. Pearson was also the voice of “Mole” in The Wind in the Willows (1983–88) and Oh! Mr Toad (1989–90).

Former NFL football star-turned-actor Bubba Smith (Charles Aaron Smith), best known for his role in the Police Academy movies, died on 3 August, aged sixty-six. The six-foot, seven-inch Smith appeared in Black Moon Rising, Blood River, and episodes of Wonder Woman and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. He was also a regular on the 1984 TV series Blue Thunder.

Forty-eight-year-old Francesco [Daniele] Quinn, the son of actor Anthony Quinn, died of an apparent heart attack while jogging in Malibu on 5 August. He portrayed “Vlad Tepes” in the 2003 film Vlad, and his other credits include episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and The Glades. Quinn also provided the voice of “Dino” in Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

Distinguished British stage and screen actor John Wood CBE died on 6 August, aged eighty-one. He made his film debut in the 1952 Hammer thriller Stolen Face, directed by Terence Fisher, and he went on to appear in The Mouse on the Moon, One More Time, Slaughterhouse-Five, WarGames, Agentii 009 ja kuole-man kurvit, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Ladyhawk, Shadowlands, Citizen X, Richard III (1995), Jane Eyre (1996), Rasputin (1996), The Avengers and The Little Vampire. On TV his credits include The Hooded Terror and episodes of Tales of Mystery, Saki, Out of the Unknown, The Avengers, Doomwatch, The Storyteller: Greek Myths and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. In 1974 Wood appeared on stage in the title role of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s revival of William Gillette’s 1899 melodrama Sherlock Holmes.

In early August it was announced that British TV actress Anne Ridler had died. She had been suffering from throat cancer for some years. Best remembered for her distinctive voice in the series Terrahawks (1983–86), she also appeared in episodes of One Step Beyond, Doctor Who (“The Wheel in Space”), Moonbase 3, Tom’s Midnight Garden, Bedtime Stories and The Tomorrow People.

Former British child actor turned TV producer and director John Howard Davies died of cancer on 22 August, aged seventy-two. At the age of eight he starred in David Lean’s classic Oliver Twist (1948), and the following year he was in The Rocking Horse Winner (based on the short story by D. H. Lawrence). In later years he produced such comedy series as Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Goodies, Fawlty Towers and The Good Life.

Child star Sybil Jason (Sybil Jacobson) died of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease on 23 August, aged eighty-three. The South African-born actress was brought to Hollywood from Britain in the mid-1930s by Warner Bros., who starred her opposite Al Jolson in The Singing Kid and several other films. After the studio let her go in 1938, she appeared with screen rival Shirley Temple in The Little Princess and The Blue Bird (from which many of her scenes were cut, reportedly at the demand of Temple’s mother), before she retired from the screen.

The body of American actor Michael Showers was found floating in the Mississippi River, near New Orleans’ French Quarter, on the morning of 25 August. He had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis five months earlier and had been suffering from depression and anxiety. The forty-five-year-old Showers had a recurring role as police Captain John Guidry in the HBO series Treme. He also appeared in Kiss of the Vampire (aka Imortally Yours, 2009), The Collector and Hammer’s The Resident (with Christopher Lee), along with an episode of TV’s The Vampire Diaries.

American actress Eve Brent (Jean Ann Lewis), who portrayed “Jane” opposite Gordon Scott’s “Tarzan” in the TV fix-up movies Tarzan and the Trappers and Tarzan’s Fight for Life (both 1958), died on 27 August, aged eighty-one. Her other films include Female Jungle, The Bride and the Beast, The White Buffalo, Fade to Black, BrainWaves, Date with an Angel, The Green Mile and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (uncredited). On TV she appeared in episodes of Adventures of Superman, The Veil (hosted by Boris Karloff), Highway to Heaven, Tales from the Crypt, Twin Peaks, Weird Science and Roswell High.

Former model turned actress Cobina [Carolyn] Wright, Jr., who co-starred in Charlie Chan in Rio (1941), died on 1 September, aged ninety.

American actress Annette Charles (Annette Cardona), who played “Cha Cha DiGregorio” in Grease (1978), died of lung cancer on 4 August, aged sixty-three. She also appeared in episodes of The Flying Nun, The Bionic Woman, Man from Atlantis and The Incredible Hulk.

American character actor John Clark died on 9 September, aged ninety-five. He appeared in The Light at the Edge of the World, Graveyard of Horror (aka Necrophagus), The Time Guardian and The Lords of Magick.

Oscar-winning American leading man Cliff Robertson (Clifford Parker Robertson) died on 10 September, the day after his eighty-eighth birthday. He won an Academy Award for his starring role in Charley (1968). Based on the novel by Daniel Keyes, it had previously been filmed for TV in 1965 with Robertson again in the lead role. However, the actor’s attempts to get a sequel made some years later only resulted in around fifteen minutes of promotional footage. His other film credits include Man on a Swing, Brian De Palma’s Obsession, Dominique (aka Dominique is Dead), Brainstorm (1983), Dead Reckoning, Escape from L.A., 13th Child, Riding the Bullet (based on the novel by Stephen King) and Spider-Man (2002) and its two sequels (as “Ben Parker”), along with episodes of Rod Brown of the Rocket Rangers (in the title role), The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits (1963 and 1999) and Batman (as cowboy villain “Shame”). Robertson was instrumental in exposing the major fraud that brought down Columbia Pictures executive David Begelman in the 1970s, but his own career suffered as a result. His marriages to actresses Cynthia Stone and Dina Merrill both ended in divorce.

Thirty-nine-year-old Welsh-born actor Andy Whitfield, who portrayed the title character in the Starz TV series Spartacus: Blood and Sand (2010), died in his home country of Australia on 11 September. He had been battling non-Hodgkins Lymphoma since being diagnosed in March 2010. A former building inspector and model, he also starred in the horror movies Gabriel and The Clinic.

Petite Canadian-born character actress Frances Bay (Frances Goffman) died in California on 15 September, aged ninety-two. She made her belated screen debut in 1978, and went on to appear in such movies as Topper (1979), The Attic, Double Exposure, Nomads, Blue Velvet, Big Top Pee-wee, Arachnophobia, The Pit and the Pendulum (1991), Critters 3, Grave Secrets: The Legacy of Hilltop Drive, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, Single White Female, The Neighbor, In the Mouth of Madness, Disney’s Inspector Gadget, and Ring Around the Rosie (aka Fear Itself: Dark Memories). The actress’ prolific TV credits include episodes of Faerie Tale Theatre, Amazing Stories, Alien Nation, ALF, Tales from the Crypt, Twin Peaks (as “Mrs Tremond”), Quantum Leap, The X Files, Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction, Charmed and Cavemen.

American photographic model-turned-actress Norma Eberhardt died of complications from a stroke on 16 September, aged eighty-two. She co-starred in the 1958 film The Return of Dracula (aka The Fantastic Disappearing Man).

Eton-educated character actor Jonathan Cecil (Jonathan Hugh Gascoyne-Cecil), who usually portrayed upper-class English characters in films and on television, died of pneumonia on 22 September, aged seventy-two. Best known for portraying “Captain Arthur Hastings” in three 1980s TV movies starring Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot, he also appeared in Hammer’s Lust for a Vampire and TV versions of Alice Through the Looking Glass (1973), Gulliver in Lilliput (1982) and Alice in Wonderland (1986).

Mexican comedian and singer Gaspar Henaine [Perez], better known as “Capulina” to his many fans, died from pneumonia on 30 September, aged eighty-five. In a career spanning five decades, he appeared in numerous films, including Se los chupó la bruja, Los invisibles, Santo contra Capulina, Capulina contra los vampiros, El terror de Guanajuato and Capulina contra los monstruos.

Grizzled American character actor Charles Napier died on 5 October, aged seventy-five. He made his full-frontal screen debut in Russ Meyer’s sex comedy Cherry Harry & Raquel!, and also appeared in the director’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, The Seven Minutes and Supervixens. Napier went on to appear in Wacko, The Night Stalker (1987), Body Count, Deep Space, The Incredible Hulk Returns, Alien from the Deep, Dragonfight, Future Zone, Maniac Cop 2, The Silence of the Lambs, Frogtown II, Eyes of the Beholder, Body Bags, Skeeter, Ripper Man, Alien Species, The Cable Guy, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Steel, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Pirates of the Plain, Nutty Professor II: The Klumps, Dinocroc, The Machurian Candidate (2004) and One-Eyed Monster. Along with supplying voices to numerous cartoon series, on TV the actor also appeared in the original Star Trek, Starsky and Hutch (“Satan’s Witches”), The Incredible Hulk, Knight Rider, Tales of the Gold Monkey, Outlaws, The New Adventures of Superman, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Roswell High, The Legend of Tarzan and The 4400. He also reportedly supplied the growls for the final two seasons of TV’s The Incredible Hulk.

Striking Australian actress Diane Cilento died after a long illness on 7 October, aged seventy-seven. She left her second husband, James Bond actor Sean Connery, after eleven years for playwright Anthony Shaffer while starring in The Wicker Man (1973). After roles in the BBC’s A Tomb with a View (1951) and the 1952 short All Hallowe’en, Cilento appeared in Meet Mr Lucifer, The Angel Who Pawned Her Harp and Z.P.G. (aka Zero Population Growth), along with episodes of Late Night Horror (“The Kiss of Blood”), Thriller (“Spell of Evil”) and in a recurring role on the children’s series Halfway Across the Galaxy and Turn Left. She also reportedly doubled for Mia Hama in a swimming scene in the Bond film You Only Live Twice.

Bulgarian-born British character actor and writer George Baker MBE, who starred as “Chief Inspector Wexford” in ITV’s The Ruth Rendell Mysteries (1987–2000), died of pneumonia after a recent stroke the same day. He was eighty. Baker’s other credits include such films as Sword of Lancelot (aka Lancelot and Guinevere), Curse of the Fly, the James Bond adventures On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and The Spy Who Loved Me, The Canterville Ghost (1987) and Back to the Secret Garden, along with episodes of The Prisoner (as the “New Number Two”), Doomwatch, Zodiac, Survivors (1975), Doctor Who (“Full Circle”), Robin of Sherwood, Johnny and the Dead (based on the book by Terry Pratchett) and Randall and Hopkirk {Deceased} (2001). Creator Ian Fleming had apparently wanted the actor to play James Bond on the screen. Baker’s third wife, actress Louie Ramsay, died in March at the age of eighty-one.

American actor and musician David [Alexander] Hess, who starred in and additionally composed the soundtrack for Wes Craven’s infamous psycho thriller The Last House on the Left, died on 8 October, aged sixty-nine. He also appeared in The House on the Edge of the Park, Swamp Thing, Body Count, Zombie Nation, Zodiac Killer, The Absence of Light, Fallen Angels and Smash Cut, along with episodes of TV’s Knight Rider and Manimal. Hess also directed the 1980 slasher film To All a Goodnight. In the late 1950s he had a music-recording career under the name “David Hill”. He wrote a number of songs recorded by Elvis Presley, as well as “Speedy Gonzalez”, which was a #1 hit for Pat Boone.

Dependable American actor Alan Fudge died of lung and liver cancer on 10 October, aged seventy-seven. His movies include Bug, Capricorn One, Are You in the House Alone? The Golden Gate Murders, Goliath Awaits, Brainstorm (1983), Chiller, My Demon Lover, I Saw What You Did (1988), Nightmare on the 13th Floor, Edward Scissorhands, Galaxis and Shark Swarm. Fudge played “C. W. Crawford” on the 1977–78 TV series Man from Atlantis, and he also appeared in episodes of Ghost Story, Wonder Woman, The Greatest American Hero, Knight Rider, the 1980s Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents series, Highway to Heaven, Alien Nation, Quantum Leap, M.A.N.T.I.S. and Dark Skies.

British stage and screen actress Sheila Allen died on 13 October, aged seventy-eight. She appeared in the films Children of the Damned, Venom (aka The Legend of Spider Forest) and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, along with an episode of TV’s The Prisoner (1967).

Michael Cornelison, who starred in Frank Darabont’s 1983 short The Woman in the Room, based on the story by Stephen King, died of liver complications on 15 October, aged fifty-nine. He also appeared in Superstition, Timesweep, Mommy and Mommy’s Day, Haunting Villisca and Husk, along with two episodes of TV’s The Greatest American Hero.

Glamorous British actress Sue Lloyd (Susan Margery Jeaffreson Lloyd) died on 20 October, aged seventy-two. A former chorus girl, showgirl and model, she studied acting with Jeff Corey and appeared in Hammer’s Hysteria, Corruption (with Peter Cushing), Go For a Take, No.1 of the Secret Service and the 1993 Roy “Chubby” Brown comedy U.F.O. During the 1960s and ’70s, the actress was a regular on British TV in such series as The Avengers, Journey to the Unknown, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased), Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson and Super Gran. Lloyd starred in a short-lived stage version of The Avengers in 1971, and twenty years later she married actor Ronald Allen, six weeks before his death from lung cancer.

American character actor Leonard Stone (Leonard Steinbock) died of cancer on 2 November, the day before his eighty-eighth birthday. Best remembered as the father of the gum-chewing Violet Beauregarde in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), he also appeared in Shock Treatment (1964), Soylent Green and Once Upon a Spy (with Christopher Lee), along with episodes of TV’s The Outer Limits (1963), the “lost” pilot The Ghost of Sierra de Cobre, The Invaders, Lost in Space, Land of the Giants, The Six Million Dollar Man, Gemini Man, The Next Step Beyond, Bigfoot and Wildboy and The Invisible Man (2001).

American actor and comedian Sid Melton (Sidney Meltzer) died of pneumonia on 3 November, aged ninety-four. His film credits include Lost Continent (1951) and The Atomic Submarine. Melton portrayed “Ichabod ‘Ikky’ Mudd” on TV’s Captain Midnight (1954–56), and he also appeared in episodes of Adventures of Superman, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Munsters and I Dream of Jeannie.

Cynthia [Jeanette] Myers, who posed as a Playboy “Playmate of the Month” when she was just seventeen, died on 4 November, aged sixty-one. She studied acting with Jeff Corey and was in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls as well as playing an uncredited native girl in Hammer’s The Lost Continent (1968), based on the novel by Dennis Wheatley.

Former World Heavyweight Boxing Champion “Smokin’” Joe Frazier (Joseph William Frazier) died of liver cancer on 7 November, aged sixty-seven. He had a role in the 1987 horror-comedy Ghost Fever.

British actor Richard [Lindon Harvey] Morant, the nephew of Bill Travers and son-in-law of Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. by his first marriage, died of an aneurysm on 9 November, aged sixty-six. He appeared in the films The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1976) and The Company of Wolves, as well as episodes of TV’s The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes, Bedtime Stories, The Mad Death, Jack the Ripper (1988) and The Legend of the Lost Keys. Morant also played the eponymous space hero in the second series of the 1984 children’s SF game show Captain Zep — Space Detective. As well as being an actor, he also sold bespoke carpets and rugs from his London gallery.

Malaysian-born British stage and screen actress Dulcie Gray CBE (Dulcie Winifred Catherine Bailey) died of bronchial pneumonia on 15 November, aged ninety-five. She made her film debut in the early 1940s and appeared in A Place of One’s Own, Wanted For Murder (aka A Voice in the Night) and an episode of TV’s Tales from the Crypt. As an author, she wrote twenty-four books (mostly theatrical crime novels) and contributed eight stories to Herbert van Thal’s The Pan Book of Horror Stories series. Her short fiction was collected in Stage Door Fright: A Collection of Horror and Other Stories (1977). Gray was married to fellow actor Michael Denison for fifty-nine years.

Ninety-three-year-old Austrian-Hungarian-born actor Karl Slover (Karl “Karchy” Kosiczky), one of the last surviving Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz (1939), died the same day from cardiopulmonary arrest. The four-foot, four-inch Slover, whose father sold him to a troupe of vaudeville performers when he was nine, was the smallest Munchkin. He played four parts in the classic movie: the “Munchkin Herald #1”, “Sleepyhead”, a singing Munchkin and a soldier. He also appeared in Bringing Up Baby and The Terror of Tiny Town.

Distinguished British actor John Neville OBE died of Alzheimer’s disease in Toronto on 19 November, aged eighty-six. He emigrated to Canada in 1972, and his film credits include Unearthly Stranger, A Study in Terror (as “Sherlock Holmes”), The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (in the title role), Journey to the Center of the Earth (1993), Shadow Zone: The Teacher Ate My Homework, The Fifth Element, Johnny 2.0, The X Files, Urban Legend and Spider. He also appeared in episodes of such TV series as Shadows of Fear, The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (as Austin Freeman’s “Dr Thorndyke”), Star Trek: The Next Generation, Viper, The X Files (in a recurring role as “The Well-Manicured Man”), F/X: The Series, The Adventures of Shirley Holmes and the pilot for Odyssey 5.

Susan Palermo[-Piscitello] died of brain cancer on 23 November, aged fifty-nine. For many years she was Vice President of Operations for Sandy Frank Productions, and more recently she worked as an actress, musician, producer and/or special effects artist on such low budget horror films as Zombies! Zombies! Everywhere, Post Mortem America 2021 and Road Hell.

American character actor Bill McKinney (William Denison McKinney), best known for his role as a crazed Mountain Man in Deliverance, died of cancer of the oesophagus on 1 December, aged eighty. His many other credits include She Freak, Angel Unchained, Cleopatra Jones, The Strange and Deadly Occurrence, Strange New World, Back to the Future Part III, It Came from Outer Space II, The Green Mile, Hellborn (aka Asylum of the Damned), Looney Tunes: Back in Action, 2001 Maniacs and The Devil Wears Spurs, along with episodes of I Dream of Jeannie, Galactica 1980 and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. McKinney also voiced the role of “Jonah Hex” on an episode of the animated Batman TV series.

American comedy actor Alan [Grigsby] Sues, a regular on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In in the late 1960s and early 1970s, died of a heart attack the same day, aged eighty-five. He appeared in the movies Oh! Heavenly Dog and A Bucket of Blood (aka The Death Artist, 1995), while his other TV credits include episodes of The Twilight Zone, The Wild Wild West, Fantasy Island, Time Express (with Vincent Price), Misunderstood Monsters and Sabrina the Teenage Witch. On stage, Sues portrayed “Professor Moriarty” in the 1975 Broadway production of Sherlock Holmes.

Dependable American character actor and TV director Harry Morgan (Harry Bratsberg, aka “Henry Morgan”), best remembered for his Emmy Award-winning role as “Colonel Sherman T. Potter” in the long-running CBS-TV series M*A*S*H (1975– 83), died of pneumonia on 7 December, aged ninety-six. During his extensive career, Morgan appeared in The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe, Dragonwyck (with Vincent Price), Crime Doctor’s Man Hunt (scripted by Leigh Brackett), Disney’s Charlie and the Angel and The Cat from Outer Space, Exo-Man, Maneaters Are Loose! The Wild Wild West Revisited and More Wild Wild West, and Dragnet (1987), along with episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Night Gallery, the revived The Twilight Zone and a recurring role on 3rd Rock from the Sun.

Child actress Susan Gordon, the daughter of producer/director Bert I. Gordon, died of cancer on 11 December, aged sixty-two. She appeared in her father’s films Attack of the Puppet People (aka Six Inches Tall), The Boy and the Pirates, Tormented and Picture Mommy Dead. Her other credits include a TV version of Miracle on 34th Street (1959) and episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and The Twilight Zone.

1930s American character actress Louise Henry (Jesse Louise Heiman) died on 12 December, aged 100. She appeared in Charlie Chan on Broadway and Charlie Chan in Reno. She retired from the screen in 1939.

Argentina-born actor Alberto de Mendoza (Alberto Manuel Rodríguez Gallego Gonzáles de Mendoza) died of respiratory failure in Spain the same day, aged eighty-eight. He began his film career in 1930, and his many credits include The Ghost Lady (1945), La bestia humana, Horror Express (with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing) and the 1974 version of And Then There Were None.

Jennifer Miro (Jennifer Anderson), vocalist and electric piano player with the 1970s San Francisco punk/new wave/goth band The Nuns, died in New York City on 14 December. She appeared in the movies Nightmare in Blood (uncredited), The Video Dead and Dr Caligari (1989).

Seventy-three-year-old Scottish actor Nicol Williamson, who portrayed Sherlock Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution and Merlin in Excalibur, died of oesophageal cancer on 16 December. His other film credits include Hamlet (1969), Venom, Macbeth (1983), Disney’s Return to Oz, The Exorcist III and Spawn. Williamson also appeared in an episode of the little-seen 1990 anthology TV show Chillers, hosted by Anthony Perkins. From 1971–77 he was married to actress Jill Townsend.

American character actor Robert Easton (Robert Burke, aka “Bob Easton”), regarded as “the Henry Higgins of Hollywood” for his later career as a respected dialect coach, died the same day, aged eighty-one. He appeared in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (uncredited), The Neanderthal Man, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, The Loved One, One of Our Spies is Missing, Johnny Got His Gun, The Touch of Satan, The Giant Spider Invasion, Mr Sycamore, Disney’s Pete’s Dragon, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Pet Sematary II, Needful Things, Spiritual Warriors and Horrorween, plus episodes of TV’s Adventures of Superman, The Munsters, Lost in Space, My Mother the Car, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart, The Ghost Busters (1975), Kolchak: The Night Stalker (“Mr R.I.N.G.”) and The Bionic Woman. Easton was also the voice of co-pilot “Phones” and other characters in Gerry Anderson’s “supermarionation” series Stingray (1964–65).

A chimpanzee, whose owner claimed was the eighty-year-old Cheeta that appeared in the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films of the 1930s, died of kidney failure at a Florida primate sanctuary on 24 December. However, experts agreed that it was extremely unlikely that it was the original chimp.

Virtuoso violinist Israel Baker, who contributed the screeching violin chords to Bernard Herrmann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), died on Christmas Day, aged ninety-two. A highly paid session musician and acclaimed concert musician, Baker’s movie credits also include Jonathan Livingstone Seagull and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Mexican-born character actor Pedro Armendáriz, Jr. (Pedro Armendáriz Bohr) died of cancer in New York on 26 December, aged seventy-one. He began his career in the 1960s in such films as Las vampiras (with John Carradine), and he continued to work in both his native country and the US. Armendárez’s movie credits include Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (1973), Chosen Survivors, Earthquake, Licence to Kill, The Legend of the Mask, The Mask of Zorro (1998) and The Legend of Zorro, and he also appeared an episode of TV’s Knight Rider.

FILM & TV TECHNICIANS/PRODUCERS

American make-up artist and musician Verne Langdon died on 1 January, aged sixty-nine. Perhaps best remembered as creator of the Universal Monster “Calendar Masks” for Don Post Studios, he worked on such movies as The Haunted Palace, The Comedy of Terrors, Planet of the Apes, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Escape from the Planet of the Apes and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, along with TV’s The Star Wars Holiday Special. Langdon also created and co-produced the 1967 Decca record album An Evening with Boris Karloff and His Friends, and co-created the 1980 “Castle Dracula” show at Universal Studios.

Spanish screenwriter, producer and director Juan Piquer Simón (aka “J. P. Simon”) died of lung cancer on 7 January, aged seventy-five. His many genre films include Where Time Began (based on the novel by Jules Verne), Satan’s Blood, Supersonic Man, Monster Island (with Peter Cushing and Paul Naschy), Pieces, Extraterrestrial Visitors, Slugs (based on the novel by Shaun Hutson), Cthulhu Mansion (which had absolutely nothing to do with H. P. Lovecraft), The Rift and La isla del diablo. Simón additionally scripted Beyond Terror (as “Alfredo Casado”), Nexus 2.431 (which was based on his unproduced screenplay) and El escarabajo de oro (a 1999 adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold Bug”). In 2008 he was the subject of Nacho Cerdà’s documentary Pieces of Juan (Piquer Simón).

Del Reisman, who was associate producer on the original TV series of The Twilight Zone and scripted episodes of Ghost Story and The Six Million Dollar Man, died on 8 January, aged eighty-six.

Peter Yates, the British film director probably best remembered for the iconic car chase movie Bullitt (1968) starring Steve McQueen, died after a long illness on 9 January, aged eighty-one. He began his career as a dubbing assistant, working his way up to assistant director on such films as the sleazy Cover Girl Killer before getting his break directing the classic Cliff Richard musical Summer Holiday. His varied other credits include The Deep and Krull, along with episodes of TV’s The Saint and Danger Man.

British production designer Peter (Edward Sidney Canton) Phillips, best known for his BAFTA Award-winning work on TV’s Brideshead Revisited (1981), died on 10 January, aged eighty-five. He worked as a production design assistant on the 1947 film Uncle Silas (aka The Inheritance, based on the novel by J. Sheridan Le Fanu) before joining Granada Television, where his credits include three episodes of 1980s series Shades of Darkness — “Bewitched”, based on the story by Edith Wharton; “The Demon Lover”, based on the story by Elizabeth Bowen, and “Agatha Christie’s The Last Séance”.

David [Oswald] Nelson, the real-life son of Ozzie Nelson and Harriet Hilliard, and the older brother of singer/actor Ricky Nelson, died of complications from colon cancer on 11 January, aged seventy-four. He was the last surviving star of the 1952–66 TV show The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, and in 1982 he directed the horror movie Death Screams (aka House of Death).

Dan Filie, who wrote and produced the 2009 horror comedy Frankenhood, died on 13 January, aged fifty-six. As Senior Vice President for Drama Development for Universal Television in the 1990s, he was instrumental in creating the TV series Hercules and Xena: Warrior Princess.

American music producer and publisher Don (Donald) Kirshner died of heart failure on 17 January, aged seventy-six. During the 1960s, Kirshner helped launch the careers of such songwriters as Carole King, Neil Sedaka and Neil Diamond when he became music supervisor on NBC-TV’s The Monkees, before he was fired when the manufactured group demanded more control. Kirshner went on to work as a music consultant/supervisor on such TV series as Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, the animated Archie series (“Sugar Sugar” stayed at #1 in the US for four weeks in 1969), The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan and the 1976 TV movie The Savage Bees (which he also executive produced). He also produced the rarely-seen 1970 SF musical Toomorrow, directed by Val Guest and starring a young Olivia Newton-John.

Greek-born film and stage costume designer Theoni V. Aldredge (Theoni Athanasiou Vachliotis) died of a heart attack in Stamford, Connecticut, on 21 January, aged eighty-eight. Broadway dimmed its lights to mark her death. The Oscar-winning designer created costumes for such movies as No Way to Treat a Lady, The Fury, Eyes of Laura Mars, The First Deadly Sin, Ghostbusters, Addams Family Values and The Rage: Carrie 2.

Bernd Eichinger, Germany’s most successful movie producer, died of a heart attack while having dinner with family and friends at his home in Los Angeles on 24 January. He was sixty-one. Best known as the producer of Resident Evil and the sequels starring Milla Jovovich, his other film credits include The NeverEnding Story, The Name of the Rose, The Fantastic Four (both the 1994 and 2005 versions), Prince Valiant (1997), The Calling, The Mists of Avalon (based on the novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley), 666: In Bed with the Devil, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (which he also co-scripted from Patrick Süskind’s World Fantasy Award-winning novel) and 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer.

Richard Datin, who headed the team of model-makers that created the Starship USS Enterprise for the original Star Trek TV series (1966–69), died the same day.

American TV director Phil Bondelli died 31 January, aged eighty-three. He directed episodes of The Bionic Woman, The Six Million Dollar Man, Fantasy Island, Blue Thunder and Outlaws.

Producer, director and author Charles E. Sellier, Jr., founder and president of Grizzly Adams Productions, Inc., died the same day, aged sixty-seven. From the early 1970s onwards he produced a string of paranormal documentaries, including The Mysterious Monsters, In Search of Noah’s Ark, The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena, Beyond and Back, The Bermuda Triangle and Beyond Death’s Door, along with the TV series Encounters with the Unexplained. Sellier also executive produced The Time Machine (1978), The Fall of the House of Usher (1979), Hangar 18, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1980), Earthbound, The Boogens and Knight Rider 2000, and he directed the Christmas horror movie Silent Night Deadly Night (1984).

Walt Disney animator and director Bill (William) Justice, who joined the studio in 1937 and stayed there for forty-two years, died on 10 February, aged ninety-seven. He began his career as an “in-betweener” on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and went on to work as a full animator on such films as Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, The Three Caballeros, The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr Toad (uncredited), Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, along with numerous shorts. Although a film of Roald Dahl’s first children’s story, “The Gremlins”, was developed by the studio during World War II, it was eventually abandoned. However, Justice’s concept illustrations were used in the book when it was published in 1943. He directed the opening title sequence for TV’s The Mickey Mouse Club, which premiered in October 1955, and with Disney colleagues T. Hee and Xavier Atencio he created stop-motions scenes for The Shaggy Dog, The Misadventures of Merlin Jones and Mary Poppins. Justice went on to help create the audio-animatronic figures for Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean, Mission to Mars and Haunted Mansion attractions, and he also designed parades and costumes for the theme park. Justice retired in 1979, and his 1992 autobiography was entitled Justice for Disney. He was named a Disney Legend in 1996.

British TV producer and director Paul [Coryn Valentine] Lucas died of cancer on 13 February, aged fifty-five. Best known for his work on the award-winning Prime Suspect series, he also directed two episodes of the BBC’s Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes and the 2000 movie After Alice (aka Eye of the Killer).

American exploitation film producer, director and screenwriter David F. (Frank) Friedman died of heart failure on 14 February, aged eighty-seven. He had lost his hearing and eyesight almost a decade before. He began his career in the early 1960s with business partner Herschell Gordon Lewis making “nudie-cuties”, before the pair moved on to horror with the infamous Blood Feast (1963). Made for just $24,500, the “first splatter film” went on to make millions. The pioneering pair followed it up with the equally gory Two Thousand Maniacs! and Color Me Blood Red, and Friedman’s numerous other cult credits include She Freak, Space-Thing, The Erotic Adventures of Siegfried, The Adult Version of Jekyll & Hyde and Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS. He was credited as executive producer on the more recent Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat, 2001 Maniacs, Crustacean (featuring writer Peter Atkins) and 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams. Friedman’s fun 1990 autobiography was titled A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King.

Thirty-nine-year-old Perry Moore (William Perry Moore IV), who was an executive producer on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and its two sequels, Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, died from an apparent drug overdose on 17 February, after being found unconscious in his New York apartment. Moore was also chosen by the C. S. Lewis estate to write the Official Illustrated Movie Companion to the first film. In 2009 he produced the TV documentary Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak. As a response to how gay characters were depicted in the comic book industry, Moore wrote the award-winning YA novel Hero (2007), about a teenage superhero struggling with his sexual orientation. He was voted People Magazine’s “Sexy Man of the Week” in the 19 November 2007 issue.

Hollywood press agent turned movie producer Walter Seltzer died on 18 February, aged ninety-six. His credits include The War Lord, The Omega Man and Soylent Green, all starring his friend Charlton Heston.

American former assistant director and production manager Scott Adam was killed, along with his wife and another couple, on 22 February, several days after their yacht had been hijacked by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden. Adam worked in various capacities on The Savage Bees, Day of the Animals, The Evil, The Goonies and episodes of the original V TV series before he began sailing around the world performing missionary work.

American film producer and director Gary Winick died of a brain tumour on 27 February, aged forty-nine. A pioneer in digital film-making, he found commercial success with such films as 13 Going on 30 and the 2006 remake of Charlotte’s Web.

British-born film and television director Charles Jarrott died of cancer in Los Angeles on 4 March. He was eighty-three. Jarrot’s credits include the 1968 TV movie of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde starring Jack Palance, the 1973 musical remake of Lost Horizon, Disney’s Condorman and episodes of TV’s The Unforseen, Out of This World, Haunted and Armchair Theatre (“The Picture of Dorian Gray” and “The Rose Affair”).

American director Sidney Lumet died of lymphoma on 9 April, aged eighty-six. A former actor, he began his directing career in live television in the 1950s before going on to make a string of acclaimed films. His credits include Fail-Safe (1964), The Wiz and Deathtrap (1982). Lumet had a small role in the 2004 remake of The Manchurian Candidate, and he was presented with an honorary Academy Award in 2005.

Japanese anime director Osamu Dezaki died on 17 April, aged sixty-seven. His TV credits include The Mighty Orbots and Bionic Six.

American TV director Charles [Friedman] Haas died on 12 May, aged ninety-seven. He began his career as an extra at Universal in 1935, and his directing credits include Tarzan and the Trappers (with Gordon Scott as Tarzan), stitched together from three unsold TV shows, plus episodes of Dick Tracy (1951), The Shadow (1954), The New Adventures of Charlie Chan, Men Into Space, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Outer Limits and The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Harry Redmond, Jr., the son of special effects pioneer Harry Redmond, Sr., died of complications from heart disease on 23 May, aged 101. Redmond worked (often uncredited) with his father — who was head of special effects at RKO Radio — on such films as The Most Dangerous Game (aka Hounds of Zaroff), King Kong (1933), The Son of Kong and She (1935). He also worked on Lost Horizon (1937), Wonder Man, Angel on My Shoulder, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The Bishop’s Wife (1947), The Magnetic Monster, Donovan’s Brain, Riders to the Stars and Gog. Redmond’s TV credits include Ten Little Niggers (1947), Science Fiction Theatre, The Outer Limits and the 1964 spin-off pilot The Unknown.

British film editor (Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Spy in Black) turned producer Hugh [St. Clair] Stewart died on 31 May, aged 100. After working on films with Norman Wisdom and Morecambe and Wise, his later credits as a producer included Mr Horatio Knibbles and The Flying Sorcerer for the Children’s Film Foundation.

British film and TV director Pat Jackson (Patrick Douglas Selmes Jackson), reportedly the last surviving director of the 1967–68 TV series The Prisoner, died on 3 June, aged ninety-five. He also directed the 1961 crime film Seven Keys (which appears to be an uncredited version of the much-filmed Seven Keys to Baldpate) and the lively horror comedy What a Carve Up! (aka No Place Like Homicide!), starring Sidney James and Kenneth Connor.

American writer, producer and director Leonard B. (Bernard) Stone died of heart failure on 7 June, aged eighty-seven. He began his career scripting Abbott and Costello’s later films (including Africa Screams), before creating such TV shows as McMillan & Wife, and writing and producing episodes of Get Smart, The Snoop Sisters and Holmes and Yo-Yo. Stone’s other credits include the Get Smart movies, The Nude Bomb and Get Smart Again!. From 1951–53 he was married to actress Julie Adams.

Swedish cinematographer [Erling] Gunnar Fischer died of an infection on 11 June, aged 100. He is best known for his twelve collaborations with director Ingmar Bergman, including The Seventh Seal, The Magician and The Devil’s Eye.

American movie producer Laura [Ellen] Ziskin died on 12 June, aged sixty-one. She had been battling breast cancer for seven years. Responsible for the blockbuster Spider-Man (2002) and its two sequels, her other credits include Eyes of Laura Mars, Fail Safe (2000) and the 2012 franchise re-boot The Amazing Spider-Man, plus episodes of the 2003 Tarzan TV series.

Film and TV producer Christopher [Elwin] Neame, the son of director and cinematographer Ronald Neame, died in France of an aneurysm the same day. He was sixty-eight. Starting out as a clapper boy at Hammer on Dracula Prince of Darkness and Rasputin the Mad Monk, Neame worked as an uncredited assistant director on Frankenstein Created Woman, Quatermass and the Pit (aka Five Million Miles to Earth) and The Devil Rides Out and as a production manager on Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb, Fear in the Night, Demons of the Mind and Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell. He was also an associate producer on Tigon’s The Beast in the Cellar and production manager/designer on the sexy sci-fi comedy Zeta One. The first of his three autobiographies, Rungs On a Ladder (2003), was about his time at Hammer. Neame’s godfather was Noël Coward.

Michael J. Hein, founder of the New York City Horror Film Festival in 2002, died of a heart attack on 9 July, aged forty-one. He contributed special effects make-up to Metamorphosis: The Alien Factor, Class of Nuke ’Em High Part II: Subhumanoid Meltdown and Out of Darkness, and scripted, produced and directed the 2001 horror film Biohazardous.

American TV producer and writer Sherwood [Charles] Schwartz, who created such series as It’s About Time, Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, died on 12 July, aged ninety-four. A former joke writer for Bob Hope’s radio show, his other credits include the comedy 1983 TV movie The Invisible Woman. Schwartz also created the theme tunes to a number of his shows.

Japanese film and TV animator Toyoo Ashida, who directed the 1985 anime, Vampire Hunter D, died on 23 July, aged sixty-seven. His many other credits include the Space Battleship Yamato, Ulysses 31 and Fist of the North Star (1986).

Cyprus-born film director Mihalis Kakogiannis (aka Michael Yannis/Michael Cacoyannis), who directed the Oscar-winning Zorba the Greek (1964), died in Athens, Greece, on 25 July. He was eighty-nine. Kakogiannis made an uncredited appearance in the 1948 body-swap comedy Vice Versa and he also scripted, produced and directed the 1967 counter-culture SF comedy The Day the Fish Came Out.

Canadian-born film and TV director Silvio Narizzano died in London on 26 July, aged eighty-four. After producing a 1952 series of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea for Canadian television, he moved to the UK, where he directed Hammer’s Fanatic (aka Die! Die! My Darling) and worked uncredited on an episode of Space Precinct. Narizzano’s low budget Las flores del vicio (aka Bloodbath, 1979) starred Dennis Hopper and was filmed in Spain.

Polly Platt (Mary Marr Platt), who was married to director Peter Bogdanovich from 1962 until 1972, died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease) on 27 July, aged seventy-two. Her various credits in the movie industry include being Nancy Sinatra’s stunt double in The Wild Angels, production co-ordinator on Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women, co-story writer and production designer of Bogdanovich’s Targets (starring Boris Karloff), production designer on The Man With Two Brains and The Witches of Eastwick, and executive producer of the 2011 A&E documentary Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel.

Italian film director and journalist Gualtiero Jacopetti, who created the exploitation “Mondo” genre with his 1962 documentary Mondo Cane (A Dog’s Life), died on 17 August, aged ninety-one. The film was a huge commercial success and led to a number of similar “shockumentaries” in the mid-1960s. J. G. Ballard incorporated the director’s aesthetics into his fragmentary novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

Scottish-born BAFTA and Emmy Award-winning TV and film director Alastair Reid died the same day, aged seventy-two. His credits include The Night Digger (scripted by Roald Dahl), Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1980, starring David Hemmings), Artemis 81, and two episodes of Tales of the Unexpected.

Iranian-born Reza [Sayed] Badiyi, who holds the Directors Guild of America record for directing more television episodes than anybody else, died in Los Angeles on 21 August, aged eighty-one. He shot the iconic “wave curl” title sequence for Hawaii Five-0 and the opening sequence for Get Smart. His numerous other credits include episodes of Mission: Impossible, The Magician, The Six Million Dollar Man, Man from Atlantis, Holmes and Yo-Yo, The Incredible Hulk, The Phoenix, Superboy, Dinosaurs, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Nowhere Man, Viper, Baywatch Nights, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Mortal Combat: Conquest, Sliders and Early Edition. Badiyi also directed the 1972 TV movie The Eyes of Charles Sands, and he was assistant director on Carnival of Souls (1962), in which he made an uncredited appearance as a bus ticket customer.

Veteran American TV director Charles S. Durbin (Charles Samuel Dubronevski) died on 5 September, aged ninety-two. He helmed episodes of such shows as Tales of Tomorrow (including an adaptation of Cyril M. Kornbluth’s “Little Black Bag”), Tarzan (1966), The New People, Ghost Story, Kung Fu, Man from Atlantis, Tabitha, Supertrain, Herbie the Love Bug and Starman, along with the TV movies Cinderella (1965), Death in Space and Topper (1979). In 1958 Durbin was blacklisted for four years by the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

American underground film-maker, comics artist and teacher George (Andrew) Kuchar, died of prostate cancer on 6 September, aged sixty-nine. He began making 8mm films in the 1950s with his twin brother Mike, and his numerous experimental and avant-garde short films include such titles as The Slasher, I Was a Teenage Rumpot, The Fall of the House of Yasmin, Route 666, Hush Hush Sweet Harlot, Planet of the Vamps, Kiss of Frankenstein and The Fury of Frau Frankenstein. In 1975 he published a cartoon biography of H. P. Lovecraft in Arcade #3, which offended many fans of the writer.

Highly-respected Hollywood producer and studio executive John Calley died of cancer after a long illness on 13 September, aged eighty-one. His film credits include The Loved One, 13 (aka Eye of the Devil), Castle Keep and Catch-22. After leaving the movie industry in 1980 for more than a decade, he returned to produce The Da Vinci Code and its sequel, Angels & Demons. Calley received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award in 2009 from The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences. His second wife was actress Meg Tilly.

Canadian film producer John Dunning died on 19 September, aged eighty-four. He co-founded Cinepix (later Lions Gate Films) in 1962, and his movie credits include The Sensual Sorceress, Death Weekend, David Cronenberg’s Shivers and Rabid, My Bloody Valentine (1981 and 2009 versions), Happy Birthday to Me, Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, Whispers and The Incredible Adventures of Marco Polo and His Journeys to the End of the Earth.

Fritz Manes, a boyhood school friend of Clint Eastwood who went on to produce a number of the actor’s movies, including Firefox, Tightrope and Pale Rider, died on 27 September, aged seventy-nine. He also produced Ratboy (1986), directed by Eastwood’s former girlfriend, Sandra Locke.

Fifty-six-year-old technology guru Steve Jobs (Steven Paul Jobs), who co-created Apple Computer Inc. in 1977 with Steve Wozniak, died of respiratory arrest stemming from a metastatic pancreatic tumour on 5 October. He had been diagnosed with a rare form pancreatic cancer in 2003. In 1986, Jobs purchased a computer graphics firm from George Lucas and renamed it Pixar Animation Studios. In 1991 the company signed a deal with Disney, and Jobs is credited as an executive producer on Toy Story (1995).

Welsh-born TV director and scriptwriter [Alan] Paul Dickson died on 6 October, aged ninety-one. An award-winning documentary film-maker, he also helmed episodes of Colonel March of Scotland Yard (starring Boris Karloff), The Avengers, The Champions, Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) and Department S. In 1956 Dickson directed the low budget SF film Satellite in the Sky.

Yugoslavia-born cinematographer Andrew Laszlo (András László) died in Montana on 7 October, aged eighty-five. After beginning his career in documentaries (including The Beatles at Shea Stadium), he worked on Miracle on 34th Street (1973), The Dain Curse, The Funhouse, Southern Comfort, Streets of Fire, Remo: Unarmed and Dangerous, Poltergeist II: The Other Side, Innerspace, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Ghost Dad.

Iranian-born Hollywood costume designer Ray Aghayan (Reymond G. Aghayan) died on 10 October, aged eighty-three. His credits include Our Man Flint, In Like Flint and Doctor Dolittle (1967), along with more than a dozen Academy Awards shows. He won an Emmy Award with his lifetime partner Bob Mackie for the costumes in an all-star TV version of Alice Through the Looking Glass (1966).

Prolific British TV director Peter Hammond (Peter Charles Hammond Hill) died on 12 October, aged eighty-seven. A former actor (the 1949 Helter Skelter, Hammer’s X The Unknown), he began directing in the early 1960s and his credits include episodes of Out of This World (hosted by Boris Karloff), The Avengers, Out of the Unknown, Wuthering Heights (1978), Tales of the Unexpected, Shades of Darkness, The Return of Sherlock Holmes, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. In 1987, Hammond also directed the Holmes TV movie The Sign of Four and the BBC mini-series Dark Angel (aka Uncle Silas), based on the Gothic novel by J. Sheridan Le Fanu.

British-born film producer Richard Gordon died in New York City on 1 November, aged eighty-five. Along with his older brother Alex, Gordon moved to the US in 1947, starting up his own distribution company, Gordon Films, on the East Coast. This resulted in him entering into co-production deals with various European companies, and he produced or executive produced such films as The Haunted Strangler (aka Grip of the Strangler, starring Boris Karloff), Fiend Without a Face, Corridors of Blood (with Karloff and Christopher Lee), First Man Into Space, The Playgirls and the Vampire, Devil Doll (1964), Curse of the Voodoo (aka Curse of Simba), The Projected Man, Naked Evil (aka Exorcism at Midnight), Island of Terror (starring Peter Cushing), Secrets of Sex (aka Bizarre), Tower of Evil (aka The Horror of Snape Island/Beyond the Fog), Horror Hospital (with Michael Gough), The Cat and the Canary (1978) and Inseminoid (aka Horror Planet). Gordon also “presented” such films as Metempsyco (aks Tomb of Torture) and Cave of the Living Dead to the American market. He became Bela Lugosi’s agent in the 1950s, and after a UK theatrical tour of Dracula flopped in 1951, he came up with the story idea for the comedy Mother Riley Meets the Vampire (aka My Son the Vampire) starring the ailing actor.

Hollywood costume designer Theadora Van Runkle (Dorothy Schweppe) died of lung cancer on 4 November, aged eighty-two. Best known for her designs for Bonnie and Clyde, Bullitt and The Godfather Part II, she also worked on Myra Breckinridge, Johnny Got His Gun, Peggy Sue Got Married and White Dwarf, along with the TV series Wizards and Warriors.

British TV producer and director Mark [William] Hall died after a short illness on 17 November, aged seventy-five. With his college friend Brian Cosgrove, Hall formed their own animation company, Cosgrove Hall Productions, in 1976, and together they created such children’s shows as Jamie and the Magic Torch, Creepy Crawlies, The Wind in the Willows, Count Duckula, Oh! Mr Toad, Danger Mouse, Noddy’s Toyland Adventures, Fantomcat and Truckers, Soul Music and Wyrd Sisters (all based on novels by Terry Pratchett). Hall also co-produced TV movies of Cinderella (1979), The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1981), The Wind in the Willows (1983), The Reluctant Dragon (1987) and Roald Dahl’s The BFG (1989).

British film production designer Syd Cain died on 21 November, aged ninety-three. His credits include Fahrenheit 451 (based on the novel by Ray Bradbury), Billion Dollar Brain, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy and TV’s The New Avengers. As an art director, Cain also contributed to The Road to Hong Kong, Dr No and Live and Let Die, and he worked in various capacities on Uncle Silas (1947), The Gamma People, Supergirl, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Neverending Story III: The Return to Fantasia, GoldenEye and Tarzan and the Lost City.

Eighty-four-year-old maverick British director Ken Russell (Henry Kenneth Alfred Russell) died on 27 November, following a series of strokes. After making a string of acclaimed TV documentaries and short films for the BBC in the late 1950s — early ’60s, he transferred his talents to the cinema, where he directed a number of flamboyant and often controversial movies, including Billion Dollar Brain, The Devils, Tommy, Lisztomania, Altered States, Gothic, The Lair of the White Worm, the homemade comedy-musical The Fall of the Louse of Usher: A Gothic Tale for the 21st Century, the “Girl with Golden Breasts” episode of the anthology horror movie Trapped Ashes, and the short Revenge of the Elephant Man. Russell made cameo appearances in a number of his own films, and had a role in the 2011 zombie comedy Invasion of the Not Quite Dead.

The 35mm Motion Picture Camera officially died in 2011. In an article written by Debra Kaufman for the Creative Cow website, it was revealed that ARRI, Panavision and Aaton had all ceased making them, concentrating instead on professional digital cameras.

Maverick American film producer and political activist Bert Schneider (Berton Jerome Schneider), who co-produced the Emmy Award-winning TV series The Monkees (1966–68) and the music group’s psychedelic spin-off movie Head (1968), died on 12 December, aged seventy-eight. Schneider’s other credits include Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show and Days of Heaven.

Australian-born scriptwriter and director Don Sharp (Donald Herman Sharp), who made six films with Christopher Lee, died in Cornwall, England, on 14 December, aged eighty-nine. A former actor, he moved to the UK after World War II and started directing in the mid-1950s. Although not prolific, Sharp was always a stylish director and his credits include Hammer’s The Kiss of the Vampire, The Devil-Ship Pirates and Rasputin the Mad Monk, along with Witchcraft (with Lon Chaney, Jr.), Curse of the Fly, The Face of Fu Manchu and The Brides of Fu Manchu, Rocket to the Moon (aka Those Fantastic Flying Fools), Dark Places, Psychomania (aka The Death Wheelers) and What Waits Below (aka Secrets of the Phantom Caverns). Sharp also directed three episodes of The Avengers, plus an episode each of The Champions and Hammer House of Horror (“Guardian of the Abyss”). As an actor, he also had a leading role in the 1953 BBC Radio serial Journey Into Space.