YBTL 2008 Update

(Updated (04/01/08)

Greetings You Bet Their Lifers! Stage and screen are in the spotlight, as 3 of our 4 latest stiffs managed to make it through life portraying other people.

 

If you have missed an update, fear not. You may view the Deaths to Date Page to see all of the year's stiffs in digest form.

 

Get caught up on all of the gossip, rumors and other dead pool activities on the new Forum Page.

 

Remember, if you have scored an Active Squad Hit (ASH), please send your Taxi Squad Call-Up (TSCU) to tableslam17@yahoo.com .

Paul Scofield, the towering British stage actor who won international fame and an Academy Award for the film "A Man for All Seasons," died Wednesday 03/19/08. He was 86. Scofield died in a hospital near his home in southern England. He had been suffering from leukemia.

 

Scofield made few films even after the Oscar for his 1966 portrayal of Tudor statesman Sir Thomas More. He was a stage actor by inclination and by his gifts - a dramatic, craggy face and an unforgettable voice that was likened to a Rolls Royce starting up or the rumbling sound of low organ pipes.

 

Even his greatest screen role was a follow up to a play - the London stage production of "A Man for All Seasons", in which he starred for nine months. Scofield also turned in a performance in the 1961 New York production that won him extraordinary reviews and a Tony Award. He also was in a stage adaptation of Graham Greene's "The Power and the Glory" in 1956.

 

Scofield's huge success with "A Man for All Seasons" was followed in 1979 by another great historical stage role, as Salieri in "Amadeus." His later stage appearances included "Heartbreak House" in 1992 and the 1996 National Theatre production of Ibsen's "John Gabriel Borkman."

 

Scofield's rare films included Edward Albee's "A Delicate Balance" in 1974, Kenneth Branagh's 1989 production of "Henry V," in which he played

the king of France; "Quiz Show," Robert Redford's film about the 1950s TV scandal in which Scofield played poet Mark Van Doren; and the 1996

adaptation of Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible".

 

Rigger Morty's Pasta Way Café snares a solo 20 points with the Active Squad hit on the thespian. US Signal Corpse had the actor listed as understudy, but still gets 3 points for the Taxi Squad hit.

Al Copeland, who became rich selling spicy fried chicken and notorious for his flamboyant lifestyle, died Sunday 03/23/08. He was 64. The founder of the Popeyes Famous Fried Chicken chain had been diagnosed shortly before Thanksgiving with a malignant salivary gland tumor. His death was announced by his spokeswoman, Kit Wohl. Copeland died at a clinic near Munich, Germany.

 

After growing up in New Orleans, Copeland sold his car at age 18 for enough money to open his own one-man doughnut shop. He went on to spend 10 modestly successful years in the doughnut business. The opening of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in New Orleans in 1966, however, caught Copeland's eye. Inspired by KFC's success, Copeland in 1971 used his doughnut profits to open a restaurant, Chicken on the Run ("So fast you get your chicken before you get your change").

 

After six months, Chicken on the Run was still losing money. In a last-ditch effort, Copeland chose a spicier Louisiana Cajun-style recipe and reopened the restaurant under the name Popeyes Mighty Good Fried Chicken, after Popeye Doyle, Gene Hackman's character in the film "The

French Connection." The chain that grew from the one restaurant became Popeyes Famous Fried Chicken.

 

Christopher Reeve's Dancecard, Ethnic Cleansing, Forrest Tucker's Ghost, More Hemlock Please, Putnam's Tomahawk Chop and Van Owens Body take out 14 points each (10 for the 6-way hit and 4 for Under 65) on the Chicken King.

Richard Widmark, whose movie debut as a giggling killer made him an overnight star, giving rise to an enduring Hollywood career playing a gallery of nasty hoodlums and flawed heroes, died Monday 03/29/08 at his home in Roxbury, CT. He was 93. His health had been declining since he fractured a vertebra in recent months.

 

Widmark first etched his name in film noir history in the 1947 gangster movie "Kiss of Death", playing Tommy Udo, a snickering, psychopathic ex-convict seeking revenge against an informer (played by Victor Mature). In one indelible scene, he binds the informer's mother (Mildred Dunnock) in her wheelchair with a cord ripped from a lamp and shoves her down a flight of stairs to her death. The performance made Widmark, who had been an established radio actor, an instant movie star, and it brought him his sole Academy Award nomination, for best supporting actor. For the next seven years, as a contract actor, he was given parts in the 20th Century Fox studio's juiciest melodramas.

 

His mobsters were drenched in evil. But even his heroes were nerve-strained and feral - the daredevil pilot flying into the eye of a storm in "Slattery's Hurricane" (1949); the doctor who fights bubonic plague in Elia Kazan's "Panic in the Streets" (1950); and the pickpocket who refuses to be a traitor in Samuel Fuller's "Pickup on South Street" (1953).

 

In reality, the screen's most vicious bad guy was a mild-mannered former college teacher who had married his college sweetheart, the playwright and screenwriter Ora Jean Hazlewood.

 

His trademark villains overshadowed his work in a wide range of roles in a career that spanned six decades and more than 60 movies. In "The Cobweb" (1955), he played the head of a psychiatric clinic where the staff seemed more emotionally troubled than the patients; in "Saint Joan" (1957), he was the Dauphin to Jean Seberg's Joan of Arc; in "The Alamo" (1960), he was Jim Bowie, the inventor of the Bowie knife; in "Judgment at Nuremberg" (1961), he was a U.S. Army colonel prosecuting German war criminals.

 

As his blond hair turned gray, Widmark played generals in the nuclear thriller "Twilight's Last Gleaming" (1977) and "The Swarm" (1978), in which he waged war on bees. He was the evil head of a hospital in "Coma" (1978) and a U.S. senator in "True Colors" (1991).

 

Richard Widmark was born on 12/26/14, in Sunrise, MN and grew up throughout the Midwest, the son of a traveling salesman. Graduating from Lake Forest College in Illinois in 1936, he spent two years as an instructor in the college drama department while acting in stage productions. Then he headed to New York, where a classmate was producing 15-minute radio soap operas and cast Widmark in a variety of roles.

 

In World War II, Widmark tried to enlist in the army but was rejected three times because of a perforated eardrum. So he turned to Broadway. In his first stage role, in 1943, he played an army lieutenant in F. Hugh Herbert's "Kiss and Tell", directed by George Abbott.

 

After 10 successful years as a radio actor, Widmark tried the movies with "Kiss of Death", which was being filmed in New York. He was originally turned down for the role by the director, Henry Hathaway, who told him that he was too clean-cut and intellectual for the part. It was Darryl Zanuck, the Fox studio head, who, after watching Widmark's screen test, insisted that he be given the part.

 

Widmark, who shunned the limelight, spent his Hollywood years living quietly on a large farm in Connecticut and on an 80-acre, or 32-hectare, horse ranch in Hidden Valley, north of Los Angeles. He sold the ranch in 1997 after the death of Hazlewood, his wife of nearly 55 years.

 

Dead Wringers, GHOSTBUSTIN' BABE, Gratefull Dead, Otis' Cirrhosis from Morrison Sisters' Still, Playin for Bonz, Prop 'Em Up Beside the Jukebox, Satan's Waitin' and Spectral Evidence find their motivation with 6 points each on the veteran actor.

American director Jules Dassin, whose Greek wife Melina Mercouri starred in his hit movie "Never on Sunday" and six more of his films, died late Monday 03/31/08 at an Athens hospital. He was 96. The cause of death was not made public. A spokeswoman for Hygeia hospital said only that he had been treated there the past two weeks.

 

Dassin, a leftist activist whose more than 20 films also included "Topkapi", abandoned Hollywood in 1950 during the communist blacklisting era. Five years later, he won wide acclaim for "Rififi", famous for its long heist sequence that was free of dialogue. The movie won him the best director prize at Cannes, where he met Mercouri.

 

He married the actress-politician in 1966 and settled permanently in Athens. Dassin directed his wife in seven films, including 1960's "Never on Sunday", in which she gained international notice for her portrayal of a kindhearted prostitute. It brought him two Oscar nominations, for direction and writing.

 

Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis called Dassin, who was born in Middletown, CT, "a first-generation Greek."

 

After Mercouri's death in 1994, Dassin focused on her main unrealized goal while she was Greece's culture minister: trying to persuade the British Museum to return the Elgin Marbles, a large collection of sculptures taken from the Parthenon by a Scottish diplomat nearly 200 years ago. "If there is anything I want to be remembered for, it is for fulfilling Melina's dream," he said in a 1997 interview.

 

Dassin's Hollywood credits include "Reunion in France", a 1942 wartime romance with Joan Crawford and John Wayne; "Brute Force", a 1947 prison drama starring Burt Lancaster; and the detective thriller "The Naked City" in 1948. The latter, co-written by Hollywood 10 member Albert Maltz, won Oscars for cinematography and film editing.

 

His 1974 film "The Rehearsal" was based on the Greek student rebellions that helped bring down a 1967-74 military junta that had forced Dassin and Mercouri into exile in Paris. In 1980, Dassin made the Canadian-backed film "Circle of Two", starring Richard Burton as an aged artist with a romantic fixation on a teenage student, played by Tatum O'Neal. Dassin was disheartened by its weak box office performance and never made another film.

 

Born on 12/18/11, to a Jewish barber who emigrated from Russia, Dassin was raised in working-class neighborhoods around New York.

 

Drop Dead Gorgeous, Spectral Evidence and The Famous Final Scene II produce 16 points each on the Hollywood outsider.

Ethnic Cleansing jumps up from 5^th place to 3^rd with their latest hit. Forrest Tucker's Ghost climbs 3 spots to 6^th. Putnam's Tomahawk Chop falls in right behind FTG from the 10 spot. The Famous Final Scene II cracks the Top 12 for the first time in 3 years. Rigger Morty's Pasta Way Café makes the biggest leap (+34). Spectral Evidence debuts in a tie for 38^th. 4 debuts in total this time, making it 98 teams with points. Here’s how we stand after the 1^st quarter. US Signal Corpse gets a cetegory and color all their own.

 

Scores

 

 

 

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