BB FANS

Edward Woodward, the chicken farmer's son who cornered the market in assassins
By GEOFFREY WANSELL Mail

Salinger caught the attention of the world – then hid from it

The extraordinary man who wrote 'The Catcher in the Rye' has died aged 91

By David Usborne Independent

Ian Carmichael obituary
Actor who brought sympathetic dimensions to the comic twerp Bertie Wooster and the shrewd detective Lord Peter Wimsey


Carmichael, seen here in 1975, conveyed a sense of dignity not only in aristocratic roles, but also as the buffoon and as a national symbol of the muddling-through Englishman. Photograph: Duffy/Getty Images

Actor known for his roles as the archetypal blithering Englishman

Playing the archetypal silly ass was the sometimes reluctant business of the stage, film and television actor Ian Carmichael, who has died aged 89. In the public mind he became the best-known postwar example of a characteristic British type - the personally appealing blithering idiot who somehow survives, and sometimes even gets the girl. One of his most characteristic and memorable sorties in this field was his portrayal of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim – the anti-hero James Dixon, who savaged the pretensions of academia, as Amis had himself sometimes clashed with academia when he was a lecturer at Swansea. Appearing in John and Roy Boulting's 1957 film, he was able to suggest an unruly but amiable spirit at the end of its tether, his great horsey teeth exposed in the strained grimace that often greeted disaster.

Carmichael made several more hugely popular comedy films with the Boultings in the second half of the 1950s, including Private's Progress, Brothers In Law and I'm All Right Jack, but always wanted to do more straight roles. The nearest he came to it was his Lord Peter Wimsey in the television series based on Dorothy L Sayers's amateur detective (1972-75), a role he felt very happy in. Laurence Olivier once offered him a part in a Graham Greene play that he had in mind for television, but, like other possible projects, it came to nothing.

Late in Carmichael's career, when he had semi-retired back to his native Yorkshire, the Boultings told him that they wondered if they had done their best for his talents in the five-film deal they made with him near the start of his film career: perhaps they should not virtually have confined him to the playing of twerps. The light comedy producer Michael Mills used him early in his career, and years later made The World of Wooster (1965-67) with him. As PG Wodehouse's silly ass Bertie Wooster, Carmichael was constantly saved from disaster by his manservant Jeeves, played by Dennis Price, a formula so effective that Mills doubted whether Carmichael could have played straight parts without provoking laughs.

What made Carmichael notable was that he could play fool parts in a way that did not cut the characters completely off from human sympathy: a certain dignity was always maintained, so that any pathos did not become bathos. He was at the opposite pole to Norman Wisdom, whose conscious pathos irritated some people. Carmichael once said waspishly of Wisdom's ragged-urchin persona that any character he played was unbelievable because no girl, except a film starlet under orders, would ever settle for him. It was not a limitation from which the handsome, cricket-loving Carmichael suffered.

He was born in Hull, the son of an optician in the family's smart silversmith's and jeweller's shop in the centre of the city. His mother's father was a lay preacher who had wanted to become an actor, but neither parent had stage ambitions. His father was disappointed when the boy hated school at Scarborough college (so much so that he vowed never to set foot in the place again) and hated it a little less at Bromsgrove school, Worcestershire, where he distinguished himself by hitting his own wicket during a cricket match so that he could get back to two girls he was entertaining in the bushes.

However, his father swallowed his disappointment and financed him to go to Rada, in London. In his first year he played the robot in Karel and Joseph Capek's surreal play, RUR, at the People's Palace, Stepney, east London, and, more significantly, toured the regions for a few weeks in a tour of a Herbert Farjeon revue, Nine Sharp. Then war broke out and Carmichael joined the 22nd Dragoons, a recently formed tank regiment at Whitby. There he met Jean Pyman (Pym) Maclean: they married in 1943 and had two daughters. Nine years after Pym's death in 1983, he married the novelist Kate Fenton.

Carmichael was mentioned in despatches, but his war was distinguished chiefly by a staff job behind a desk, arranging entertainment, in the course of which he found he was good at the detail of administration. He admitted in a BFI interview at the National Film Theatre in 2002 that he had always had to bear the cross of initially finding Frankie Howerd "death-defyingly unfunny" when auditioning him in Germany, though had the sense to defer to a colleague's better judgment. However, he recognised the talent of the comic magician Tommy Cooper and helped him get a break.

After demobilisation, Carmichael did a lot of work for the revived BBC television service at Alexandra Palace, north London – directing and producing as well as performing. A tour of the operetta The Lilac Domino in 1949 brought him into contact with the comedian Leo Franklyn, from whom he learnt the "ABC of comedy... all the tricks of the trade". Carmichael then made his name in The Lyric Revue (1951-52) and The Globe Revue (1952-53) in the West End. For the latter he devised the comic business for a sketch in which, as an ultra-respectable little man, he had to undress on a beach and get into his swimming costume, protected from exposing himself only by panicky use of his raincoat and bowler hat. When the Boulting Brothers saw this sketch, it set them thinking. When they got round to seeing Simon and Laura, Alan Melville's play about the tensions and sentimentalities of a marriage of actors, in which Carmichael played a frantic TV producer trying to prevent the combative pair from ruining his show, they insisted he play the same part in the film version they were planning at the time. Later they told his agent they wanted to make him a film star and offered him the five-film deal. To sweeten the prospect, they sent him two comic novels, Alan Hackney's Private's Progress (the film of which followed in 1956) and Henry Cecil's Brothers in Law (1957).

Out of this deal came the films that made Carmichael a national symbol of the muddling-through Englishman. In I'm All Right Jack (1959), he played the decent but slightly daft young executive, Stanley Windrush, while Peter Sellers appeared as the pompous shop steward – an even-handed cinematic satire on both management and trade unions. Later he even portrayed one of the cricket-mad buffoons fighting back against Balkans devilry (originally made famous by Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne) in the 1979 remake of Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.

By then, Carmichael had admitted to being a would-be Peter Pan who hated the thought of ageing, and said he was growing too old to go on playing the sort of parts that had made him famous. He had always expressed a dislike of London. Some friends took this with a pinch of salt in view of his handsome house in Hampstead but, with his two daughters now grown up, he bought a house on the North Yorkshire moors, which he remembered visiting on day trips as a boy. It was also near Whitby, where he had met his first wife.

Such sentiment was part of his character and appeal. He continued to be available for work that took his fancy, such as narrating the television series The Wind in the Willows (1984-88), but was the victim of ill-health, and appeared ever more rarely as the portrayer of an English type now likely to provoke more irritation than laughter. Nonetheless, there were still roles for him in the nostalgic drama series always in demand for Sunday-evening television: the 1950s Scottish laird Sir James Menzies in Strathblair (1992-93), Lord Cumnor in Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters (1999), and the hospital secretary TJ Middleditch in The Royal, from 2003 onwards. The last two episodes in which he appeared are due to be screened later this year.

He was appointed OBE in 2003, and is survived by Kate and his daughters.

• Ian Gillett Carmichael, actor, born 18 June 1920; died 5 February 2010• Ian Gillett Carmichael, actor, born 18 June 1920; died 5 February 2010
Guardian

Alexander McQueen

Alexander McQueen, who was found dead yesterday aged 40 after apparently hanging himself, was celebrated as the "bad boy of British fashion" – an aggressively-talented tailor who refused to compromise and was all-the-more lauded as a result.

Telegraph

Lionel Jeffries; Actor

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Veteran actor and director Lionel Jeffries, whose credits include well-loved films such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and The Railway Children, died today.

The RADA-trained star, who was associated with a number of children's classics, was 83.

DailyMail

Rose Gray obituary

One of the most influential modern British restaurateurs and chefs who co-founded the iconic River Cafe in London
Guardian

Obituary: Michael Foot

Michael Foot was one of the great political orators, for more than half his life a political rebel and a thorn in the flesh of the establishment.

But he became a loyal and determined cabinet minister and, finally, Labour leader, although he took his party to its worst electoral defeat in 50 years.

BBC

Corey Haim obituary
Impish, irrepressible star of The Lost Boys and other 80s teen movies
www.guardian.co.uk

Airplane! and Mission Impossible actor Peter Graves dies, aged 83

Peter Graves, star of the television series Mission Impossible and the Airplane! films, has died.

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Graves' publicist, Sandy Brokaw, said the actor passed away shortly after returning to his Los Angeles home from brunch with his family. He was 83.


DailyMail

Charlie Gillett obituary

Radio DJ, champion of world music and author of a major history of rock'n'roll


Few people can have opened so many ears to such a variety of music over the last four decades as Charlie Gillett, the author and radio disc jockey, who has died aged 68 after a long illness. Charlie wrote the first serious history of rock'n'roll and went on to become a central figure in drawing together the confluence of international sounds that became known, to the benefit of many artists whose work might otherwise have remained in obscurity, as world music.

The radio was Charlie's medium, and from Honky Tonk, his 1970s Radio London show, to his weekly BBC World Service broadcasts in recent years, he nurtured an audience whose loyalty to him and belief in his integrity were unshakeable. He was never polished in his presentation – "I'm not very good at reading scripts," he once said, "and I wouldn't be very convincing introducing a record that I didn't personally like" – but his listeners knew that if Charlie had chosen to play a piece of music, it would be worth hearing.

His discoveries were numerous, from Johnnie Allen's Cajun version of Chuck Berry's Promised Land in the early 1970s, through Youssou N'Dour and Salif Keita to Mariza, the young singer of Portuguese fado music who went from appearances on Charlie's show in 2001 to sellout concerts at the Royal Albert Hall, London. Throughout the last decade he compiled CD anthologies, presenting the best of new music from around the world. The most recent, last year's Otro Mundo, included contributions from Armenia and Mallorca.

The best-known story, however, concerns a recently formed south London group who approached Charlie with their demo tape one day in 1976. He liked what he heard, and chose one of the songs, Sultans of Swing, to play on Honky Tonk that Sunday. By the time the tune had finished, his little studio had taken calls from half the A&R men in London. Dire Straits were on their way the global success, and they never forgot their debt to his willingness to trust his instincts.

Charlie was born in Morecambe, Lancashire, and brought up in Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, where, at the age of 16, he saw Buddy Holly and the Crickets on their only British tour. Educated at Grangefield grammar school, he excelled as a quarter-miler on the athletics track and as a footballer, and his love of sport never left him. While camping in north Wales one summer, he met Buffy Chessum, then 15. Some years later, after he had studied economics at Peterhouse, Cambridge, they made contact again, and in 1964 they were married.

They spent the following year in New York, where Charlie studied for his MA at Columbia University. The history of rock'n'roll became the subject of his thesis, long before popular music became an acceptable topic for academic study. Returning to England in 1966, he taught social studies and film-making, another lifelong enthusiasm, at Kingsway College of Further Education, now Westminster Kingsway, in central London, while Buffy gave birth to their two daughters (followed later by a son) and he spent the evenings turning his thesis into a book.

Attempting to find a niche in journalism, he wrote for New Society, Anarchy and the soul music magazine Shout before securing a column in Record Mirror, in which he could express his enthusiasm for rhythm and blues and early rock'n'roll. But it was when The Sound of the City was published in the US in 1970, to great acclaim, that his reputation was established. The book looked beneath the surface of the first 15 years of rock'n'roll, tracing its antecedents and making thoughtful, typically unpretentious assessments, not just of the musicians but of the fledgling industry and its visionary hustlers. Its avoidance of received wisdom inspired countless authors to pursue its themes in the subsequent decades.

Four years later Charlie produced Making Tracks, a serviceable history of Atlantic Records. But writing books, it turned out, was not his true vocation. Honky Tonk was heard for the first time in 1972, and over the next six years it became compulsory Sunday listening for the kind of music lover to whom the intimate music of JJ Cale or Bobby Charles spoke louder than the pumped-up sounds of Led Zeppelin or Yes, and who were thrilled when Charlie played demos by Elvis Costello or Graham Parker.

Wisely, he turned down an offer to present BBC2's The Old Grey Whistle Test, realising that he would have little to say to musicians for whose work he cared nothing. The intimacy of radio suited him better, and he became a series consultant to Radio 1's well-received The Story of Pop. In 1972 he was also part of the writers' collective that founded Let It Rock, a monthly magazine.

It was in the mid-1970s that he and his dentist, Gordon Nelki, formed a partnership which led them to manage Kilburn and the High Roads (whose lead singer was Ian Dury) and to start a label and publishing company, Oval Music. Their successes included Lene Lovich's Lucky Number, Paul Hardcastle's 19 and Touch and Go's Would You...? Later he acted as a music consultant to film companies and advertising agencies.

In 1979 he moved from BBC Radio London to Capital, the city's commercial station, and began to feature music from around the world. Sacked in 1983, he was brought back by public demand and stayed until 1990. In May 1995 he returned with a show on GLR, Radio London's successor, and began his World Service series in 1999. He was also a regular presenter of Radio 3's World on 3.

In recent years he contracted a disease of the autoimmune system that forced him off the air and finally ended his Sunday-morning kickabouts on Clapham Common with players from an assortment of African and South American countries. It was followed by a stroke and, last week, a heart attack outside his home. He is survived by Buffy, their daughters Suzy and Jody, their son Ivan, and two grandchildren.

• Charles Thomas Gillett, radio presenter, author and music publisher, born 20 February 1942; died 17 March 2010

Eugène Terre'Blanche: Leader of the far-right AWB party who led the resistance to majority rule in South Africa


The murder of Eugène Terre'Blanche, the notorious leader of the neo-Nazi Afrikaner-Weerstandsbeweging (Afrikaner Resistance Movement or AWB), who was bludgeoned to death, allegedly by two of his farm hands, following a dispute over unpaid wages, comes amid growing anxiety about crime in South Africa and what the opposition Democratic Alliance party has blamed on increasing racial tensions.

The South African white supremacist, who campaigned for a separate white homeland, came to prominence in the early 1980s around the same time that Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the far right party, Le Front National, was making headway in French elections. However, unlike Le Pen, Terre'Blanche's political career never really matched the grand rhetoric of his speeches, and was often marred by controversy and humiliation, caused partly by his womanising.

Born on a farm in the Transvaal town of Ventersdorp, about 100 miles west of Johannesburg, on 31 January 1941, Eugène Ney Terre'Blanche came from a family with a traditional Afrikaans background. His grandfather had fought as a so-called "Cape Rebel" for the Boer cause in the Second Boer War, against the British (1899-1902) while his father was a Lieutenant-Colonel in the South African Armed Forces.


The young Terre'Blanche attended Laerskool Ventersdorp and Hoër Volkskool in Potchefstroom, matriculating in 1962. He joined the South African Police Force before being transferred to a special unit guarding the residences of the state President and Prime Minister. Having reached the rank of warrant officer, he left the force after four years to become a farmer.

Disillusioned by the Westminster style of government and political discourse, Terre'Blanche, whose name means "white earth", founded the AWB with six others in 1973 in a garage in the Transvaal town of Heidelberg. The organisation first attracted public attention in 1979, when members tarred and feathered a prominent historian, Professor Floors van Jaarsveld, for publicly arguing that the Day of the Covenant, the anniversary of the Afrikaner victory (Battle of Blood River, 1838) over the Zulus, should be de-sanctified.

Terre'Blanche began to gain support through his skills as an orator. He modelled himself on Hitler and Mussolini, gestures included, his thunderous voice alternating between a roar and a whisper, mesmerising his followers and converting others. He played on people's fears and prejudices in the same way as his idols.

Violence was very much part of his fiery rhetoric. In addition, he played on Boer War memories, recalling the approximately 27,000 women and children who died in British concentration camps, and argued that Afrikaners should abolish political parties and seek to revive the pre-Boer war republics of Transvaal and the Orange Free State in a new Boer Volkstaat. He wanted them to oppose what he regarded as the liberal policies of the then South African leader, John Vorster.

Initially, the AWB's paramilitary style – khaki or black-shirted men with side arms – seemed to appeal, and their numbers grew, as did Terre'Blanche's penchant for the dramatic. During the '80s, with large numbers being attracted to his rallies, he would arrive on horseback like a Boer general, sometimes alone, sometimes flanked by some of his militia.

The AWB were building arms caches and forming paramilitary units to oppose even moderate concessions by the government as black opposition to apartheid grew. Naturally enough, the organisation's strongest support was found in the rural communities of South Africa's north, with relatively few open supporters in urban areas. As far as Terre'Blanche was concerned the country had started on the slippery slope towards democracy, communism, black rule and the destruction of the Afrikaner nation in the 1980s, when P.W. Botha's government considered a constitutional plan allowing the country's Asian and coloured (mixed-race) minorities to vote for racially segregated parliamentary chambers.

With Nelson Mandela's release from prison in February 1990 and his support for reconciliation and negotiation with President F.W. de Klerk, who was heading towards free elections, Terre'Blanche threatened unrest and civil war. In 1991, when De Klerk addressed a meeting in Terre'Blanche's hometown of Ventersdorp, he led a protest. The Battle of Ventersdorp ensued between the AWB and the police, with a number of deaths. In 1993, in an attempt to disrupt the negotiation process, AWB fighters crashed an armoured vehicle through the plate-glass doors of the World Trade Centre in Kempton Park, near Johannesburg, while constitutional negotiations were in progress.

The AWB continued with further terrorist tactics, detonating bombs in urban locations including Johannesburg's main airport, in the run-up to South Africa's first democratic elections in 1994. Terre'Blanche's final attempt to block the transition to democracy came in March 1994. It was the final debacle for the AWB, who invaded Bophuthatswana, one of the nominally independent "homelands" which the apartheid government had set up in a gesture towards black self-determination, in an attempt to prop up the autocratic leader. The attempted coup resulted in three AWB militia being gunned down by opposition forces under the glare of TV cameras. For Terre'Blanche it was a PR disaster, ending any hopes of seizing power by force. April 1994 saw South Africa's first free elections, with victory for the ANC and Mandela, who became the country's first black President.

Terre'Blanche's reputation had also taken a battering following an alleged affair with the journalist Jani Allan which had shocked his conservative grassroots supporters while being lapped up by the rest of the country; she described him at one point as "a pig in a safari suit". He also had mishaps with his trademark arrival on horseback, falling off on a number of occasions. The AWB's membership declined and the organisation moved out of its Pretoria offices.

In 1998, Terre'Blanche accepted "political and moral responsibility" before South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the bombing campaign to disrupt the 1994 elections, in which 21 people were killed and hundreds injured. Following the end of apartheid, he and his supporters sought amnesty, which was granted by the Commission.

In 2000, Terre'Blanche was jailed for six months following an assault on a petrol attendant and setting his dog on him. Eventually his past caught up with him and in 2001, he was jailed for the attempted murder of a farm worker whom he beat so badly in 1996 that the man was left brain damaged. It was the type of rhetoric he had espoused over the years. Upon his release in 2004, he had become a born-again Christian and spent much of his time writing poetry and living on his farm in anonymity.

In 2009, however, the ever bullish Terre'Blanche proclaimed that he had revived the AWB after several years of inactivity and that it would join with like-minded forces to push for secession from South Africa. "The circumstances in the country demanded it," he told the South African papers. "The white man in South Africa is realising that his salvation lies in self-government in territories paid for by his ancestors." Much of this was seen as more hot air from a political figure who had promised so much but delivered so little.

Martin Childs

Eugène Ney Terre'Blanche, white supremacist leader, born Ventersdorp, South Africa 31 January 1941; married (one daughter); died Villana, near Ventersdorp 3 April 2010.
Independent