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When it came to TV and movies, her material was often not nearly as strong as her talents, but Beatrice Arthur, who according to the AP died today of cancer, was the kind of performer who never let anything stand in her way.  Certainly, as Maude she made TV history and brought to the screen the kind of outspoken, and charismatic woman who is beyond strong and very much a fact of daily life, particularly if you belong to any of a number of ethnic groups.

Whether it was delivering the often, at least by modern TV standards, rather contrived sitcom dialogue both on Maude and even more so on her longest running sitcom, Golden Girls,  holding her own, or even emerging triumphant during such notorious musical comedy fiascos as the ill-conceived film version of Mame (which I haven’t had the guts to see in decades) and the really ill-conceived and now legendary Star Wars Christmas Special – in which she is, actually, kind of marvelous — she was as reliable a performer as they ever come. If there was a moment to be found in material, she would find it.

Indeed, artistically she seems to have had better luck on the stage and in early television. It’s not generally known that her “big break” was as Lucy Brown in Marc Blitzstein’s groundbreaking 1954 off-Broadway version of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil’s masterpiece, Threepenny Opera, a production that first brought original Pirate Jenny Lotte Lenya to the United States and also featured Jerry Orbach, Ed Asner, and Jerry Stiller. Clearly, the production had a great impact on Ms. Arthur, and she reportedly said that “Sid Caesar taught me the outrageous; Lee Strasberg taught me what I call reality; and Lotte Lenya, whom I adored, taught me economy.”

Anyhow, the sad news of Ms. Arthur’s  passing has really only just gotten out (I heard about it just before writing this via Pasadena public radio station KPPC), but I don’t think it too early for a sampling of how one woman could be a part of history, turn mediocre (or worse) material into a kind of poetry, and generally just be an entertainment immortal based on, among other things the outrageous, reality, and economy.

We’ll start with a moment where Bea Arthur and Maude Findlay collided with American history.

More videos, including musical highlights, after the flip…

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I hate to write this one. Andy Hallett passed on yesterday at age 33 after a long struggle with heart disease. He was known to fans of Angel originally as the suavely lovable demon karaoke singer/nightclub owner, psychic, and occasional stoolie originally known as “the Host,” and later revealed to be Lorne, aka Krevlornswath of the Deathwok Clan. He eventually became a full regular cast member on the show and, as Brian Doan says in his terrific remembrance, it’s conscience with a camp sense of humor.

Lorne, whose show-biz sensibilities were somewhere in between Scott Thompson of  “The Kids in the Hall” and a more benign George Sanders, was definitely one of the most popular supporting characters of Angel, a darker, sometimes noirish, spin-off of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer that, while sometimes highly uneven, occasionally threatened to become more interesting than the show which spawned it. He certainly got many of the funniest lines, but delivered them with a kind of ageless melancholy and was no simple comic relief demon.

During the show’s intriguing final season, creator Joss Whedon took him to some very dark places, particularly in  “Not Fade Away,” the brilliant final episode, and Hallett went to those places with an apparent ease that belied the fact that Lorne had been his first role. How sad that, as an actor, it turned out to be his one of just a very few.

Still, he is extremely well remembered by his coworkers and fans who, over the years, have had nothing but nice things to say about him personally, as well as making his character one of the most beloved in the “Buffyverse.” Note the literally hundreds of sincerely sad remarks on the thread announcing his death on the fan blog, Whedonesque.

Joe Reid of NPR has more.

UPDATE: Angel executive producer Tim Minear has a very nice video tribute up to Lorne/Andy Hallett featuring many of his highlights from the series over at Facebook.

From Ernie Kovacs, of course.

This review will appear on the very same day an African-American man will become President of the United States. While the media is constantly reminding us of the historic nature of that fact, what many younger readers may not realize is that only three and a half decades back, a man running on a more or less openly racist, and specifically anti-black, platform was a serious candidate for President — running in the very same Democratic party that would eventually nominate Barack Obama for the highest office on earth.

“George Wallace” is a savvy and darkly engrossing, if often slow and heavy handed, television biopic that takes a circuitous path in tracing the long career of the despised and beloved four-term Governor of Alabama and four-time Presidential candidate of various parties, George C. Wallace (Gary Sinise). We first meet Wallace in 1972 as the avid, middle-aged husband to a beautiful and very sexy young wife, Cornelia (Angelina Jolie). At the same time, a racist state trooper forces Archie (a “composite” character played by Clarence Williams III), a convicted killer and Wallace’s trusted African-America valet, to wear handcuffs at his mother’s funeral.

After his fateful encounter with four bullets that day, we meet Wallace again as the younger and far more liberal political protégé of anti-racist populist governor “Big Jim” Folsom (Joe Don Baker). Though Wallace is a skirt-chasing, semi-absentee father and husband to his steadfast wife, Lurleen (Mare Winningham), the real darkness only comes four year later when Wallace is defeated in his first gubernatorial bid by an opponent supported by the terrorist Ku Klux Klan. Seeing no alternative – losing an election is equivalent to losing his life – Wallace swears that he will “never be outn*ggered again.” He is true to his words and, within a matter of years he is the nation’s most notorious racist pol, blocking the doors of the University of Alabama rather than allowing a pair of black students to enter and “mix” with white students, and uttering his most quoted line: “…I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Read the rest at Premium Hollywood

And here’s our third brilliant, underrated (in the U.S. anyway) octogenarian…..

The writer of two of the best and most popular British TV series (in the U.S. anyway) has passed on at age 85. Sir John Mortimer received mega-kudos as the sensitive, and very complete, adapter of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited for television. His script turned a great but actually relatively short novel, not very long on plot, and brimming with the kind of introspection that nearly always gets at least 99.99% cut from even very long adaptations, into an 11 episode epic masterpiece with, as far as I can remember, all the introspection intact. It managed this while being perfectly compelling, though it’s discovery of the young Jeremy Irons in the part of the narrator definitely helped. (The recent movie version handled things in the more usual way, and was more than a bit of a come down.)

In any case, Mortimer became even more famous — since he didn’t have to compete with the ghost of Mr. Waugh — at roughly the same time here in the U.S. for his popular and long running dramedy (emphasis on the “edy”), Rumpole of the Bailey starring none other than #6’s final antagonist, Leo McKern. A great actor in a great role.

Back in England, Mortimer is also known as a successful and respected playwright and author — and, as a lawyer who has frequently found his way into freedom of speech cases. Obviously, that lent a bit of authenticity to his “Rumpole” tales (also published in book form).

Freedom of speech, and freedom of youthful lifestyle, came up in a “scandal” — if that’s even the word any more — in which Mortimer, a very flagrant and sincere heterosexual in his later adult life (he didn’t always look like Rumpole) ultimately more or less outed himself in a Brideshead-esque English public school romance or “romantic friendship”/kerfluffle. Those fascinated by mid-century English public school/collegiate life, any homophobes/fundamentalist moralists who may be in favor of single-gender schools, and gossip mongers, should definitely read more here.

Included in the early tributes (including one from Britain’s current PM), one friend had this to say:

There was a whiff of erudition and scandal always around John and it was completely seductive and he’ll be badly, badly missed.

Definitely one of those people who, the more you know, the more interesting — and kind of likable — he becomes. Good show.

UPDATE: Via David Hudson (who was also cool enough to mention this very page), comes this informative literary appreciation from Charles McGrath of the New York Times. I knew Mortimer was an author, but it never quite sunk in with me (or I just forgot) that those wonderful TV Rumpole shows were actually adaptations of stories — since they all just said “written by John Mortimer”. Count me as another American ignoramus.

And yet, more reasons to like the late Sir Mortimer — amazing how much someone who drinks champagne at 6 a.m. can accomplish. I swear, there are days when I actually wish I had ADD…some of those people get so much accomplished.

In addition, I like the sound of the term “Champagne socialist” — and he was a liberal who supposedly hated atheists, vegetarians, and animals rights people. Intriguing. I wouldn’t say I hate any of those groups (in fact, some of my best friends have been in the first two camps) and as an agnostic (more or less), I guess I shouldn’t engage in nontheistic tribal warfare. Still, there is a quality common to some — but far from all — members of all three of those groups that makes me understand where Mortimer was coming from.

An extremely interesting actor and one of the main creative forces behind an early relative of just about everything interesting on your modern TV screen has passed on at age 80. Irish-American by birth and British by upbringing, after turning down the role of James Bond in Dr. No (and he would have been about as great as the bloke who actually agreed to do it) McGoohan made it big on a pair of English spy series, probably today best known in the U.S. as the source of the Johnny Rivers hit, “Secret Agent Man.”

That led to a 1967-1968 non-sequel, The Prisoner, which had McGoohan playing a secret agent (which he always denied was Secret Agent Man John Drake) who tries to quit but instead finds himself in “the Village” — basically the ultimate gated community with just a dash of Gitmo (waterboarding not included), where the not-secret-agent-man is given a number, 6, and his name is really taken away. Despite constant prodding and head games (which get ever more heady as the show progresses), No. 6 fails to cooperate — but just why and what he’s fighting is not a simple matter of something you can quote at an ACLU meeting.

McGoohan appears to have effectively been the showrunner of the series, which for decades was often cited by critics as probably the single best TV series of all time. Though the competition for that title has increased exponentially over the decades, it was without a doubt, a major force in my adolescence, and world geekitude in general, when it was revived on PBS and later on cable and home video. McGoohan went on to a solid movie career as a character actor, usually playing very interesting antagonists/bad guys in movies like Escape from Alcatraz and Silver Streak, but The Prisoner was always the one that people talked about when they talked about McGoohan.

It was for good reason. Like his acting, the show bore an unmistakable stamp of originality and commitment that’s impossible to forget.  His L.A. Times obit includes this quote from Peter Falk, who exposed him as a murderer not once but twice on Columbo.

There are many very, very talented people in this business, but there are only a handful of genuinely original people….I think Patrick McGoohan belongs in that small select group of truly original people.

I think Falk would know.

More from master-compiler David Hudson at his new IFC locale and also from Bullz-Eye’s esteemed TV maven Will Harris.

Be seeing you, Mr. McGoohan…

And now, well, you know I can’t resist. Best. TV show opening. Ever.

I really think so.

UPDATE:  In memory of #6, Jim Emerson has reposted his analysis of the above. Definitely recommended.

AND ANOTHER UPDATE: Via Brian Doan, some words from Glenn Kenny, who also digs up a revealing quote from David Cronenberg about the rough going he experienced with McGoohan on Scanners, a movie I really should be able to handle, now that I’ve got my gorephobia partially under control. Why, I wouldn’t mind seeing it right now (except that I won’t).

AND YET ONE MORE UPDATE: The amazing Kimberly “Cinebeats” Lindbergs has some good stuff up on the subject as well, though I disagree with her that the prospect of a new Prisoner TV show is necessarily depressing. To me, everything is basically a remake of something, admitted or not — it’s just a matter of whether the remaker has something new and worthwhile to bring to the party. On the other hand, after what I’ve been through with Frank Miller’s vile travesty of The Spirit and Neil Labute’s ridiculously clueless and bluntly misogynist The Wicker Man, I can very definitely see her point.

I don’t know what’s going on this Christmas day, but the incredibly smart and witty performer who proved that sex kittens can have brains, courage, and sharp claws when needed, has passed on at age 81.  Though a lot of us young geeks first knew Eartha Kitt as the Catwoman on the third season of the Adam West Batman television show  — where  the sudden dropping of the Bat on Cat flirtation that had flourished both with Julie Newmar on TV and Lee Meriweather in the sixties Bat-movie gave a lot of us an early education in media racial/sexual politics — she was first and foremost a live performer and an icon of the lounge era, and involved with a lot more than her once semi-obscure, now-iconic Xmas hit, “Santa Baby.”

The highlights and dramas of her career are probably well known to a lot of you — and can be read about via both Greencine and at the Huffington Post….Her comments on Vietnam in front of Lady Bird Johnson in which she experienced a harsher version of what later happened to the Dixie Chicks, and a big compliment from Orson Welles, who called her “the most exciting woman in the world,” was followed by being bitten by the ever voracious actor-director, who apparently mistook her for a blintz one night while she was playing Helen of Troy to his Faust. Whatever happened to her, she was an indomitable force who was never around enough for my taste, but who also kept working and never went away, until now.

There’s no doubt about it — she was one gutsy talent. Still, what I love about Ms. Kitt is the humor and ability to reach out to an audience as both an actress, and especially as a singer and cabaret performer. Lounges were made for the likes of her.

And we end on a slightly seasonal, slightly appropriate note. Everything really does change, but few of us hold the line better than Ms. Kitt did.

Two great Christmas songs from two great Jews. Yes, we’re not supposed to celebrate Christmas. We’re also not supposed to eat shrimp with lobster sauce. And, yet….

Whatever you’re doing, being merry isn’t a bad way to be.

So, about two weeks back good ol’ Flickhead tagged me with invited me to the “Twenty Actresses” meme asking for a selection of favorites, originally developed by the devilish actresexual, Nathaniel R. I’m slow to respond to a meme, but I always come through, more  or less. In this case, let’s just say I have a slightly lax attitude towards the whole “twenty” business. I mean, Janet Leigh and Judy Garland absolutely had to be accomodated….

The following is not necessarily a list of all-time, absolute favorites, just twenty twentish really terrific female actors I’ve been thinking about lately. Old friends may spot at least one obvious omission, but in this list I’m only including people I think are pretty much fully and completely arrived in terms of their talent. The isn’t anyone here I think is one hair shy of being absolutely first rate, with definite extra points awarded for charisma, of course.

Presented in no order whatever.

Gloria Grahame

Ingrid Bergman

Isabella Rosellini

Laura Linney

Emma Thompson

Giulietta Masina

Kristin Bell

Gong Li

Jane Darwell 

Jodie Foster

Janet Leigh

Michelle Yeoh

Myrna Loy

Audrey Hepburn

Madeline Kahn

Allison Janney

Marilyn Monroe

Judy  Garland

Deborah Kerr

Gina Torres

Lauren Bacall

Margaret Dumont

Anyhow, I’m not sure how this happened, but as far as I can tell using Google, it appears as if FtY pal and brother in mixing film and political blogging with a love of musicals and geekery, Brian Doan has been left uninvited. No more!