R.I.P.

So long Darth Vader. Just learned he was in one of my favorite flicks, A Clockwork Orange...

Dave Prowse, Man Behind Darth Vader’s Mask, Is Dead at 85​

Mr. Prowse went from being a weight lifting champion in Britain to helping portray one of the most iconic villains in movie history. But his voice did not make the edit.


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Dave Prowse, left, alongside probably his most famous character, Darth Vader, at a fan convention in Cusset, France, in 2013.Credit...Thierry Zoccolan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Dave Prowse, the British actor who gave the imposing physical presence — but not the voice — to Darth Vader in the original “Star Wars” trilogy, died on Saturday in a hospital in London. He was 85.
Mr. Prowse’s death was confirmed by Thomas Bowington, his agent, in a telephone interview. Mr. Prowse’s family did not release a cause of death, but he retired in 2016 because of ill health, Mr. Bowington said.

Standing 6-foot-6 and with a figure honed from years of weight lifting (he was once the British heavyweight champion), Mr. Prowse had the perfect presence for the role of Darth Vader, whom he played in 1977’s “Star Wars,” in “The Empire Strikes Back” in 1980 and in “Return of the Jedi” in 1983.


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Mr. Prouse, left, in 1978. He was the British heavyweight champion in weight lifting in the 1960s.Credit...Colin Davey/Evening Standard, via Getty Images

He was scouted for the role by George Lucas, the franchise’s creator, who had seen Mr. Prowse play a bodyguard in Stanley Kubrick’s “A Clockwork Orange.”

Mr. Lucas actually offered Mr. Prowse a choice of roles for the original “Star Wars”: Chewbacca, the hairy, gentle giant and a hero in the franchise; or Darth Vader, the arch-villain. Mr. Prowse told the BBC in a 2013 interview that the choice had been simple. “I said, ‘Well, don’t say any more, George, I’ll have the villain’s part,’” Mr. Prowse recalled. “You always remember the bad guy.”


There was another reason he turned down Chewbecca, he added: “I thought, ‘Oh, God no, three months in a gorilla skin, no thank you very much.’”

Mr. Prowse’s voice had the distinctive agricultural tones of someone born in Bristol, in southwest England, and many believe that is why he did not get to voice Darth Vader. His lines were instead overdubbed by James Earl Jones after filming had finished.


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From left, Peter Cushing, George Lucas, Carrie Fisher and Mr. Prowse on the set of the first “Star Wars” movie, which was released in 1977.Credit...Sunset Boulevard/Corbis, via Getty Images


In the BBC interview, Mr. Prowse claimed that it was not actually his accent that had led to the change. Wearing Darth Vader’s mask had caused his lines to come out muffled during filming, he said, and Mr. Lucas did not have time to fly him out to America to overdub the lines afterward.

Mr. Prowse only learned that his voice was missing from the film at its premiere. “I’m watching the film and all of a sudden this strange voice comes over,” he told the BBC in the 2013 interview. “I thought, ‘Oh, goodness me, that’s not me.’” But he said that Mr. Jones had been “a great choice” for the part and the pair became friends.

But some said the change was inevitable because of his accent. “They always knew they were not going to use that voice,” Carrie Fisher, who played Princess Leia in the films, said in a 2016 BBC interview. “We called him Darth Farmer.”

Mr. Prowse’s face and voice could have finally made an appearance in the franchise in “The Return of the Jedi” when Luke Skywalker (played by Mark Hamill) removes Darth Vader’s mask so that the pair can look at each other. But Mr. Lucas instead decided to use the actor Sebastian Shaw to play the character in that moment.

In some fight scenes, Darth Vader was also played by Bob Anderson, a fencer and stunt double.
Regardless of the changes, Mr. Prowse was always a favorite of “Star Wars” fans and spent much of his life afterward attending conventions and dealing with fan mail — some of it of a salacious nature from women who found his suit sexy, he told Jackie Collins in a 1980 interview.

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Mr. Prowse posing with fans dressed up as Star Wars characters in Cusset in 2013.Credit...Thierry Zoccolan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


David Charles Prowse was born in Bristol in July 1935. His first passion was not acting but bodybuilding and he won the British heavyweight championship in weight lifting in the 1960s. Once he moved into acting, his first roles were mainly as monsters in horror movies.

In Britain, he became more widely known when he got the part of the Green Cross Code Man, a superhero who promoted road safety. He appeared as the character in a government television campaign and also toured schools to encourage children to stop, look and listen before crossing the street.

The British government almost fired him from that role after “Star Wars” came out, Mr. Prowse told Ms. Collins in the 1980 interview, because they felt Darth Vader’s image could clash with a road safety campaign.

That campaign ran until 1990, and Mr. Prowse wrote in a 2014 piece for The Guardian that it was “the best job I’ve ever had, including my Star Wars role, and by far my proudest achievement.” But even in Britain, Mr. Prowse will most likely be remembered more for being the man behind the suit in “Star Wars” than anything else.

He is survived by Norma Scammell, his wife; and three children, Mr. Bowington said.


Wear a Darth Vader Costume Created by an Oscar Winner (If You Have $1 Million) (Published 2019)

sure to upset my daughter - an over the top Star Wars fanatic
 
Really sad, Chuck Yeager passed away. Truly one a kind, a National Hero, WWII ace, Test Pilot Extraordinaire, first human to fly faster than sound, and one hell of an outdoorsman.

During the European air war of WWII he was shot down over France, but was recovered by Resistance fighters and spirited back to the UK. For a long time he was forbidden to fly lest he get shot down again and captured by the Germans, possibly compromising his Resistance host during interrogation. Eventually he was cleared to fly again and was one of the few pilots who shot down a ME-262, the German jet fighter. Albeit he caught one on "final approach" for landing and was able to blast it out of the sky from his P-51 Mustang, The Glamorous Glennis. In 1997, at age 74, Yeager commemorated the 50th anniversary of his milestone flight in the X-1, by flying in an F-15 Eagle. I have a model of the Bell X-1 sitting on my desk that was signed by the General himself.

Will have to watch "The Right Stuff" tonight. Anyone watching the new "Right Stuff" series? Is it any good??

Chuck Yeager, pilot who broke the sound barrier, dies at 97
 
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The NYTimes obit. It's a PITA to cut, paste and reformat, but the least I can do for the General...

Chuck Yeager, Test Pilot Who Broke the Sound Barrier, Is Dead at 97​

A World War II fighter ace and Air Force general, he was, according to Tom Wolfe, “the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff.”

Chuck Yeager in 1948. The previous year, he became the first pilot to break the sound barrier.

Chuck Yeager in 1948. The previous year, he became the first pilot to break the sound barrier.Credit...Associated Press
By Richard Goldstein

Published Dec. 7, 2020 Updated Dec. 8, 2020, 12:44 a.m. ET

Chuck Yeager, the most famous test pilot of his generation who was the first to break the sound barrier, and, thanks to Tom Wolfe, came to personify the death-defying aviator who possessed the elusive yet unmistakable “right stuff,” died on Monday at a hospital in Los Angeles. He was 97.

His death was announced via his official Twitter account, which cited his wife, Victoria, and confirmed by John Nicoletti, a family friend, by phone.

General Yeager came out of the West Virginia hills with only a high school education and with a drawl that left many a fellow pilot bewildered. The first time he went up in a plane, he was sick to his stomach.
But he became a fighter ace in World War II, shooting down five German planes in a single day and 13 over all. In the decade that followed, he helped usher in the age of military jets and spaceflight. He flew more than 150 military aircraft, logging more than 10,000 hours in the air.

His signal achievement came on Oct. 14, 1947, when he climbed out of a B-29 bomber as it ascended over California’s Mojave Desert from what was then known as Muroc Air Force Base, and entered the cockpit of an orange, bullet-shaped, rocket-powered experimental plane attached to the bomb bay.

An Air Force captain at the time, he zoomed off in the plane, a Bell Aircraft X-1, at an altitude of 23,000 feet, and when he reached about 43,000 feet above the desert, history’s first sonic boom reverberated across the floor of the dry lake beds. He had reached a speed of 700 miles an hour, breaking the sound barrier and dispelling the long-held fear that any plane flying at or beyond the speed of sound would be torn apart by shock waves.

“After all the anticipation to achieve this moment, it really was a letdown,” he wrote in his best-selling memoir “Yeager” (1985), a collaboration with Leo Janos. “There should’ve been a bump in the road, something to let you know that you had just punched a nice, clean hole through the sonic barrier. The Ughknown was a poke through Jell-O. Later on, I realized that this mission had to end in a letdown because the real barrier wasn’t in the sky but in our knowledge and experience of supersonic flight.”

Nonetheless, that exploit ranked alongside the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903 and Charles Lindbergh’s solo fight to Paris in 1927 as epic events in the history of aviation. In 1950, General Yeager’s X-1 plane, which he christened Glamorous Glennis, honoring his wife, went on display at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

Chuck Yeager, center, as an 8th Air Force fighter pilot in Europe in front of his P-51 Mustang with his ground crew.

Chuck Yeager, center, as an 8th Air Force fighter pilot in Europe in front of his P-51 Mustang with his ground crew. Credit...Courtesy of Chuck Yeager

But General Yeager, in the headlines for a time, became a national celebrity only after the publication of “The Right Stuff,” by Tom Wolfe, in 1979 and the movie based on it four years later, in which General Yeager was played by Sam Shepard. In the opening scene, he was depicted breaking the sound barrier.

In his portrayal of the astronauts of NASA’s Mercury program, Mr. Wolfe wrote about the post-World War II test pilot fraternity in California’s desert and its notion that “a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness to pull it back in the last yawning moment — and then go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day.”

That quality, understood but unspoken, would entitle a pilot to be part of “the very Brotherhood of the Right Stuff itself.”

Mr. Wolfe also wrote about a nonchalance affected by pilots in the face of an emergency in a voice “specifically Appalachian in origin” that was first heard in military circles but ultimately emanated from the cockpits of commercial airliners.
 
We lost a great Broadway Star...

Ann Reinking Dies at 71; Dancer, Actor, Choreographer and Fosse Muse​

From the ensembles of “Cabaret” and “Pippin,” she stepped into the role of Roxie Hart in “Chicago,” and the rest is Tony-winning history.
 
Sad, I always wonder why the family or media does not report how the person has passed.
The reason should be shared, to help others.
 
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