In Memoriam

[Rockape]

Good read this:



Lloyd was victim of Paisley plan … then proved him wrong
No-nonsense defender, who has died aged 75, became Clough’s enforcer at Forest after demanding Anfield exit

In the autumn of 1977, Larry Lloyd, who has died aged 75, broke a bone in his foot while playing for newly promoted Nottingham Forest. As cover, the club manager Brian Clough bought David Needham from Queens Park Rangers. And, with Needham outstanding at the heart of the defence, Forest’s astonishing rise continued, their victories in Lloyd’s absence including a 4-0 win at Manchester United. But the moment Lloyd was fit, Clough put him straight back in the team.

“You may wonder why I did that,” the manager said to Needham in front of the rest of the players. “You’ve done brilliantly. And you’re a lovely lad. In fact, if I had a daughter, I’d be delighted if she ended up with you.”

Then he pointed at Lloyd.

“But him, he’s a f---ing b------.”

Voted on several occasions as Forest’s hardest ever player (“I wasn’t that hard, I was just clumsy at times,” he once insisted), for five years Lloyd acted as Clough’s unabashed enforcer on the field.

As the club won the league title, two League Cups and, gloriously, two European Cups, he was the rock around which the defence was built. Never mind that the pair did not get on personally – Lloyd maintained that the manager’s refusal ever to compliment him on a performance irked him to distraction – theirs was a silverware-bedecked relationship. And it was one, he often reflected, that would never have come about had he not made a fuss about being overlooked at a previous club, Liverpool.

He had arrived at Anfield from Bristol Rovers as a raw 20-year-old in 1969. Bill Shankly quickly promoted him to the first team and by 1973, when he played every minute of every game in a season in which Liverpool won the league title and the Uefa Cup, he was an integral part of the team.

The following season however, when he was injured, Phil Thompson was promoted in his place. And the new manager Bob Paisley prefered the more accomplished passing of Thompson to Lloyd’s blunderbuss manner even with the stalwart fully fit. Lloyd was not happy. “I threw my toys out the pram,” he once admitted. And demanded a transfer.

Paisley sold him to Coventry City for a club record £260,000 in August 1974. Such a huge outlay was it, Coventry were soon in financial trouble and sought to offload Lloyd. At which point, in came Clough. He was looking for an experienced, no-messing defender. With Forest then in the middle of the Second Division, it was not an easy sell. Though, as Lloyd later reflected, Clough was “a very, very clever man”.

After a loan spell, the manager persuaded him to sign by way of offering him a new washing machine. With the white goods plumbed into his home, Lloyd signed up and turned up at the Forest training ground, where he was accosted by one of the laundry staff. “Are you Larry Lloyd?” he was asked. “Well, you’ve just cost us our washing machine. The manager sent two blokes down to take it round to your house.”

The most fined player of Clough’s era, he was docked two weeks’ wages for punching Peter Osgood in a fog so thick the referee missed it… the manager did not
It was worth the investment. Despite being the most fined player of Clough’s era (he was once docked two weeks’ wages for punching Peter Osgood in a fog so thick the referee missed it; the manager did not) he was a towering presence. His best performance, he always reckoned, was against Hamburg in Forest’s second European triumph in May 1980.

That month, by now in his thirties, he was recalled to the England side nine years after earning his first three caps. It was not an auspicious return: England lost 4-1 to Wales in Wrexham, and he never played for his country again. Next season he was told by Clough he was getting too old for Forest. But by way of compensation Clough agreed to talk up his potential as a manager, mentioning in several interviews that he could become a top boss.

As a result, he was offered a job at Wigan as ­player-manager. As he recalled, he played in the Club World Cup final in Tokyo and the following Saturday, played for Wigan at Rochdale. But he led Wigan to promotion to the third tier and caught the eye of the board at Notts County, then in the top flight. However, Lloyd’s Forest connections meant he never won over the fans and, with County relegated, he was soon let go.

He stayed in Nottingham, turning out as a highly opinionated pundit for local radio. After a spell in Spain, where he invested in property, he returned to the city and was a regular at Forest home games, feted by fans.

“People often ask me what was my biggest regret in the game,” he once said. “And I suppose I should say it was a massive mistake to kick off at Liverpool. But then if I hadn’t, I’d never have gone to Forest. And that’s where I had the time of my life

[Nuggets]

Louis Gossett Jr, the first black man to win the best supporting actor Oscar, has died at the age of 87. R.I.P good actor.

[Arsenal Tone]

[Ach]

OJ Simpson

RIP

Awesome in naked gun films

[Zenith]

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-68962192

Actor Bernard Hill, best known for roles in Titanic and Lord of the Rings, has died aged 79.

He played Captain Edward Smith in the 1997 Oscar-winning film and King Théoden in the Lord of the Rings.

His breakout role was in 1982 BBC TV drama Boys from the Blackstuff, where he portrayed Yosser Hughes, a character who struggled - and often failed - to cope with unemployment in Liverpool.

He died early on Sunday morning, his agent Lou Coulson confirmed.

His fiancé Alison and his son Gabriel were with him at the time.

Alan Bleasdale, who wrote Boys from the Blackstuff, said Hill's death was "a great loss and also a great surprise".

"It was an astonishing, mesmeric performance - Bernard gave everything to that and you can see it in all the scenes. He became Yosser Hughes."

He added: "I was desperate to work with him. Everything he did - his whole procedure for working, the manner in which he worked and his performance was everything that you could ever wish for.

"You always felt that Bernard would live forever. He had a great strength, physically and of personality."

Hill, who was from Manchester and lived in Suffolk, was due to return to TV screens in series two of The Responder, a BBC drama starring Martin Freeman, which begins airing on Sunday.

Lindsay Salt, director of BBC Drama, paid tribute to him, saying: "Bernard Hill blazed a trail across the screen, and his long-lasting career filled with iconic and remarkable roles is a testament to his incredible talent."

"From Boys from the Blackstuff, to Wolf Hall, The Responder, and many more, we feel truly honoured to have worked with Bernard at the BBC. Our thoughts are with his loved ones at this sad time."

In Boys from the Blackstuff, Hill drew praise for his gritty portrayal of Yosser Hughes, an intense and memorable character who pleaded "Gizza job" as he sought work.

That show won a Bafta for best drama series in 1983, and in 2000 it was ranked seventh on a British Film Institute list of the best TV shows ever made.

Another of Hill's memorable BBC TV performances came in the 2015 drama series Wolf Hall, adapted from Hilary Mantel's book about the court of Henry VIII. Hill portrayed the Duke of Norfolk - an uncle of Anne Boleyn and an enemy of Cardinal Wolsey.

Hill was also much loved for his performances in Peter Jackson's epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings.

He joined the cast for the second film, 2002's The Two Towers, and returned to the franchise for 2003's The Return Of The King, which picked up 11 Oscars.

Lord of the Rings co-star Dominic Monaghan said Hill had "passed to the grey havens", in a statement on Instagram.

"But he will always be remembered," he added.

Other roles in Hill's decades-long career included the 1976 BBC TV series I, Claudius, an appearance in 1982's Gandhi, Shirley Valentine in 1989, The Scorpion King in 2002 and 2008 Tom Cruise film Valkyrie.

He was meant to be at Comic Con Liverpool on Saturday, but had to cancel at the last minute, the convention said in a post on X. As news of his death broke, the organisers said on the platform they were "heartbroken" at Hill's death, and wished his family "a lot of strength".

Scottish musician Barbara Dickson also paid tribute on X, saying he was "a really marvellous actor".

She added: "It was a privilege to have crossed paths with him. RIP Benny x."

RIP.

[Ach]

Just beat me to it

RIP

Loved him in LOTR

Quote him all the time. Especially so it begins

[Nuggets]

R.I.P Yosser....Bernard Hill

[Zenith]

https://www.theguardian.com/music/artic ... cal-artist

Françoise Hardy: France’s girlish yé-yé star was a groundbreaking musical artist

• Françoise Hardy, French pop singer and fashion muse, dies aged 80

Hardy shot to fame singing airy, carefree pop before she took control of her career, hung out with 60s rock aristocracy and became a sophisticated singer-songwriter of rare sensuality and melancholy



Yé-yé was France’s homegrown response to rock’n’roll: pretty young singers – almost all female – performing a lightweight Francophone adaptation of American music with lyrics about teenage concerns. And at first sight, the 18-year-old Françoise Hardy was the epitome of a yé-yé girl. She was strikingly beautiful (“I was passionately in love with her,” recalled David Bowie decades later, “every male in the world, and a number of females, also were”); she was never off the airwaves of France’s premier yé-yé radio show, Salut les Copains, and never out of the pages of its accompanying magazine. Her first hit was the suitably innocent-sounding Tous les Garçons et les Filles, a wispy take on a rock ‘n’ roll ballad.

But it transpired that Hardy was a different kind of yé-yé girl. For one thing she wrote her own material, like her idol, the black-clad chansonnière Barbara. Eschewing the gauche attempts of France’s professional songwriters to mimic American rock’n’roll or translate its lyrics, 10 of the 12 tracks on her debut album were her own compositions, written with arranger Roger Samyn. This was an extraordinary state of affairs for pop music in 1962: the following year, the Beatles – the band generally credited with cementing the notion that artists could write their own material rather than relying on cover versions – would release their debut album, with just over half its contents penned by Lennon and McCartney.

Hardy’s songs were invariably melancholy, which perhaps had something to do with her unhappy childhood. Her largely absent father was closeted, and eventually died, Hardy believed, after being assaulted by a rent boy. Her sister suffered with mental illness and died by suicide in 2004. Hardy seemed diffident at best about commercial success and celebrity. In contrast to her bubbly peers, sadness seemed to seep out of her: no matter how lightweight the arrangements sounded, her voice brought a certain chilly tristesse to her releases.

Hardy came to find the arrangements a problem too, later professing to hate the music that made her famous: “I had such bad musicians, such a bad producer … I thought those recordings were terrible.” She wrested control of her own sessions, moving operations to Pye Records’ famous Marble Arch studio and surrounding herself with London’s hottest session musicians, future Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page among them. (His future bandmate, John Paul Jones, incurred Hardy’s wrath by attempting to make her arrangements sound more Gallic.)

It goes without saying that this was not how yé-yé girls were expected to behave. They were supposed to be pretty but pliable receptacles for older male songwriters: witness poor, innocent teenager France Gall, unwittingly tricked into singing about blowjobs by dirty old Serge Gainsbourg on Les Sucettes (1966). But if Hardy’s early recordings were wistfully charming, the music she made after she took charge was something else. Her mid-60s albums (for some reason, they’re almost all titled Françoise Hardy) are fabulous, sophisticated pop confections that shift between beautifully orchestrated ballads and experiments with jangly 12-string folk rock, harpsichord-bedecked baroque pop and, occasionally, fuzzed-out guitar.

An English-language single, All Over the World, was a UK Top 20 hit in 1965. That Hardy didn’t make more impression on the charts here tells you more about the way audiences struggled to connect with anything not sung in English than the quality of her work. Nevertheless, she moved among the 60s rock aristocracy. It would be nice to think they recognised someone cut from the same groundbreaking cloth, but it is hard to avoid the impression that her looks sometimes overshadowed her talent. As if to prove Bowie’s point, Bob Dylan wrote lovelorn poems about her, and Mick Jagger declared her his “ideal woman”.

Hardy transitioned with ease into the late-60s singer-songwriter era, covering Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne on 1968’s Comment te Dire Adieu (with a certain inevitability, its original title was Françoise Hardy), an album to which Gainsbourg also contributed two particularly fine songs: the surprisingly effervescent title track, and the gorgeous L’Anamour. But it was her 1971 album, again called Françoise Hardy but known by fans as La Question, that proved her masterpiece. A collaboration with Brazilian singer-songwriter Tuca, it was sparse and dreamlike, its sound sitting somewhere between folk, jazz and bossanova, its breathily intoned lyrics dealing with both suicide and sensuality. It’s not exactly a highly contested field, but Mer may well be the most drowsily erotic-sounding song ever recorded about suicide.

She followed it up by working with the cream of London’s folk-rock scene, including Richard Thompson, recording a stunning version of revered the acid-folk band Trees’ The Garden of Jane Delawney. In one of the great what-ifs of rock history, Fairport Convention producer Joe Boyd attempted to hook her up with another of his charges, Nick Drake. Hardy was a huge fan of the then largely ignored singer-songwriter, but a plan for the two to make an album together floundered when they met: the painfully shy Drake “came to the studio where I was recording in London, and he sat in the corner, almost hidden, and he never said one word”, recalled Hardy. “I was so full of admiration for his work, so I didn’t dare to say anything, and he didn’t dare to say anything.”

Her subsequent albums were rich and impressively diverse. She was as capable of essaying a Gallic take on country rock on the 1972 album Françoise Hardy, AKA Et si je m’en vais avant toi, as she was dealing in supremely cool jazzy funk on Gin Tonic (1980) or, perhaps most unexpectedly of all, grungy alt-rock (1996’s Le Danger). These aren’t albums terribly well known in the UK – the 90s anglophone re-evaluation of French artists, which saw Gainsbourg transformed from a novelty artist to a justly revered figure, seemed to stop short of Hardy’s oeuvre – but they deserve to be. And Hardy clearly had her admirers outside the French-speaking world. Blur collaborated with her on a version of To the End, renamed La Comedie; so did Iggy Pop, on a 2000 cover of the American Songbook standard I’ll Be Seeing You. Everyone from Cat Power to Weezer hailed her as an influence.

She remained a defiantly uncategorisable figure until the end. Her final album before ill health forced her retirement from music, 2018’s Personne d’Autre, found her writing French lyrics to music by Finnish indie band Poets of the Fall and confronting mortality head-on. You could just about imagine her singing the melody of one of its tracks, Train Special, as a yé-yé song in a different era, but its lyrics dealt with impending death. “What a person sings is an expression of what they are,” she told the Observer at the time of its release. “Luckily for me, the most beautiful songs are not happy songs. The songs we remember are the sad, romantic songs.”

Thanks for the music, Françoise. Quelle femme! RIP.

[Arsenal Tone]

Just seen about Kevin Campbell

[VCC]

RIP Kevin Campbell great striker I rated his comments with AFTV he said it like he saw it and often x players sit on the fence with comments.
As a back up striker he had the balls to move on and pave his own way at other clubs.

[Zenith]

Millwall and Montenegro international goalkeeper Matija Šarkić also passed away yesterday.

He was born in Grimsby to an English mother and a Montenegrin father but spent 10 years Belgium playing for the Anderlecht academy alongside his twin brother Oliver before signing for Aston Villa.

Watched him play against Belgium the other week—he pulled off several good saves and was crowned Man of the Match—but now he's gone at just 26... RIP.

[UFGN]

Shitty DJ and producer Dario G passes away

RIP I suppose

[Zenith]

Anouk Aimée obituary

Elegant French film actor best known for her roles in the classic films A Man and a Woman, Lola, and La Dolce Vita



Show-business history records how the young Françoise Sorya was walking with her parents in Paris when they were approached by the director Henri Calef, who asked whether the teenager could play a part in his forthcoming production La Maison Sous la Mer (1947). The answer was yes and Françoise took the professional name Anouk after the character she was to play.

A short while later, she accepted a part in La Fleur de l’Age and its director, Marcel Carné, added Aimée to her chosen name. In the event the film was not completed, but its writer, Jacques Prévert, had been captivated by the beauty and natural talent of the young actor and wrote a screenplay indebted to Romeo and Juliet for her. As a result, Anouk Aimée, who has died aged 92, took the role of Juliette in The Lovers of Verona (1949).

The success of the movie launched her career, which included some 70 feature films, stage work and a handful of TV movies and miniseries. Her greatest successes were La Dolce Vita (1960), Lola (1961) and A Man and a Woman (1966), for which she won a Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination, but she chose work erratically and happily sacrificed her career for a private life that included an absence from the screen during the first six years of her marriage to the actor Albert Finney.

Daughter of Geneviève (nee Durand), who acted under the name Geneviève Sorya, and Henri Dreyfus, also an actor, she was born in Paris. During the occupation, her parents moved her to the country for safety and she used her mother’s name rather than that of her Jewish father. He later changed his name to Henry Murray.

Aimée studied both drama and dance before her first starring role in The Lovers of Verona, as the would-be actor Juliette, who, while working as an understudy, meets and falls tragically in love with a set carpenter (Serge Reggiani). That success took her to Britain for a part opposite Trevor Howard in The Golden Salamander (1950). Although she was well received in the rather dull film, she subsequently married the Greek director Nico Papatakis and had a daughter, and did not appear on screen again until The Crimson Curtain (1953).

This was a stylishly made period romance, adapted by the writer Alexandre Astruc from a short story as his directorial debut. Despite a duration of 43 minutes and narration rather than dialogue, it proved a critical success. Aimée, cast as a young woman with heart problems who sacrifices herself for her lover, embarked on a busy international career.

She played a prostitute, Jeanne, in an adaptation of a Georges Simenon story, The Man Who Watched the Trains Go By (aka The Paris Express, 1952); co-starred in a somewhat pretentious thriller, Bad Liaisons (1955), directed by Astruc; and played a small role in Lovers of Paris (1957), which starred Gérard Philipe, France’s leading romantic actor.

She was invited to play opposite him in Jacques Becker’s Montparnasse 19 (1958), a biopic of Modigliani in which she took the role of the woman who eventually married the artist. She moved straight to another prestige production for Georges Franju, The Keepers (1959), playing a woman who tries to help a young man wrongly committed to a psychiatric hospital by his father. In Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, starring Marcello Mastroianni, she had the powerful role of a jaded socialite and found in the director a new freedom and vitality that kept her working in Italy for much of the next six years.

However, her best role was in Lola, Jacques Demy’s enchanting debut, dedicated to Max Ophuls and romantic cinema, which it affectionately satirised. Aimée as the not very talented singer waiting for her sailor lover to return made the character, in top hat and feather boa, vivacious yet vulnerable. Sadly, most of the other films in this period were less distinguished, and only Fellini’s 8½ (1963) placed her in a quality movie, as Mastroianni’s girlfriend.

She received the greatest popular acclaim of her long career in Claude Lelouch’s A Man and a Woman. It took the Oscar as best foreign film, and the Cannes festival award as best film, with an Oscar nomination for Aimée as best actress. She did not win, but there was compensation in receiving the equivalent award from Bafta, a Golden Globe and starring in a huge box office hit. Its success led to a sequel, A Man and a Woman – Twenty Years Later (1986).

After starring in the elegant and mysterious Un Soir, Un Train (1968) for the Belgian director André Delvaux, she again played Lola, in Model Shop (1969), which marked Demy’s American debut. The film flopped, not least because Aimée seemed uninterested and unengaged by her role.

The same could be said of The Appointment and Justine (both 1969). The former was a misguided project by the New Yorker Sidney Lumet and suffered from an arty pseudo-European “sophistication” that alienated audiences. Justine was taken over by George Cukor early in the shooting. The director, famous for his rapport with female actors, later remarked that it was his only experience working with “somebody who didn’t try”. It was a commercial failure.

She returned to the screen in 1976 with Second Chance. There was an upturn when she received the best actress award at the 1980 Cannes festival for A Leap in the Dark, an atmospheric work by Marco Bellochio. Aimée took the character role of a spinster sister of a judge (Michel Piccoli), also unmarried, each enduring lives of quiet desperation. This was one of eight films she made with Piccoli, a friend since their days as drama students.

She worked for another distinguished director, Bernardo Bertolucci, in Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981), but her cool talent was swamped by the ebullience of her co-star, Ugo Tognazzi. The political thriller enjoyed little success either critically or commercially. Aimée subsequently worked mainly in France, with occasional sorties into international movies, including a small role in Jerzy Skolimowski’s Success Is the Best Revenge (1984), and a larger one in Bethune: The Making of a Hero (1990), a co-production celebrating the Canadian doctor Norman Bethune, portrayed by Donald Sutherland.

She was among the prestige cast in Robert Altman’s stargazer’s delight, Prêt-à-Porter (1994), which had fun at the expense of the fashion trade. In 2002 she received a lifetime achievement Golden Bear award at the Berlin International film festival.

She continued to work during the following decade, and defended criticisms of her occasional misfires, saying that while some of her choices had been poor, she was still proud of her “not unimpressive” career. She added that actors, too, need to work for money.

She had a pivotal role in The Birch-Tree Meadow (2003), co-written by Jeanne Moreau and directed by Marceline Loridon-Ivens. This sturdy work cast her as a Holocaust survivor returning to the scenes of the atrocities and encountering the photographer grandson of an SS officer.

In lighter mood in the comedy Happily Ever After (2004), she played the mother to the central character Vincent, a role taken by the director Yvan Attal. In 2006, she was attracted to another supporting role as the mother to the lead actor in the intriguing Hotel Harabati.

The amiable The One I Love (2009) was followed by a return to the director who had given her international fame in 1966. Lelouch’s Ces Amours-là was a sad disappointment, however, and Aimée’s following film, Paris Connections (financed by Tesco and sold through their retail outlets), based on a Jackie Collins novel, seems to have fared little better.

She then worked with the novelist and film-maker Philippe Claudel in his second feature, Tous les Soleils (2011), in which she took the role of a dying woman. After Mince Alors! (2012), her 90th screen credit, in which she had a small role, as Maman, she effectively retired, living in Montparnasse, Paris, with her daughter, Manuela.

However, in 2019 she was tempted to return for a final film with Lelouch and the chance to work again with Jean-Louis Trintignant, her co-star from A Man and a Woman. The film The Best Years of a Life was the second follow-up to that famous original and dealt with love and memory in old age. It was celebrated for showing the enduring magnetism of its stars.

Aimée was married and divorced four times. She is survived by Manuela.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/j ... e-obituary

RIP.

[Ach]

Donald Sutherland

RIP

[Nuggets]

Actor Donald Sutherland, star of films including The Hunger Games and Don't Look Now, has died at 88 after a long illness.
His son, the actor Kiefer Sutherland, announced his father's death in a statement.
"With a heavy heart, I tell you that my father, Donald Sutherland, has passed away. I personally think one of the most important actors in the history of film," he said.
"Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. He loved what he did and did what he loved, and one can never ask for more than that. A life well lived."
Solong Oddball R.I.P