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The plant-loving nebbish who fed his enemies to his ever-hungry Audrey Jr. in The Little Shop of Horrors; the undead, hook-handed killer known as Candyman; the interplanetary cook who later appeared as Police Woman Pepper Anderson’s boss; and the Mexican actress who served as star and artistic muse in a trio of classic Luis Buñuel films. The month of November saw the passing of four memorable motion picture and TV performers, and we at MovieFanFare would like to take a moment to remember them:
A cornerstone of Roger Corman’s repertoire company, Jonathan Haze was born Jack Aaron Schachter in Pittsburgh in 1929. After performing in summer theater, Haze moved to California and was working at an L.A. gas station when an encounter with actor/writer Wyott Ordung led to his getting a minor part in the 1954 Corman-produced shocker Monster from the Ocean Floor. Over the next 12 years Jonathan found steady work with the B-movie auteur, appearing in Apache Woman, Day the Earth Ended, It Conquered the World, Teenage Cave Man, The Terror, and the classic The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent.
His biggest and most famous role was as Seymour Krelboined, the flower shop worker whose pet plant grows into a bloodthirsty monster, in the 1960 original comedy/thriller The Little Shop of Horrors. Haze’s non-Corman work included an uncredited role in the 1955 James Dean drama East of Eden; writing the sci-fi spoof Invasion of the Star Creatures; and TV turns on Dragnet, 77 Sunset Strip, and even a voiceover role in the animated The Angry Beavers, along with work in TV and commercial production. Jonathan passed away on Nov. 2 at 96.
With his distinctive voice and 6’5″ stature, Washington, D.C. native Tony Todd was born to play a movie villain, and play he did. Born in 1954, Todd grew up in Connecticut and studied stage acting before making his movie debut in the 1986 chiller Sleepwalk, which also featured early turns by Steve Buscemi and Ann Magnuson. Tony’s second film turn came in Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning Vietnam War saga Platoon, and by 1990 he was working steadily in movies (Colors, Bird) and TV (21 Jump Street, Night Court). He would co-star in director Tom Savini’s 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead. 1992 found him in the role he would best be known for: Daniel Robitaille, a late 1800s African-American painter who has an affair with a white model. Tortured and murdered by a racist mob egged on by the woman’s father, Robitaille comes back as the vengeance-seeking entity known as Candyman, whom Todd would play in four films.
Away from the Candyman mirror, Tony’s hundreds of screen credits included a crime boss’s right-hand man in 1994’s The Crow; a Marine captain in Michael Bay’s 1996 Alcatraz-set actioner The Rock; funeral director William Bludworth in three films in the Final Destination series; Reverend Zombie in the first two Hatchet chillers and the fourth entry, Victor Crowley; and the title roles in a 2006 updating of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He also played Worf’s Klingon brother, Kurn, on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; had two different roles on 24; and was even a cast member on the soap opera The Young and the Restless. Tony’s voice could be heard in various animated series, from Transformers: Prime to playing Darkseid in several DC Comics projects. Todd was 69 when he died Nov. 6.
Who was the first actor to enter Rod Serling’s “wondrous land” known as The Twilight Zone? That would be Earl Holliman, playing a man who awakens in a town devoid of people in the series’ 1959 debut episode, “Where Is Everybody?” By this time the Louisiana native was a movie and TV veteran with several credits and a Golden Globe award. The seventh of 10 children in an impoverished family, his mother put him up for adoption a week after his 1928 birth and a family named Holliman took him in. Young Earl fell in love with the movies as a boy and tried more than once to break into motion pictures. After two U.S. Navy stints (the first in World War II when he was underage), Holliman studied acting at UCLA and the Pasadena Playhouse before landing his first screen role in the 1953 Martin/Lewis comedy Scared Stiff. His mid-50s work included Broken Lance, The Bridges at Toko-Ri, and The Big Combo. 1956 saw him play United Planets starship C-57D’s cook in Forbidden Planet; Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor’s son-in-law in Giant; and Katharine Hepburn’s brother in The Rainmaker, which won him the Best Supporting Actor Golden Globe. Fun Fact: Earl beat out Elvis Presley for the Rainmaker role.
By the late ’50s westerns had become Holliman’s stock in trade, with key roles in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Last Train from Gun Hill, and alongside John Wayne, Dean Martin, and Michael Anderson, Jr. as one of The Sons of Katie Elder. Holliman’s first TV series cast him as stylish crook-turned-Colorado marshal Sundance, who wore polished silver dollars on his hatband to blind gunfight opponents, in 1959-60’s Hotel de Paree, followed by the 1962-63 rodeo drama Wide Country with Andrew Prine. During the 1960s and early ’70s Holliman lived in California and France, and devoted much of his professional time to TV guest shots and stage work. He co-starred in George Pal’s 1968 psychic thriller The Power and the WWII actioner Anzio the same year, and was top-billed in the 1972 Disney feature The Biscuit Eater. After a memorable turn in the 1970 telefilm Tribes, Holliman found success as LAPD Sgt. Bill Crowley, boss of undercover officer Pepper Anderson (Angie Dickinson), in the 1974-78 NBC drama Police Woman. The ’80s and ’80s saw Earl playing opposite Burt Reynolds in the film Sharky’s Machine and alongside Delta Burke and Lea Thompson in the sitcoms Delta and Caroline in the City, respectively. He also worked for various animal rights charities as well as the Marines Toys for Tots program. Holliman was 96 when he passed away on Nov. 25.
Considered one of the leading ladies of the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, Silvia Pinal was born in the state of Sonora in 1931. While in her teens she worked as a secretary in Mexico City and took singing lessons in hopes of becoming an opera singer. As a college student she was voted Student Princess of Mexico, and Silvia’s attentions switched briefly to the stage before she made her film debut in 1949’s Bamba. That same year she appeared opposite beloved comic actor Germán Valdés, aka “Tin-Tan,” in El Rey Del Barrio, the first of three picture they made together. 1950 saw Pinal co-star with another Mexican funnyman, Cantinflas, in El Portero. Her work in such mid-’50s films as Un Extraño en la Escalera, Locura Pasional, and La Dulce Enemiga earned her acclaim and two Silver Ariel awards (Mexico’s Oscar equivalent) as Best Actress.
While working in Europe in the early ’60s, Pinal and her producer-husband Gustavo Alatriste (the second of her four spouses) made contact with Spanish-born filmmaker Luis Buñuel, who had returned to his homeland for the first time since Franco came to power in 1939. Their desire to collaborate on a project led to 1961’s controversial Viridiana. The taboo-shattering tale follows a naïve novitiate named Viridiana (Pinal) who thinks her lascivious uncle drugged and raped her (yes to the former, no the the latter). Inheriting his estate after he commits suicide, Viridiana turns the home into a refuge for the city’s poor, only to see it become a place of greed and debauchery. Banned in Spain and condemned by the Catholic Church, the film would earn the Palme d’Or at Cannes and make Pinal a global sensation. She would, along with Buñuel, return to Mexico for two more collaborations: 1962’s The Exterminating Angel, in which the wealthy guests at a swank dinner party find they cannot leave the mansion, and 1965’s Simon of the Desert, a satirical take on the story of the 5th-century Syrian Christian who lived for years atop a pillar in the middle of the desert and who is tempted by Satan (Pinal) to abandon his vigil.
The Buñuel films made Pinal an international commodity, but while she appeared with Anthony Quinn and Charles Bronson in a 1968 French/Italian/Mexican co-production, the frontier drama Guns for San Sebastian, her only real Hollywood role came the following year in director Sam Fuller’s thriller Shark!, co-starring with a young Burt Reynolds. She continued to perform in Mexican pictures and on stage and TV well into her 80s before she died on Nov. 28 at the age of 93.