RIP to Italian actress Gina Lollobrigida, at age 95.



She appeared in many films, including Beat The Devil (with Humphrey Bogart), Trapeze (with Tony Curtis), Never So Few (with Frank Sinatra), Solomon abd Sheba (with Yul Brynner), Woman of Straw (with Sean Connery), Hotel Paradiso (with Alec Guinness), Strange Bedfellows (with Rock Hudson) and Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell (with Phil Silvers, Telly Savalas, Peter Lawford, Philippe LeRoy, Shelly Winters and Lee Grant) She was a fine actress and had a bit of a rivalry with Sophia Loren, as they were similar types nad sought after by international producers. Buona Sera, Mrs Campbell is a personal favorite, as she is a woman, who had a child out of wedlock, who has been supported by several GIs, who all secretly are led to believe they are the father, while the named father is a fictional member of their unit. She was also quite interesting as the love interest for Sinatra, in Never So Few, a film about the OSS units operating in Burma, with the Kachin, behind Japanese lines (much like the British Chindits). That film also features Lawford and Steve McQueen, in one of his early roles.

She was adept at comedy or drama, but was more often cast for her physical beauty and.......um....."stature". Generally, her name was spoken while holding up cupped hands. Gina had a lotta-brigida.

Australia's 'first lady of soul' Renée Geyer has died at the age of 69 of complications following hip surgery, although she was also suffering from inoperable lung cancer.

Geyer had an amazing voice, and described herself as "a white Hungarian Jew from Australia sounding like a 65-year-old black man from Alabama". She had a number of hit songs here in Australia, but never really got the overseas recognition she deserved. Nevertheless, she was a respected and sought-after backing vocalist, whose session credits include work with Sting, Chaka Khan, Toni Childs and Joe Cocker. She often spoke of meeting with overseas artists and promoters who, only have heard her recordings, were surprised to discover she was white.

R.I.P. to a 'difficult woman' who has given me countless hours of listening pleasure. (Paul Kelly wrote a song about Renée called 'Difficult Woman', which she recorded as the title track of her 9th album, and her autobiography is titled Confessions of a Difficult Woman.)

If memory serves, the Jetsons also based a guest character on her.

Heart attack.  He was 52.

I'm not one to get overly emotional about celebrity deaths, but this one hits hard. Really hard.

As I sit here listening to some of the music that David Crosby made with The Byrds and with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, and as a solo artist, I'm surprised by how moving I'm finding it.

The Byrds are my second favourite band of all-time (second only to The Beatles) and Crosby was a huge part of why the band's music during his tenure with the band (1964-1967) is so amazingly good. There are lots of his songs that have been part of the soundtrack of my life and, as a result, are deeply personal to me. And he's obviously been a big influence on my own music too.

He was a difficult, complex, and hugely egotistical b*stard, by all accounts. But he was also a fearless innovator, who possessed one of the greatest harmony voices of the rock era.

I dunno...I feel kinda stunned. Which is nuts when you consider the colossal volume of drugs that Crosby took in the '60s,'70s and '80s -- and how close he came to dying from his addiction. He's had a good 35 years or so more life than even his closest friends believed he'd get! Plus, there were his numerous medical conditions and ailments, which meant that he'd been living on borrowed time for a good couple of decades now, if not longer. So, he definitely had a good innings, whichever way you slice it.

But still, I feel melancholy about his passing. Quite apart from his excellent music, fantastic voice, and the musical influence he's had on me, I also looked up to him (particularly when I was a younger man). He was someone who was a truly uncompromising artist. Somebody who fundamentally embodied what it meant to be a singer-songwriter and to follow your own muse, commercial considerations and audience expectations be damned!

I never got to meet Crosby or even see him perform live, but I really didn't need to. Any conversation that we needed to have had already occurred years ago, via the magic of dusty old records spinning at 33⅓ revolutions per minute.

Rest in peace, Croz. And thanks for being you.

I will be 62 next month and the names that I grew up with are passing fast and furious these days. It's the circle of life I guess. George Perez, Neal Adams, Olivia Newton John, Kirstie Alley, Anita Pointer all kind of made me sad as I  associated them with parts of my life.  

RIP to British character actor Tim Barlow.....





He played the character Jack, in the series Dereck, with Ricky Gervais and was Mr Treacher, in Hot Fuzz. He also had a guest role in the Tom Baker Dr Who serial, Destiny of the Daleks. He did some feature films, appearing in the 1998 Les Miserables, Mary Riley, The Tall Guy, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Privates on Parade, and The Eagle Has Landed.

Prior to taking up acting, he served 15 years in the British Army, as an officer, including during the Malay Emergency. He was involved in small arms testing and after firing a new high velocity rifle, lost significant hearing, but was considered fit to carry on his job. He left the army in 1969 and went into acting, upon advice from Laurence Olivier. Due to his hearing loss, he actually had to learn to lip read cues, for the stage.

In 2008, he received a cochlear implant, which restored some of his hearing, an experience he described for BBC 4 Radio's "Earful: From Silence into Sound."

I particularly recall him from The Eagle is Landed, where he plays publican George Wilde, as a group of German paratroops, disguised as Poles, seek to capture Winston Churchill, as he visits a nearby estate.

He also had roles in both the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes and the Benedict Cumberbatch Sherlock.