Eric Rohmer died he was 89

French New Wave director Eric Rohmer, known for "My Night at Maud's," ''Claire's Knee," and other films about the intricacies of romantic relationships and the dilemmas of modern love, died on Monday. He was 89. Rohmer, also an influential film critic early in his career, died in Paris, said Les Films du Losange, the production company he co-founded. The cause of death was not immediately given. The director — internationally known for his films' long, philosophical conversations — continued to work until recently. His latest film, the 17th-century costume tale "Les amours d'Astree et de Celadon," ("Romance of Astree and Celadon"), appeared in 2007. In 2001, Rohmer was awarded a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival for his body of work — dozens of films made over a five-decade career. Rohmer's movies were full of romantic temptation and love triangles, pretty girls and handsome youths. Often they took a lighthearted, chatty form, with serious themes hidden under the surface. French President Nicolas Sarkozy paid tribute to a "great auteur who will continue to speak to us and inspire us for years to come." "Classic and romantic, wise and iconoclast, light and serious, sentimental and moralist, he created the 'Rohmer' style, which will outlive him," Sarkozy said in a statement. Six of Rohmer's films comprised an influential cycle of "moral tales" that addressed the thorny questions of modern love: whether to compromise your beliefs in the face of passion, for example, or how to maintain a sense of individual freedom in a relationship. In 1969's "Ma nuit chez Maud" ("My Night at Maud's"), a churchgoing young engineer played by Jean-Louis Trintignant must choose between a seductive divorcee and a woman who meets his ideals. The film's screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1970's "Le Genou de Claire" ("Claire's Knee"), a diplomat is overwhelmed by his desire to stroke the knee of a teenage girl he meets. France's culture minister, Frederic Mitterrand, said Rohmer's "very personal, very original" movies appealed to cinephiles and ordinary filmgoers alike. Serge Toubiana — who heads the Cinematheque, France's famous film preservation society — said Rohmer worked closely with his crews and described his creative process as a collaborative effort with the actors. "He knew that he needed them and because of that he showered them with love," Toubiana told France Info radio. "Each film was a kind of shared game, with its own rules in which each person played his role." Born in 1920 in the central French city of Tulle, Rohmer got his start as a literature professor and a film critic for the influential Cahiers du Cinema magazine, becoming its editor. Though his name at birth was Maurice Scherer, he created his artistic pseudonym by rearranging the sounds in his first and last name to come up with Rohmer, he told Le Monde newspaper in 2007. As a director, Rohmer became a leading force in France's convention-smashing New Wave cinema, alongside directors Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, his colleagues at the Cahiers. With Claude Chabrol, another director, Rohmer published a classic study on one of their heroes, Alfred Hitchcock. Along with his series of moral tales, Rohmer produced a cycle of modern-day relationship fables for each season of the year, and another dubbed the cycle of "comedies and proverbs," with each film taking its inspiration from a proverb. One popular film in that series was 1983's "Pauline a la plage" ("Pauline at the Beach"), focusing on a teenager on a seaside holiday. Thierry Fremaux, who runs the Cannes Film Festival, told BFM television that though Rohmer's films weren't "trendy," they were timeless. "He proved that you can make great movies with small budgets," Fremaux said. "And that's good to keep in mind in the times we live in." Rohmer was a very private person, but his survivors are believed to include his younger brother, philosopher Rene Scherer, and his son journalist Rene Monzat. To see more of who died in 2010 click here

Miep Gies died she was 100

Miep Gies, the office secretary who defied the Nazi occupiers to hide Anne Frank and her family for two years and saved the teenager's diary, has died, the Anne Frank Museum said Tuesday. She was 100.

Gies' Web site reported that she died Monday after a brief illness. The report was confirmed by museum spokeswoman Maatje Mostar, but she gave no details. The British Broadcasting Corp. said she died in a nursing home after suffering a fall last month.

Gies was the last of the few non-Jews who supplied food, books and good cheer to the secret annex behind the canal warehouse where Anne, her parents, sister and four other Jews hid for 25 months during World War II.


After the apartment was raided by the German police, Gies gathered up Anne's scattered notebooks and papers and locked them in a drawer for her return after the war. The diary, which Anne Frank was given on her 13th birthday, chronicles her life in hiding from June 12, 1942 until August 1, 1944. Gies refused to read the papers, saying even a teenager's privacy was sacred. Later, she said if she had read them she would have had to burn them because they incriminated the "helpers."


Anne Frank died of typhus at age 15 in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, just two weeks before the camp was liberated. Gies gave the diary to Anne's father Otto, the only survivor, who published it in 1947.

After the diary was published, Gies tirelessly promoted causes of tolerance. She brushed aside the accolades for helping hide the Frank family as more than she deserved — as if, she said, she had tried to save all the Jews of occupied Holland.

"This is very unfair. So many others have done the same or even far more dangerous work," she wrote in an e-mail to The Associated Press days before her 100th birthday last February.

"The Diary of Anne Frank" was the first popular book about the Holocaust, and has been read by millions of children and adults around the world in some 65 languages.

For her courage, Gies was bestowed with the "Righteous Gentile" title by the Israeli Holocaust museum Yad Vashem. She has also been honored by the German Government, Dutch monarchy and educational institutions.

Nevertheless, Gies resisted being made a character study of heroism for the young.

"I don't want to be considered a hero," she said in a 1997 online chat with schoolchildren.

"Imagine young people would grow up with the feeling that you have to be a hero to do your human duty. I am afraid nobody would ever help other people, because who is a hero? I was not. I was just an ordinary housewife and secretary."

Born Hermine Santrouschitz on Feb. 15, 1909 in Vienna, Gies moved to Amsterdam in 1922 to escape food shortages in Austria. She lived with a host family who gave her the nickname Miep.

In 1933, Gies took a job as an office assistant in the spice business of Otto Frank. After refusing to join a Nazi organization in 1941, she avoided deportation to Austria by marrying her Dutch boyfriend, Jan Gies.

As the Nazis ramped up their arrests and deportations of Dutch Jews, Otto Frank asked Gies in July 1942 to help hide his family in the annex above the company's canal-side warehouse on Prinsengracht 263 and to bring them food and supplies.

"I answered, 'Yes, of course.' It seemed perfectly natural to me. I could help these people. They were powerless, they didn't know where to turn," she said years later.

Jan and Miep Gies worked with four other employees in the firm to sustain the Franks and four other Jews sharing the annex. Jan secured extra food ration cards from the underground resistance. Miep cycled around the city, alternating grocers to ward off suspicions from this highly dangerous activity.

In her e-mail to the AP last February, Gies remembered her husband, who died in 1993, as one of Holland's unsung war heroes. "He was a resistance man who said nothing but did a lot. During the war he refused to say anything about his work, only that he might not come back one night. People like him existed in thousands but were never heard," she wrote.

Touched by Anne's precocious intelligence and loneliness, Miep also brought Anne books and newspapers while remembering everybody's birthdays and special days with gifts.

"It seems as if we are never far from Miep's thoughts," Anne wrote.

In her own book, "Anne Frank Remembered," Gies recalled being in the office when the German police, acting on a tip that historians have failed to trace, raided the hide-out in August 1944.

A policeman opened the door to the main office and pointed a revolver at the three employees, telling them to sit quietly. "Bep, we've had it," Gies whispered to Bep Voskuijl.

After the arrests, she went to the police station to offer a bribe for the Franks' release, but it was too late. On Aug. 8, they were sent to Westerbork, a concentration camp in eastern Holland from where they were later packed into cattle cars and deported to Auschwitz. A few months later, Anne and her sister Margot were transported to Bergen-Belsen.

Two of the helpers, Victor Kugler and Johannes Kleiman, were sent to labor camps, but survived the war.

Around 140,000 Jews lived in the Netherlands before the 1940-45 Nazi occupation. Of those, 107,000 were deported to Germany and only 5,200 survived. Some 24,000 Jews went into hiding, of which 8,000 were hunted down or turned in.

After the war, Otto Frank returned to Amsterdam and lived with the Gies family until he remarried in 1952. Miep worked for him as he compiled the diary, then devoted herself to talking about the diary and answering piles of letters with questions from around the world.

After Otto Frank's death in 1980, Gies continued to campaign against Holocaust-deniers and to refute allegations that the diary was a forgery.

She suffered a stroke in 1997 which slightly affected her speech, but she remained generally in good health as she approached her 100th birthday.

Her son Paul Gies said last year she was still receiving "a sizable amount of mail" which she handled with the help of a family friend. She spent her days at the apartment where she lived since 2000 reading two daily newspapers and following television news and talk shows.

Her husband died in 1993. She is survived by her son and three grandchildren.

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Art Clokey died he was 88,

Arthur "Art" Clokey died he was 88. Clokey was a pioneer in the popularization of stop motion clay animation, beginning in 1955 with a film experiment called Gumbasia^[1], influenced by his professor Slavko Vorkapich at the University of Southern California.

From the Gumbasia project, Art Clokey and his wife Ruth invented Gumby. Since then Gumby and his horse Pokey have been a familiar presence on television, appearing in several series beginning with the "Howdy Doody Show" and later "The Adventures of Gumby."^[1] The characters enjoyed a renewal of interest in the 1980s when Eddie Murphy parodied Gumby in a skit on Saturday Night Live. In the 1990’s Gumby: The Movie came out sparking even more interest.^[1].

(born Arthur C. Farrington, October 12, 1921, Detroit, Michigan —died January 8, 2010)

Clokey's second most famous production is the duo of Davey and Goliath, funded by the Lutheran Church in America.

When Clokey was 9 years old, his parents divorced and he stayed with his father. After his father died in a car accident, he went to live with his mother in California, but was placed in a half-way house orphanage after one year because his stepfather did not want him around. At age 12, he was adopted by Joseph W. Clokey, a classical music composer and organist who taught music at Pomona College in Claremont, California, and who encouraged young Arthur's artistic inclinations. The aesthetic environment later became the home of Clokey's most famous character, Gumby, whose name derives from his childhood experiences during summer visits to his grandfather's farm, when he enjoyed playing with the clayey mud called "gumbo".

At Webb School in Claremont, young Clokey came under the influence of teacher Ray Alf, who took students on expeditions digging for fossils and learning about the world around them. Clokey later studied geology at Pomona College, where he received his undergraduate degree in 1943.

Art Clokey also made a few highly experimental and visually inventive short clay animation films for adults, including his first film Gumbasia, the visually rich Mandala—described by Clokey as a metaphor for evolving human consciousness—and the equally bizarre The Clay Peacock, an elaboration on the animated NBC logo of the time. These films have only recently become available via the Rhino box-set release of Gumby's television shorts, all appearing on the bonus DVD (disc 7).

His student film Gumbasia (1955), consisting of animated clay shapes contorting to a jazz score, so intrigued Samuel G. Engel, then president of the Motion Pictures Producers Association, that he financed the pilot film for what became Art Clokey's The Gumby Show (1957). The title Gumbasia is an homage to Walt Disney's Fantasia.

Clokey is credited with the clay-animation title sequence for the beach movie Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965), starring Vincent Price and Frankie Avalon. His son, Joe Clokey, continued the Davey and Goliath cartoon in 2004. In March 2007, KQED-TV broadcast an hour-long documentary "Gumby Dharma" as part of their Truly CA series.

In 2007, Princeton Architectural Press published an interview between Art Clokey and Dorian Devins (illustrated by Glenn Head) in "The Best of LCD (Lowest Common Denominator): The Art and Writing of WFMU" edited by Dave the Spazz.

Art Clokey died on January 8, 2010, aged 88, at his home in Los Osos, California.^[2]

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Blanca Sanchez died she was 63,

Actress Blanca Sánchez died she was 63. Sánchez died from a severe decrease in platelet levels in her blood. She was hospitalized for over a month at a medical center in Mexico City for serious kidney problems before passing, a passing that shocked doctors and her family.

Nine years ago the legendary actress received a kidney transplant and it was only a few months ago when it began to cause issues.

Blanca’s career began at age 11 with the soap opera nights of anguish. Among her most important telenovelas, she is remembered as the mother of both Quinceañera Thalia (1987) and Light and Shadow (1989). Other films include Time to Die, When the children leave, I am Chucho el Roto and Mama Dolores.

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Yvonne Zanos died she was 60

Yvonne Zanos has been fighting for consumers at KDKA since 1997. She lost her own personal battle with cancer. Yvonne passed away surrounded by family following a courageous two-year battle with ovarian cancer. She had just turned 60-years-old on Wednesday.

Born Yvonne Marquer, she grew up in the South Hills and graduated from Bethel Park High School and Bethany College.

Her magnetic smile attracted the notice of modeling agencies. She portrayed a warmth and occasional quirkiness that was easy to see.

Whether she was warning people about a scam -- letting them know about the latest product recalls or putting projects to the test in her "Does It Really Do That" segments, Yvonne loved to have fun and it showed.

A brief modeling career led to her selection as runner-up in the Miss Pennsylvania pageant. She took over the title when the winner went on to become Miss America.

She also caught they eye of former Pitt football star Jim Zanos. Their marriage led to two daughters, and five grandchildren -- four granddaughters and a grandson.

As a mother, she never tired of telling stories of her two daughters and their families.

Though she has worked as KDKA's consumer editor since 1997, this was actually her second stint at KDKA. Yvonne made her television debut on "Evening Magazine" in 1977.

Yvonne's humanitarian stories helped her win a prestigious Gabriel Award and many other honors. She was nominated several times for Mid-Atlantic Emmys and recently won the Patti Burns Award for excellence; but what really made her happy was helping others.

Yvonne's love for children carried over into her annual appearance on our Children's Hospital Free Care Fund telethon.

Her work for needy families also helped to feed thousands of needy residents through the KDKA Turkey Fund.

She fought off this increasingly debilitating illness to raise a record amount for the KDKA Turkey Fund this past Thanksgiving – despite a recession. It would be the final triumph for the reporter who has helped so many.

Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2007, Yvonne appeared as honorary chair of the Walk to Break the Silence on Ovarian Cancer in October.

Yvonne covered her private pain to deliver messages of hope to fellow survivors. She fought through the pain and exhaustion of her final months to visit schools and community organizations best described as heroic.

Yvonne shared her compassion, determination to make a difference and, of course, her laughter up to the very end.

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Jean Biden died she was 92

WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Jean Biden, who raised her son Vice President Joe Biden to believe in what he called "America's creed ... everyone is your equal," died Friday after falling seriously ill in recent days. She was 92.

In a statement, the vice president said she died in Wilmington surrounded by her family and loved ones. She had suffered a broken hip in a fall in March 2009.

"Together with my father, her husband of 61 years who passed away in 2002, we learned the dignity of hard work and that you are defined by your sense of honor," he said in the statement. "Her strength, which was immeasurable, will live on in all of us."

Joe Biden Jr. was first elected to the Senate in 1972, shortly before his 30th birthday. His mother helped out by organizing coffee klatches — part of a family effort that also included Biden's father, sister and brothers.

"Those of you who have met my mom, you know she's fairly politically astute, and she still runs the show," the vice president quipped shortly after she fell last year.



The former Catherine Eugenia Finnegan was born July 7, 1917, in Scranton, Pa. In 1941, she married businessman Joseph Biden Sr., with whom she had four children. The couple moved from Scranton to Claymont, Del., in 1953, when their eldest son, Joe, was 10 years old. Joseph Biden Sr. died in 2002 at age 86.

According to Biden's 2007 autobiography, "Promises to Keep," his mother had some reservations about whether he should risk a promising career as a young lawyer to enter politics.

"You're not going to run for Senate and ruin your reputation, are you?" he recalled his mother asking.

"And once Mom was reassured that my future was safe, win or lose, she would do anything," Biden wrote.

Biden was elected vice president as Barack Obama's running mate. In his speech at the Democratic National Convention in August 2008, he paid tribute to his mother, who was in the audience.

"My mother's creed is the American creed: No one is better than you," he said. "Everyone is your equal, and everyone is equal to you. My parents taught us to live our faith, and to treasure our families. We learned the dignity of work, and we were told that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough."

Biden said he also learned honor and loyalty from his mother.

"When I got knocked down by guys bigger than me, and this is the God's truth, she sent me back out the street and told me, 'Bloody their nose so you can walk down the street the next day.' And that's what I did."

Raised in a family with a strong Irish Catholic tradition, Jean Biden leaned on her faith in comforting her eldest son after his wife and daughter were killed in a car crash in December 1972, the month after he was elected to the Senate. His two sons were seriously injured.

"After the accident, she told me, 'Joey, God sends no cross that you cannot bear,'" Biden recalled.

In his autobiography, Joe Biden recalled being mocked by a seventh-grade nun for his stuttering, an incident that sent his mother to his school in a fury, her children in tow.

"If you ever speak to my son like that again, I'll come back and rip that bonnet off your head. Do you understand me?" she told the nun.

Joe Biden also recalled how when his mother couldn't find a pair of cufflinks for him to wear to an eighth-grade dance, she fashioned a pair from nuts and bolts, which left him mortified.

"Now look, Joey, if anybody says anything to you about these nuts and bolts, you just look them right in the eye and say 'Don't you have a pair of these?'" she told him.

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Stephen Huneck died he was 60

Folk artist Stephen Huneck, whose whimsical paintings, sculptures and woodcut prints of dogs celebrated his love of animals and won him a worldwide fan base, has died. He was 60.

Huneck, of St. Johnsbury, committed suicide Thursday in Littleton, N.H. His wife said he was despondent after being forced to lay off employees at his Dog Mountain studio and dog chapel.

"Like many Americans we had been adversely affected by the economic downturn," Gwen Huneck wrote in a letter Friday announcing his death.


"Stephen feared losing Dog Mountain and our home. Then on Tuesday we had to lay off most of our employees. This hurt Stephen deeply. He cared about them and felt responsible for their welfare," she wrote.

Two days later, he shot himself in the head while sitting in a parked car outside the office of his psychiatrist, she said.


"He was one of the most creative and active members of the Vermont crafts community," said Jennifer Boyer, co-owner of the Artisans Hand craft gallery in Montpelier. "I appreciate how much energy he put into his works, which were whimsical and sardonically funny. He really had a unique sense of humor."

A native of Sudbury, Mass., he started out whittling wooden sculptures and later dog-themed furniture, like the wooden pews eventually installed in the chapel, which he built in 2000, a miniature version of the 19th-century churches that dot Vermont's landscape.

Built of wood harvested from his 175-acre Dog Mountain property, it had vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows with images of dogs pieced into them.

"Welcome all creeds, all breeds. No dogmas allowed," says the sign outside.

"When dogs pull up in here, they may never have been here before, but it's like they saw the 'Disneyland' sign," said Huneck in a 2008 interview with The Associated Press. "They just get so excited, so happy," he said.

Dog lovers would make the trip to Vermont just to see the chapel, many writing handwritten notes to their long-gone pets and affixing them to the interior walls, where they remained.

Huneck's books, about his beloved Labrador retrievers, including "Sally Goes to the Beach," ''Sally Goes to the Farm" and "Sally Gets a Job," featured woodcut prints accompanied by quirky captions.

"They were totally unique, very insightful, particularly for dog lovers," said Irwin Gelber, executive director of the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, a library and art center where Huneck frequently gave readings. "He seemed to create works and captions that just captured that expressed every dog lover's insights into owning and loving animals."


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