Milton Katselas, Acting Teacher and Director, Dies he was 75

Milton Katselas died he was 75. He was a Greek-American film director and famous Hollywood coach for The Beverly Hills Playhouse. He has taught such stars as Gene Hackman, Jason Beghe, Jenna Elfman, George Clooney, Alec Baldwin, Giovanni Ribisi, Tom Selleck, Michelle Pfeiffer, Ted Danson, Tony Danza, Jeffrey Tambor, Gene Reynolds, Tyne Daly, Mel Harris, Catherine Bell, Sofia Milos, Elizabeth Sung and many more.
(December 22, 1933 - October 24, 2008)

Milton Katselas was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S., to Greek immigrant parents, who had a tiny restaurant right outside the gates of a Westinghouse Electric plant. When Katselas was 14 years old, his father went into the movie theater business and ran a local theater company of Greek actors, and Milton himself would sing.

After high school, Katselas set off for Pittsburgh's Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) to study theater. On a visit to New York, he sneaked in to watch Lee Strasberg's acting class where he also saw renowned director Elia Kazan on the street and chased him down. "I talked to him in Greek, and he talked with me", Katselas recalls. "He told me, `When you finish college, come see me.'" Katselas did. Following graduation in 1954, he began studying with Strasberg and serving as an apprentice to Kazan.

After working with several other big-name directors, including Joshua Logan, Joseph Anthony, and Sanford Meisner, Katselas struck out on his own, making his Off-Broadway his reputation as a theater director debut in New York, on the original 1960 production of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story. He was nominated for a Tony Award for the Broadway production of Leonard Gershe's Butterflies Are Free in 1969, and also directed the 1972 movie version starring Goldie Hawn, Edward Albert, and Eileen Heckart, who won an Academy Award for her role. The following year he reunited with Gershe and Albert for the film 40 Carats. His other credits include the Broadway shows Camino Real and The Rose Tattoo, local productions of The Seagull, Romeo and Juliet, and Streamers - all of which won him L.A. Drama Critics Circle awards for best direction. In 1983, Katselas directed a revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives, the only Broadway stage production in which Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton co-starred together. However, after the show was panned in its Boston tryout, Taylor, who was a producer, fired Katselas, yet he retained his directing credit for the Broadway run.

He also directed the screen adaptation of Mark Medoff's When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?.

Katselas had also been active as a writer, painter and acting teacher for over twenty years. He wrote a book titled Dreams Into Action which garnished international attention and has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show discussing the book's success.

He was a long-time Scientologist, having been introduced to it in 1965, and had attained the Scientology state of Operating Thetan. A number of Hollywood celebrities were introduced to Scientology by means of Katselas' acting workshops Katselas died of heart failure on October 24, 2008 at the Los Angeles hospital Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. more

John Leonard, Critic, Dies he was 69

John Leonard the Critic died he was 69. John was an American literary, television, film, and cultural critic.

(February 25, 1939 – November 5, 2008)
John Leonard grew up in Washington, D.C., Jackson Heights, Queens, and Long Beach, California, where he graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School. Raised by a single mother, Ruth Smith, he made his way to Harvard University, where he immersed himself in the school newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, only to drop out in the spring of his sophomore year. He then attended the University of California at Berkeley.

An acerbic leftist, Leonard had an unlikely early patron in conservative leader William F. Buckley, who gave him his first job in journalism at National Review magazine in 1959. There, he worked alongside such young talents as Joan Didion, Garry Wills, Renata Adler and Arlene Croce. Leonard went on to be Drama and Literature Director for Pacifica Radio flagship KPFA in Berkeley, where he featured a then-little-known Pauline Kael and served as the house book reviewer, delighting in the torrent of galleys sent him by publishers. He worked as an English teacher in Roxbury, Massachusetts, as a union organizer of migrant farm workers, and as a community organizer for Vietnam Summer before joining The New York Times Book Review in 1967.

The paper promoted him to daily book reviewer in 1969 and made him the executive editor of the Times Book Review in 1971 at the age of 31. In 1975, he returned to the role of daily book reviewer, championing the work of women writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Mary Gordon. He was the first critic to review Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison and the first American critic to review Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez. From 1977 to 1980, Leonard wrote "Private Lives," a weekly column for the Times about his family, friends, and experiences.

Leonard was a voracious critical omnivore, writing on culture, politics, television, books and the media in many other venues, including The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Playboy, Penthouse, Vanity Fair, TV Guide, Ms. Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Newsweek, New York Woman, Memories, Tikkun, The Yale Review, The Village Voice, New Statesman, The Boston Globe, Washington Post Book World, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, American Heritage and Salon.com. He reviewed books for National Public Radio's Fresh Air and wrote a column for New York Newsday called “Culture Shock.” He hosted WGBH's First Edition, and reviewed books, TV and movies on CBS Sunday Morning for 16 years. Leonard taught creative writing and criticism at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. He told the story of Japanese author Kōbō Abe in every one of these venues.

Leonard wrote extensively about television in his career – for Life and The New York Times, both under the pen name Cyclops, for New York Magazine from 1984 to 2008, and in his 1997 book Smoke and Mirrors. In addition, he authored four novels and five collections of essays.

Leonard was co-literary editor of The Nation with his wife, Sue Leonard, from 1995 to 1998, and continued as a contributing editor for the magazine. He wrote a monthly column on new books for Harper's magazine and was a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books. Leonard rated highest among literary critics in a 2006 Time Out New York survey of writers and publishers. He received the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.

Leonard died on November 5, 2008, of lung cancer, aged 69. He is survived by his his mother, Ruth, wife Sue, two children from his first marriage – Salon.com columnist Andrew Leonard and Georgetown University history professor Amy Leonard – and a stepdaughter, Jen Nessel, who heads the communications department at the Center for Constitutional Rights, as well as three grandchildren: Tiana and Eli Miller-Leonard and Oscar Ray Arnold-Nessel.
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Samuel Adrian Baugh died he was 94

Samuel Adrian Baugh died he was an American football player and coach. He played college football for the Horned Frogs at Texas Christian University, where he was a two-time All-American. He then played in the National Football League for the Washington Redskins from 1937 to 1952. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in the 17-member charter class of 1963. He was known as "Slingin' Sammy".Baugh was born on a farm near Temple, Texas, and was the second son of James, who worked for the Santa Fe Railroad, and Lucy Baugh. His parents later divorced and his mother raised the three children. When he was 16, the family then moved to Sweetwater, Texas and he attended Sweetwater High School. As the quarterback of his high school football team, he would practice for hours throwing a football through a swinging automobile tire, often on the run. But apparently, Baugh would practice punting more than throwing. (March 17, 1914 – December 17, 2008)

Baugh, however, really wanted to become a professional baseball player and almost received a scholarship to play at Washington State University. But about a month before he started at Washington State, Baugh hurt his knee while sliding into second base during a game, and the scholarship fell through.


As expected, Baugh was drafted in the first round (sixth overall) of the 1937 NFL Draft by the Washington Redskins, the same year the team moved from Boston. He signed a one-year contract with the Redskins and received $8,000, making him the highest paid player on the team.

During his rookie season in 1937, Baugh played quarterback, defensive back, and punter, set an NFL record for completions with 91 in 218 attempts and threw for a league-high 1,127 yards. He led the Redskins to the NFL Championship game against the Chicago Bears, where he finished 17 of 33 for 335 yards and his second-half touchdown passes of 55, 78 and 33 yards gave Washington a 28–21 victory. The Redskins and Bears would meet three times in championship games between 1940 and 1943. In the 1940 Championship game, the Bears recorded the most one-sided victory in NFL history, beating Washington 73–0.

In 1942, Baugh and the Redskins won the East Conference with a 10–1 record. During the same season the Bears went 11-0 and outscored their opponents 376-84. In the 1942 Championship game, Baugh threw a touchdown pass and kept the Bears in their own territory with some strong punts, including an 85-yard quick kick, and Washington won 14-6.[2]

Baugh was even more successful in 1943 and led the league in passing, punting (45.9-yard average) and interceptions (11). One of Baugh's more memorable single performances during the season was when he threw four touchdown passes and intercepted four passes in a 42–20 victory over Detroit. The Redskins again made it to the championship game, but lost to the Bears 41–21. During the game, Baugh suffered a concussion while tackling Bears quarterback Sid Luckman and had to leave.

During the 1945 season, Baugh completed 128 of 182 passes for a 70.33 completion percentage, which was an NFL record then and remains the second best today (to Ken Anderson, 70.55 in 1982) He threw 11 touchdown passes and only four interceptions. The Redskins again won the East Conference but lost 15–14 in the 1945 Championship game against the Cleveland Rams. The one-point margin of victory came under scrutiny because of a safety that occurred early in the game. In the first quarter, the Redskins had the ball at their own 5-yard (4.6 m) line. Dropping back into the end zone, Baugh threw to an open receiver, but the ball hit the goal post (which at the time were on the goal line instead of at the back of the end zone) and bounced back to the ground in the end zone. Under the rules at the time, this was ruled as a safety and thus gave the Rams a 2–0 lead. It was that safety that proved to be the margin of victory. Owner Marshall was so mad at the outcome that he became a major force in passing the following major rule change after the season: A forward pass that strikes the goal posts is automatically ruled incomplete. This later became known as the "Baugh/Marshall Rule".


One of Baugh's more memorable single performances came on "Sammy Baugh Day" on November 23, 1947. That day, the Washington D.C. Touchdown Club honored him at Griffith Stadium and gave him a station wagon. Against the Chicago Cardinals he passed for 355 yards and six touchdowns. That season, the Redskins finished 4–8, but Baugh had career highs in completions (210), attempts (354), yards (2,938) and touchdown passes (25), leading the league in all four categories.

Baugh played for five more years -- leading the league in completion percentage for the sixth and seventh times in 1948 and 1949. He then retired after the 1952 season. In his final game, a 27–21 win over Philadelphia at Griffith Stadium, he played for several minutes before retiring to a prolonged standing ovation from the crowd. Baugh won a record-setting six NFL passing titles and earned first-team All-NFL honors seven times in his career. He completed 1,693 of 2,995 passes for 21,886 yards



By the time he retired, Baugh set 13 NFL records in three player positions: quarterback, punter, and defensive back. He is considered one of the all-time great football players, together with Jim Brown and Jerry Rice. He gave birth to the fanaticism of Redskins fans. As Michael Wilbon of the Washington Post says: "He brought not just victories but thrills and ignited Washington with a passion even the worst Redskins periods can barely diminish." He was the first to play the position of quarterback as it is played today, the first to make of the forward pass an effective weapon rather than an "act of desperation". He was the last surviving member of the inaugural class inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1963, including Bronko Nagurski, Red Grange, Jim Thorpe, Curly Lambeau, Don Hutson, George Halas, Ernie Nevers, and Mel Hein.

Two of his records as quarterback still stand: most seasons leading the league in passing (six; tied with Steve Young) and most seasons leading the league with the lowest interception percentage (five). He is also second in highest single-season completion percentage (70.33), most seasons leading the league in yards gained (four) and most seasons leading the league in completion percentage (seven).

As a punter, Baugh retired with the NFL record for highest punting average in a career (45.1 yards), and is still second all-time (Shane Lechler 46.5 yards), and has the best (51.4 in 1940) and third best (48.7 in 1941) season marks. As a defensive back, he was the first player in league history to intercept four passes in a game, and is the only player to lead the league in passing, punting, and interceptions in the same season. Baugh also led the league in punting from 1940 through 1943.

When comparing Baugh's athletic achievements with modern football greats, two challenges he faced merit consideration: 1) the actual football he threw to all those touchdowns was rounder at the ends and fatter in the middle than the one used today, making it far more difficult to pass well (or even to create a proper spiral); and, 2) he never played for a great coach, Ray Flaherty being the best in a long line.



Early in his career, Baugh paid $200 an acre for a 7,600-acre ranch in West Texas, 80 miles northwest of Abilene. After retiring from football all together, Baugh and Edmonia Smith, his wife, moved to the ranch and had four boys and a girl. Edmonia died in 1990, after 52 years of marriage to Baugh, who was her high school sweetheart.


Baugh lived in a nursing home in a little West Texas town not far from Double Mountain Ranch. The Double Mountain Ranch is now in the hands of Baugh's son David and is still a cow-calf operation, on 20,000 acres


December 17, 2008, saying Baugh had died after numerous health issues at Fisher County Hospital in Rotan, Texas

Baugh was the last surviving member of the 17-member charter class of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.[3] Additionally he was honored by the Redskins with the retirement of his jersey number, #33, the only number the team has officially retired. more

Michael Pate died he was 88

He was born Edward John Pate, on 26 February 1920 in Drummoyne, Sydney. In 1938, he became a writer and broadcaster for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, collaborating with George Ivan Smith on Youth Speaks. For the remainder of the 1930s he worked primarily in radio drama. He also published theatrical and literary criticism. He enjoyed brief success as an author of short stories, publishing works in Australia and the United States.

During World War II, Pate served in the Australian Army in the South West Pacific Area. He was transferred to the 1st Australian Army Amenities Entertainment Unit, known as "The Islanders", entertaining Australian troops in various combat areas.

After the war, Pate returned to radio, appearing in many plays and serials. Between 1946 and 1950 he began breaking into films. In 1949 he appeared in his first leading role in Sons of Matthew. In 1950 he appeared in Bitter Springs with Tommy Trinder and Chips Rafferty.

Also in 1950, Pate adapted, produced, and directed two plays — Dark of the Moon and Bonaventure. Later that year he travelled to the U.S. to appear in a film adaptation of Bonaventure for Universal Pictures. This was released in 1951 as Thunder on the Hill, starring Claudette Colbert and Ann Blyth. In 1956 he appeared in the film The Court Jester.

Pate spent most of the 1950s in the U.S., appearing in over three hundred TV shows. Most notable among these was a 1953 Climax! live production of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, in which Pate played the role of "Clarence Leiter" (instead of Felix, in the credits), opposite Barry Nelson's "Jimmy Bond".

During his time in the U.S., Pate became an acting instructor and lecturer, and wrote many screenplays and teleplays for the major American networks. In 1959, he returned briefly to Australia, where he starred in the TV program The Shell Hour. He returned to the U.S. for another eight years, during which he enjoyed a successful career as a television character actor, appearing repeatedly on such programs as Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, Branded, The Virginian, Batman, Mission: Impossible ("Trek"), The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Get Smart, Rawhide ("Incident of the Power and the Plow"), and Wagon Train. In the 1963 movie PT 109 he played the part of Arthur Reginald Evans, the Australian coast watcher who helped rescue John F. Kennedy and his crew.

In 1968, Pate returned to Australia and became a television producer, winning two Logie Awards while working at the Seven Network. In 1970, he published a textbook on acting, The Film Actor. From 1971 to 1975 he starred as Detective Sergeant Vic Maddern in Matlock Police. In 1977 he wrote and produced The Mango Tree, starring his son Christopher Pate.

Pate continued working in theatre in both Sydney and Melbourne. In 1979, he adapted the screenplay for Tim from the novel by Colleen McCullough. The film would star Mel Gibson and Piper Laurie. For his adaptation, Pate won the Best Screenplay Award from the Australian Writers Guild.

During the early 1980s Pate and his son Christopher collaborated in a stage production of Mass Appeal. This was a success, and closed with a season at the Sydney Opera House.

Although Pate retired from acting in 2001 he remained busy with voiceover work, and was writing a screenplay at the time of his death. He was married to Felippa Rock, daughter of American film producer Joe Rock. He died on 1 September 2008 at Gosford Hospital, of pneumonia and a chest infection.

William Gibson (playwright) died he was 94

William Gibson playwright has died he was 94. He was a Tony Award-winning American playwright and novelist. He graduated from the City College of New York in 1938. (November 13, 1914 – November 25, 2008)

Gibson's most famous play is The Miracle Worker (1959), the story of Helen Keller's childhood education, which won him the Tony Award for Best Play. His other works include Dinny and the Witches (1948, revised 1961), in which a jazz musician incurs the wrath of three Shakespearean witches by blowing a riff which stops time; the Tony Award-nominated Two for the Seesaw (1958), a recounting of which appeared the following year in Gibson's nonfiction book The Seesaw Log; the book for the musical version of Clifford Odets' Golden Boy (1964), which earned him yet another Tony nomination; A Mass for the Dead (1968), an autobiographical family chronicle; A Cry of Players (1968), a speculative account of the life of young William Shakespeare; Goodly Creatures (1980), about Puritan dissident Anne Hutchinson; Monday After the Miracle (1982), a continuation of the Keller story; and Golda (1977), a work about the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, which in its revised version Golda's Balcony (2003) set a record as the longest-running one-woman play in Broadway history on January 2, 2005.[1]

In 1954 he published a novel, The Cobweb, set in a psychiatric hospital resembling the Menninger Clinic. In 1955, the novel was adapted as a movie by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.


Gibson contributed to an episode of the popular television series The X-Files and continued to write into his nineties. In an interview in 2003 he said: “I’ve always found the business of writing has helped me to live.”
He married Margaret Brenman, a psychotherapist and biographer of Clifford Odets, in 1940. She died in 2004. He is survived by his two sons.
William Gibson, playwright, was born on November 13, 1914. He died on November 25, 2008, aged 94

Beverly Garland Died she was 81

Beverly Garland died she was 81. Garland was an American film and television actress, businesswoman and hotel owner. Garland gained prominence for her role as Fred MacMurray's second wife, "Barbara Harper Douglas," in the long-running 1960s sitcom, My Three Sons (a role she played from 1969 until the series ended in 1972). In the 1980s, she co-starred as Kate Jackson's widowed mother, "Dotty West," in the television series Scarecrow and Mrs. King, on CBS. She also had a recurring role on the WB series, 7th Heaven. (October 17, 1926 - December 5, 2008)

Garland was born Beverly Lucy Fessenden, in Santa Cruz, California, the daughter of Amelia Rose, who worked in business, and James Atkins Fessenden, a singer and salesman. Garland grew up in Glendale, California. Her 1950s acting roles tended to be tough women who could handle themselves in violent situations. 1956 was a busy year for Garland as she played a female sheriff in the Western Gunslinger, a prison escapee in Swamp Women and a scientist's wife who battles an alien in It Conquered the World (All three movies were directed by Roger Corman and were spoofed in the 1990s by Mystery Science Theater 3000.). Garland then starred as undercover police officer, "Casey Jones," in the syndicated TV series Decoy.

In 1957, Beverly made television history as the star of the syndicated TV series Decoy, the first American television police series with a woman in the starring role. It, however only lasted a single season, with 39 episodes made. This groundbreaking series,despite its relatively short run, paved the way for many future police/detective shows starring women, such as NBC's Police Woman starring Angie Dickinson , ABC's Honey West starring Anne Francis,CBS's Cagney and Lacey, starring Tyne Daly and Sharon Gless , and ABC'S Charlie's Angels starring Kate Jackson .

Although Garland co-starred with Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld in the 1968 feature film Pretty Poison, she is best known for playing suburban moms on several TV series. Garland appeared as "Barbara Harper Douglas," second wife of "Steve Douglas" (Fred MacMurray), for the final three seasons of My Three Sons (1969-72) and as "Dotty West," mother of "Mrs. King" (Kate Jackson) on all four seasons of the lighthearted espionage drama, Scarecrow and Mrs. King (1983-87). Garland was also featured in the successful series Remington Steele as the mother of Stephanie Zimbalist's character, detective Laura Holt.

Her decades of TV guest appearances range from the first-season Twilight Zone episode "The Four of Us Are Dying," about a con artist with a thousand faces (1960). Garland also guest starred in an episode in the final season of Kung Fu. She reprised her earlier Western personae as a tough gun-slinging widow. She appeared on the Mary Tyler Moore Show as a long-ago girlfriend of Lou Grant. Garland also had a recurring role as "Lois Lane's" mother on the 1990s TV series Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, starring Teri Hatcher. On 7th Heaven, she appeared opposite Peter Graves, the brother of James Arness who played "Marshal Matt Dillon" on Gunsmoke. Garland was a frequent guest star during "Gunsmoke's" long run, which ended in 1975.

On radio, Garland is an original player of the California Actors Radio Theatre. C.A.R.T. often records its programs on the grounds of Garland's hotel in The Beverly Garland Little Theater which is decorated with large movie posters from many of Garland's feature films.

For her contribution to the television industry, Garland has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6801 Hollywood Blvd.



In 1999 her husband of 39 years, businessman Filmore Crank, died. Subsequently, Garland combined her acting career with an increased devotion to the hotel Crank built and named for her. Situated on the former Gene Autry property, the sprawling 255-room Spanish-Mission style resort Beverly Garland Holiday Inn and Conference Center is located in North Hollywood.

Garland's daughter, actress Carrington Garland is perhaps best known for her portrayal of the third Kelly Capwell on the soap opera Santa Barbara.



On December 5, 2008, Garland died in her Hollywood Hills, California home. A memorial service and lavish reception was attended by several hundred people on December 13th at her namesake hotel property, Beverly Garland's Holiday Inn in North Hollywood. more

Sam Bottoms died he was 53

Samuel John "Sam" Bottoms died he was 53, Bottom was an American actor and producer. (October 17, 1955 – December 16, 2008)

He is perhaps best remembered for his role as Lance Johnson, a Navy Gunner's Mate stationed on a river boat in Francis Ford Coppola's 20th century opus, Apocalypse Now.

Bottoms earlier appeared with Clint Eastwood in The Outlaw Josey Wales.

At the age of 16 while watching the shooting of the film The Last Picture Show, which his older brother Timothy was starring in, Peter Bogdanovich decided to give him a screen test. Sam ended up getting the part of Billy in the movie.



He died of glioblastoma multiforme, a type of brain tumor, on December 16, 2008.[3]


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