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 Rodriguez Gallego Gonzales 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 Armendariz, Jr. (Pedro Armendariz 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. Armendarez’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 Simon (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. Simon 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 Cerda’s documentary Pieces of Juan (Piquer Simon).
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 Seance”.
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
