Book of Condolence Thread

Actor Robert Culp dies aged 79: Star of 'I Spy' collapsed outside home after suspected heart attack


Last updated at 7:30 AM on 25th March 2010

Actor Robert Culphas has died after collapsing outside his Hollywood home yesterday.
The star, who teamed with Bill Cosby in the racially groundbreaking TV series I Spy and appeared as Bob in the critically acclaimed sex comedy Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, was taken to hospital but pronounced dead. He was 79.
His manager, Hillard Elkins, said the actor had been on a walk when he fell.

The actor's son was told he died of a heart attack, Mr Elkins said, though police were unsure if the fall was medically related.
Los Angeles police Lt. Robert Binder said no foul play was suspected. Mr Binder said a jogger found Culp, who apparently fell and struck his head.
Culp had been working on writing screenplays, Mr Elkins said.
I Spy, which aired from 1965 to 1968, was a television milestone in more ways than one. Its combination of humour and adventure broke new ground, and it was the first integrated television show to feature a black actor in a starring role.
Culp played Kelly Robinson, a spy whose cover was that of an ace tennis player. In real life, Culp actually was a top-notch tennis player who showed his skills in numerous celebrity tournaments.

Cosby was fellow spy Alexander Scott, whose cover was that of Culp's trainer. The pair travelled the world in the service of the U.S. government.
The series greatly advanced the careers of both actors.


Cosby, who had achieved fame as a stand-up comedian, proved he could act. Culp, who had played mostly heavies in movies and TV, went on to become a film star.
He followed I Spy with his most prestigious film role, in Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice.

Big idea: Culp as Sly Wells in the 1975 British action thriller Inside Out, who comes up with a plan to recover six million dollars of Nazi gold
The work of first-time director Paul Mazursky, who also co-wrote the screenplay, it lampooned the lifestyles of the sexual revolution of the 1960s.

Bob and Carol (Culp and Natalie Wood) were the innocent ones who were introduced to wife-swapping by their best friends, Ted and Alice (Elliott Gould and Dyan Cannon).
Culp also had starring roles in such films as The Castaway Cowboy, Golden Girl, Turk 182! and Big Bad Mama II.
More recently, he appeared in the video for Eminem's 1999 hit single, Guilty Conscience.

His teaming with Cosby, however, was probably his best remembered role.
Cosby won Emmys for actor in a leading role all three years that I Spy aired, and Culp, who was nominated for the same award each year, said he was never jealous.
'I was the proudest man around,' he said in a 1977 interview.
Both he and Cosby were involved in civil rights causes, and when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated in 1968 the pair traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to join the striking garbage workers King had been organizing.
Culp and Cosby also co-starred in the 1972 movie Hickey and Boggs, which Culp also directed. This time they were hard-luck private detectives who encountered multiple deaths.

Audiences who had enjoyed the light-heartedness of I Spy were disappointed, and the movie flopped at the box office.
 
Jayziz, all the old TV stars are going...

Fess Parker: Actor whose 1950s portrayal of Davy Crockett helped Disney gain a foothold in television

Thursday, 25 March 2010

When Fess Parker donned a coonskin cap to play the frontiersman in the adventure series Davy Crockett he became one of the biggest stars on 1950s television. It was a triumph both for Parker and Walt Disney, who had made the groundbreaking move into television by a film company. Davy Crockett (1954-55) was launched as part of the anthology series Disneyland, with one of its strands titled "Frontierland" and Parker hooking viewers with stories that included brutal, hand-to-hand combat.


Davy Crockett merchandise earned Disney hundreds of thousands of dollars and when the programme's theme song "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" became a No 1 single in the United States, younger viewers cemented the Crockett-mania by running around, singing: "Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier."

Although the adventures ran to only five one-hour episodes – the last two made as prequels – the popularity of Parker's Tennessee backwoods screen character who became the tragic hero of the Alamo was further exploited by editing them together into two cinema films, Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier and Davy Crockett and the River Pirates (both 1955).

Parker was spotted for the role when Walt Disney had James Arness in mind for it and arranged a screening of that actor's sci-fi film Them! Once he saw the 6ft 6in Parker – playing a pilot thrown into an asylum after claiming his plane had been downed by giant flying insects – Disney screamed: "That's our Davy Crockett!"

The actor and his co-star, Buddy Ebsen, who played Crockett's sidekick, George Russel, went on promotional tours across the United States and more than a dozen other countries.

"Walt hadn't expected television to have the impact that it did," Parker recalled. "Then they decided that, if their merchandising programme was a log fire, they were just going to throw another log on – and that was me. They sent me all over the country."

A decade later, Parker metamorphosised into another coonskin cap-wearing frontier hero. He starred in 159 episodes of Daniel Boone (1964-70) and, as well as producing and directing some episodes, received 30 per cent of the profits. The stories, straddling the American Revolution, were set in Kentucky, where Boone lived with his family and encountered both friendly and hostile native Americans.

Seeking to gain 100 per cent of the profits, Parker left acting several years later to establish his own vineyards, hotels and restaurants.

Born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1924, Parker served as a radio operator in the US Navy's Marine Corps at the end of the Second World War, then graduated in history from the University of Texas. He studied drama at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles, and made his professional stage debut as an extra in the play Mister Roberts (1951).

Parker was soon landing bit-parts in Western films such as Untamed Frontier (1952, starring Joseph Cotten), Springfield Rifle (1952, alongside Gary Cooper) and Thunder Over the Plains (1953, with Randolph Scott). He also appeared with John Wayne and James Arness in the plane-crash drama Island in the Sky (1953).

The actor had made his television debut in Dragnet (1954), but it was Davy Crockett that turned him into an overnight star. With it came a Disney contract and starring roles in films such as the Civil War drama The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), as leader of a group of Union soldiers going behind Confederate lines, and the family saga Westward Ho The Wagons! (1956).

But Parker complained that he was becoming typecast and was even more dissatisfied when Disney forbade him from appearing in The Searchers (starring John Wayne) and Bus Stop (with Marilyn Monroe) for other producers.

When Disney released him from his contract, he reprised the role of Davy Crockett in the film Alias Jesse James (1959) – as he did later on television in The Red Skelton Show (1970) – and was seen alongside Steve McQueen in Hell Is for Heroes (1962), but his film career never took off.

Parker returned to television to star as the unsophisticated senator in the sitcom Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1962-63), based on the director Frank Capra's 1939 film featuring James Stewart.

Following the success of Daniel Boone, Parker turned down the title role in the television series McCloud, which eventually starred Dennis Weaver as the New Mexico sheriff in New York. He finished his screen career with the sitcom pilot The Fess Parker Show (1974), which failed to become a series.

Parker then became a businessman, taking a share in a Santa Barbara mobile-home park, opening a waterfront resort there and establishing the Fess Parker Family Winery and Vineyards in Los Olivos, California.

Anthony Hayward

Fess Elisha Parker, actor: born Fort Worth, Texas 16 August 1924; married 1960 Marcella Rinehart (one son, one daughter); died Santa Ynez, California 18 March 2010.
 
John Forsythe
He was the voice of ''Charlie'' in Charlie's Angels and also Blake Carrington in Dynasty........ the ex wife of Joan Collins charcater and wife of Krystle (Linda Evans:horny:)

He was aged 92.

Jukebox Jury
 
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Keith Elam, better known as Guru of Gang Starr, died from cancer yesterday(April 19th).

Doesn't look like 2010 is treating hip hop well after both Nujabes and this.
 
Such very sad news about Mel Torment. I didn't know her personally but I loved her post/concert reviews. To all those who knew Mel my thoughts are with you all.



And now I am walking through Rome
And there is no room to move
But the heart feels free.

Rest in peace, Mel. xo
 
I never met her, but Mel's words often conducted us like an orchestra, creating clarity and harmony after a show.

Wishing her peace and safe passage. Let's be nice to eachother.
 
:tears:

goinghome, I thought your sentiment on the mainpage was just perfect.
 
Shocking news. :(. Didn't know her personally, maybe only chatted with her in the queue only once or twice, but I always enjoyed reading her gig reviews. Very saddened. :(. My thoughts are with her loved ones.
 
shocked to hear about mel.
i met her in hamburg 2006 after the hamburg concert in the hostel she and I were staying. it was my second moz concert and before returning to Flensburg,my then home
(after the earth shattering experience that is a premier moz concert in berlin i did go to the gig the next day)
i also attended the hamburg concert after the glorious berlin concert..afterwards went back to the hostel. she approached me when she saw my moz shirt and we had a lovely conversation in her room . smart and interesting woman.i was astounded by her knowledge .we spoke about morrissey and we spoke about life.
some time later we briefly crossed each other ways after the abandoned london roundhouse concert in the tube and talked shortly.
you will be remembered.
 
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I haven't been here for ages, and I don't know why but I just logged on today for no particular reason and I read about Mel...
I met her quite a few times in recent years, she was the sweetest person.
We went to a couple of gigs together and that was always a lot of fun.
I loved the fact that she came all the way over from the west coast to Europe and go to all the small venues. :)
And I loved her stories about meeting Moz.
I'll miss her. :tears:
 
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