CDA x 4: Barrie and Stewart
I never like reporting on FOUR celebrity deaths! My brother Howard alerted me to three of them and my friend Jessica on the fourth: Barbara Barrie (95), Donnie Iris (83), and Patrick Stewart (86) from Howard and Elke Sommer (85) from Jessica.
I first encountered Barbara Barrie playing Dennis Christopher's mom in Breaking Away. She was nominated for an Oscar for that movie. I later knew her from the original cast recording of Stephen Sondheim's Company, in which she and her husband got in a judo fight.
Howard reminded me that she played the wife of the title character on Barney Miller. I told him I only remembered the men on that show, and the theme song.
Here's the preview for Breaking Away. I think I need to see it again!
I have to confess I didn’t know the name Donnie Iris. But I did know this song he wrote for The Jaggerz:
Howard sent me this delightful video for a song I’m sure I never heard:
So much to love in the video! The phrase that screamed through my mind while watching it was “resolutely unattractive.” The teeth, and the banana-colored suit. And yet he is catnip to women, at least to the blonde in los gauchos.
And heavy sigh, Patrick Stewart. Many of us first saw him as Captain Jean-Luc Picard on Star Trek, the Next Generation. He was fantastic on that show and in the movies. But prisoners of public television might have spotted him in a supporting role in the series I, Claudius. I watched that show in the 2010s and won't soon forget the image of a young Patrick Stewart in a brown leather pseudo gladiator getup. Nice legs on that dude!
I was very lucky to have seen him onstage twice - - he and Ian McKellen did two plays in repertory on Broadway in 2013, Becket's Waiting for Godot and Pinter's No Man's Land. Stewart had a moment that was one of the most astonishing things I've ever seen onstage. Here's how I described it in my review:
"Stewart sported a withering comb-over. He was quite silent in the first act, at one point he had a seizure or tantrum (it was difficult to tell) and threw his glass on the floor. It didn’t break, because the glass was so sturdy and the rug so thick. He staggered about for a moment, and then fell to the floor on all fours. And very slowly, I might even say haltingly, he crawled across the stage and out the door. It went on forever, it was excruciating! In the best way."
You could have heard a pin drop in the theater when he was slowly, slowly crawling offstage. I will never forget it.
Please indulge me. I'm not going to share a clip of Stewart on Star Trek or X Men or anything else that leaps to mind. I'm going to share a clip from a cute little AIDS comedy from 1995, Jeffrey. Written by the great Paul Rudnick! I think I need to see this again, too.
I’ll close with Elke Sommer, a hot actress from the 60s and 70s who’s described on her IMDb bio as a “Teutonic temptress.” LOL! She wasn’t about to do Ibsen but she had charisma and she knew what she was doing. Here she is on The Muppet Show. Fascinating that Miss Piggy becomes the real star of this sketch:
It’s shocking that Sommer actually calls out Mademoiselle Piggy for being a pig. What gives her the right…?
Howard shocked me with this news: Elke Sommer had a house on the lake in our rat’s ass Wisconsin small town in the 70s! Can you imagine. He saw her in the liquor store one time! The things you find out about people.
One last revelation about Fräulein Sommer. Why was I surprised to hear that she had a feud with Zsa Zsa Gabor? She and The Zsasz had appeared on Circus of the Stars together and Zsa Zsa defamed her in the German press saying that Sommer was broke, supported herself by knitting sweaters and selling them for $150 each (that would be a neat trick), hung out in sleazy bars, and was a balding has-been! Don’t mess with Die Sommer! She took Gabor and her skeevy arriviste husband to court and they had to cough up $3.3M!
Comments