Jane Russell, The girl with the summer-hot lips, dies at 89 

Jane Russell, “The girl with the summer-hot lips… and the winter-cold heart” (Jane about Jane) the Hollywood siren of the 1940s and 1950s and star of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes alongside Marilyn Monroe, has died at the age of 89. She died at her home in Santa Maria, California of a respiratory-related illness, according to her daughter-in-law Etta Waterfield.

Russell shot to fame in 1943 after Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire, discovered her and cast her in his controversial western, The Outlaw. The movie gained notoriety after censors kept the film from general release in a dispute over Russell’s cleavage. Adverts for the film showed the star sprawled on a bale of hay with the tag line “How’d you like to tussle with Russell?”

“Yes, Howard Hughes invented a bra for me. Or, he tried to. And one of the seamless ones like they have now. He was ahead of his time. But I never wore it in The Outlaw. And he never knew. He wasn’t going to take my clothes off to check if I had … ” Russell said.

The film set the tone for a career in films that majored on her figure and talent for light comedy. Russell appeared in dozens of films and theatrical productions and wrote an autobiography in 1985 called My Path and Detours. Her biggest box-office hits were Paleface, a comedy western with Bob Hope, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

She made only a handful of films after the 1960s but remained active in her church, with charitable organisations and with a local singing group.

Her health began to decline just a couple of weeks ago, her daughter-in-law told Associated Press. “She always said ‘I’m going to die in the saddle, I’m not going to sit at home and become an old woman’,” Waterfield said. “And that’s exactly what she did, she died in the saddle.”

Jane Russell was born Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell on June 21, 1921, in Bemidji, Minnesota. Her mother was a lay preacher. Russell showed a wild side from an early age and admitted to back street abortions and struggles with alcoholism. In later life she was a committed Republican and leader of the Hollywood Christian Group.

“These days I am a teetotal, mean-spirited, right-wing, narrow-minded, conservative Christian bigot, but not a racist,” she once said. Asked about today’s liberal stars George Clooney and Sean Penn, she said: “I think they’re not well.”

Her abortions left her unable to conceive and after experiencing problems adopting, she founded World Adoption International Agency. Russell is survived by three children, six grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren.

| The Guardian

photo via Hurrell Estate Collection

Life was a scream Hammer horror favourite Ingrid Pitt dies aged 73 

Ingrid Pitt, Hammer horror’s favourite heroine, has died aged 73 in south London. The Polish-born actor, right, who survived imprisonment in a concentration camp during the second world war, found fame as the blood-splattered, often blouseless star of films such as Countess Dracula, and The Vampire Lovers.

The Polish-born beauty Ingrid Pitt is one of a handful of actors whose names are virtually synonymous with Hammer Horror. In fact, she made only two Hammer films, as well as a few notable genre films such The House That Dripped Blood (Amicus, 1971) and The Wicker Man (1973, in a fleeting cameo).

Her first Hammer role was as the vampire Carmilla in The Vampire Lovers (1970), a role for which she gladly stripped off and met the demands of the movie-going public’s growing appetite for sex (and lesbian sex, at that). Her second and final Hammer film later that same year was in the title role of Countess Dracula, the less satisfying of the two films, despite Pitt’s sensual performance.

She relished being cast as predatory baddies, rather than innocent victims. Film historian Marcus Hearn, said: “She was partly responsible for ushering in a bold and brazen era of sexually explicitly horror films in the 1970s, but that should not denigrate her abilities.”

Steven Soderbergh gave her a late career boost when he cast her as a sinister aunt in his 1995 noir The Underneath. She also won fans as an author with an autobiography, Life’s a Scream, and three volumes of horror trivia, including 2000’s The Ingrid Pitt Book of Murder, Torture and Depravity.

sources:The Guardian

Ingrid Pitt at Dictionary of Hammer Horror

“There is no new wave, only the sea.” 

Claude Chabrol (RIP)

Claude Chabrol, the prolific French director and critic who was one of the pioneers of the French New Wave and went on to produce a series of stylish, suspense-filled films like “Le Boucher” (“The Butcher”) and “La Femme Infidèle” (“The Unfaithful Wife”) that were often compared to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, died Sunday in Paris. He was 80 years old.

Mr. Chabrol was a young film critic working for the magazine “Les Cahiers du Cinema” alongside François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer and Jean-Luc Godard when a family inheritance allowed him to form his own production company. In 1956, he produced and wrote the screenplay for the short film “Le Coup de Berger,” which was directed by Mr. Rivette, and then used his own money to finance “Le Beau Serge” (1957). “Le Beau Serge” and a subsequent Chabrol film, “Les Cousins” (1958), are often cited as the opening volley of the French New Wave.

An acerbic study of a smug Parisian, François (Jean-Claude Brialy), who returns to the provincial village of his youth and attempts to rescue his former best friend, Serge (Gérard Blain), from a seemingly pointless, working-class existence, “Le Beau Serge” (“Handsome Serge”) established the piercing anti-bourgeois themes that would shape much of the rest of Mr. Chabrol’s career. It also demonstrated, to a professionally closed and aesthetically conservative French film industry, that an outsider could break into the system and make a commercially successful, critically acclaimed film.

This lesson was not lost on his “Cahiers” colleagues. Mr. Truffaut followed Mr. Chabrol’s example with “The 400 Blows”(1959) and Mr. Godard with “Breathless” (1960), both of which became internationally successful and established “La Nouvelle Vague” (“The New Wave”) as a phenomenon.

Like the Hollywood professionals he admired, Mr. Chabrol refused few of the projects that came his way, no matter how doubtful their origins. As a result, he averaged two or three films a year through the 1960’s and 1970’s, alternating personal films like “La Femme Infidèle”(1968) with international co-productions like the dual-language “La Decade Prodigieuse”/”Ten Days Wonder” (1971), starring Anthony Perkins, Michel Piccoli and Orson Welles.

Frequently working with the cameraman Jean Rabier and the screenwriter Paul Gégauff, Mr. Chabrol, in more than 50 films and TV productions, developed an elegant, formally distant style, built around controlled camera movements that often seemed to be describing the imprisonment of his characters in a stifling social order. His style was studiously cool, his detachment from his characters disguising a deeper compassion for their plight as victims of a hypocritical middle-class moralism. He employed close-ups with discretion, as if he were declining to violate the privacy of his characters out of a concern for bourgeois propriety. But behind the well-bred manners could be found a sly, mocking sense of humor — a quality Mr. Chabrol carried over to his frequent appearances on French talk shows.

“Stupidity is infinitely more fascinating that intelligence,” Mr. Chabrol once observed, “Intelligence has its limits while stupidity has none. To observe a profoundly stupid individual can be very enriching, and that’s why we should never feel contempt for them.”

DAVE KEHR

photo via

(Source: The New York Times)