John Marzano 1963-2008
Until he became a baseball commentator on Comcast’s Phillies Post-Game Live show a few years back, I didn’t know who John Marzano was. As a career back-up catcher in the American League (for Seattle, Texas and Boston), he might as well have played on Mars since I’m a diehard Phillies fan. However, when this South Philly-bred baseball veteran started talking about the
Phillies for Comcast, I became an instant Marzano fan. He had that South Philly attitude. When the team made a bonehead play, he said so. When a player stunk up the joint, he didn’t try to make excuses. His post-game analysis was entertaining and informative. From all accounts, he was a great guy as well as a great baseball man. His shocking death at age 45 from an apparent heart attack has taken one of the good guys away long before his time.
It is always a shock when one of the young and beautiful people dies. Heath Ledger, 28, who recently finished playing The Joker in The Dark Knight and was making another film, was found dead in his apartment in New York Tuesday. While it has not been confirmed, several media outlets have 
One can’t talk of her career without mentioned An Affair to Remember and The King and I. In the category of a guilty pleasure is the 1967 comedy version of Casino Royale. Kerr played the superspy Mimi opposite David Niven and has mentioned that she enjoyed the part because it gave her the rare opportunity to use her real Scottish brogue. She was typecast as a gentle Englishwoman early on and her real life class meant that the typecasting stuck despite the versatility of her screen career. Check out the NYTimes 
Character actor Charles Lane passed away this week at the age of 102. He had roles in over 800 movies and TV shows over a span of 80 years. He often played sour-faced impatient men, a role he did not play in real life. His best known film roles were in You Can't Take It With You and It's A Wonderful Life. He also played in the famous I Love Lucy episode when "Little Ricky" was born. Go 
A World War II veteran who saw action at Omaha Beach, he got into acting in his thirties after careers as a lifeguard, sportscaster and public relations man. His other film roles include GI Blues and Girls! Girls! Girls! opposite Elvis, Born Losers, Hells Angels ’69 (which he co-wrote) and Lawnmower Man. He was the star of the 1960 TV series The Aquanauts, and was a long time regular on the soap opera One Life to Live in the 1980s. His many TV guest spots include the shows Combat, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Bonanza, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Route 66, Perry Mason and Have Gun, Will Travel. More recently he guested on My Name Is Earl. 
Robert Altman created a style of moviemaking that has been often imitated but rarely duplicated. The maverick film director who mostly worked outside the studio system died last night at age 81. His body of work is a legacy of movies that featured multiple characters with overlapping dialogue. These characters would often circle around in their own universe until they crashed into other characters in exciting ways. Notable examples of his distinctive style include Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts and Gosford Park. His fourth movie was a studio job that remained his most popular effort in terms of box office success. Before the TV series, there was M*A*S*H (1970) a movie that took a well worn genre, the G.I. service comedy, and took it into the realm of cutting edge anti-war black comedy at the height of the Vietnam War. In my mind Donald Sutherland is Hawkeye Pierce, Elliott Gould is Trapper John, Sally Kellerman is Hot Lips and Robert Duvall is Frank Burns.
He had a face made for menacing film roles and that’s just what he did following graduation from Stanford University in 1947. His first break was as stand-in to Marlon Brando for A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway, where he took over the role. He made his film debut in 1950’s Panic in the Streets and earned back-to-back Oscar nominations for bad guy roles in Sudden Fear and the classic western Shane. Forty years later he won the golden statuette for his comedy performance in City Slickers (1991) as Curly. His one-arm push-ups after he accepted the award earned him the biggest notoriety of his long career. It remains one of the most memorable Oscar moments of all time. 
My personal Jack Palance film festival would include his finest performance, an Emmy-award winning turn as a washed-up fighter in Rod Serling’s TV drama Requiem for a Heavyweight. Also on the “best of” list would be Shane, Panic in the Streets, The Big Knife, City Slickers and Bagdad Café.