SHEARED WOOLLEY, JACKAL OFF, AND OTHER NOVEMBER THRILLERS
Quincy Jones was an aspiring jazz musician and early pal of Ray Charles who went on to reshape the music industry through his collaborations with everyone from Frank Sinatra to Count Basie. His work with Michael Jackson was the most prominent, and some of the most iconic flourishes to MJ’s songs (Eddie Van Halen’s guitar solo in “Beat It”, Vincent Price’s narration in “Thriller”) were Quincy Jones concepts. He also worked in film (In the Heat of the Night, The Color Purple) and TV (Roots, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air). Though, and I am being 100% serious with this, his greatest legacy of all was producing Lesley Gore.
June Spencer was the last surviving original cast member of The Archers, debuting the old-fashioned Peggy Woolley in the 1950 pilot of the beloved radio series. Thelma Rogers took over the role shortly afterwards, but Spencer returned for keeps in 1962 and continued to portray Peggy until she was 103. Besides Archers, she also closes a deadpooling era in general as the last particularly popular pick born in the 1910s (at least until the world’s oldest people start hailing from that decade).
Timothy West was acclaimed for his Shakespearean theatre roles and films such as Nicholas & Alexandra and The Day of the Jackal, and surely bodes ominous for widow Prunella Scales. US actor deaths were the original Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors Jonathan Haze, Ryan’s Hope alum Helen Gallagher, and Police Woman star Earl Holliman, who also featured in the debut episode of The Twilight Zone. The Golden Age of Mexican cinema lost one of their dwindling ranks of stars with Silvia Pinal.
John Prescott was Deputy PM for the decade of Tony Blair’s government, serving as a scrappy working-class counterweight to Blair’s urbane New Labour, and John Nott was Thatcher’s Secretary of State for Defence and infamously walked out on an interview with Robin Day. More importantly, his son composed for Wallace & Gromit. US politics had a bit of an eventful month, but the Reaper never stops being bipartisan – he claimed both Reagan’s National Security Advisor Richard V. Allen and former US Democratic Senator Fred R Harris, who was just one of two surviving US Senators first elected to the Senate before Joe Biden was.
Besides June Spencer, other 100 Club departees were Japanese royal Princess Mikasa, oldest British man John Tinniswood, and Nobel laureate Roger Guillemin, whose February death went unacknowledged by the UK press until a Times obit for his co-laureate Andrew Schally sneaked in a nod to Guillemin’s death. The world of jazz farewelled both drum virtuoso Roy Haynes and saxophonist Lou Donaldson, Frank Auerbach was one of the leading painters of the School of London alongside Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, and Chuck Woolery hosted a variety of US game shows including Scrabble, Love Connection, and pre-Pat Sajak Wheel of Fortune. We also saw the deaths of leisure travel pioneer Arthur Frommer, author Barbara Taylor-Bradford, baseball player Rico Carty, billionaire oil magnate Vardis Vardinogiannis, and serial rapist and murderer John Cannan.