It was just a week ago that we were reading about yet another performance fiasco where Amy Winehouse slurred and pitched around the stage in a drunken, confused state. After all those pictures of her in the Caribbean last year looking so relaxed and well seemed to give hope to her fans that maybe, just maybe, this wonderfully talented young woman was finally on the straight and narrow – that she had beaten her chemical demons and was ready to start living again. Did any of us though really have the feeling she had done it…? I think we wanted to believe it – but it was not to last.
Sadly Amy Winehouse is dead at the young age of 27 – found beyond help this afternoon in her home from what appears to be a drug overdose. The devastating journey of self-destruction finally completed and what a loss she is the world of popular music. What a loss it is for her parents to lose their daughter in such a tragic, though not unpredictable way. Maybe now it is time to identify and go after those cretins who corrupted this young woman at a time when she had the world at her feet – those who sold her the drugs which reduced her little body to that of a wasted skeleton and ate away at her talent turning her into almost a caricature of her former self. They are out there, somewhere, and they must be known. I hope they pay for their part in this young woman’s tragic departure from this world.
Australians to a man are proud of the great talent that was our Bill Hunter, and now we have lost him to cancer. His screen career was launched as an extra in ‘On the Beach’ filmed in 1959 in Melbourne with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner, and his talent proceeded to rise in stature and class during a time when the Australian film industry was beginning to earn the worldwide respect it so deserved.
Bill Hunter was as Aussie as the Opera House, Uluru, the Simpson Desert and the Holden Kingswood. Each character he portrayed – whether the stoic and dependable Major Barton in Gallipoli, or a shady two-timer such as Barry Fife in Strictly Ballroom, or Muriel’s corrupt politician dad in Muriel’s Wedding – you saw a strength in the man, an innate quality that made you wish he was one of your mates. A fine actor and a very fine Australian, I’m not sure he’d be all that fussed about being referred to as a legend because everything about Bill Hunter was real and genuine. I reckon he’d prefer everyone just have a beer on him and toast a man who was very much one of our own.
Bill leaves us with so many fine moments on screen but for me, his portrayal of Major Barton preparing to lead his young Anzacs in the doomed ‘over the top’ assault at Lone Pine in the final scene of Peter Weir’s film, Gallipoli, embodies just what an instinctively fine actor he was.
The death ofCammie King Conlon has taken the surviving cast of Gone with the Wind down to one remaining person. Cammie played Rhett and Scarlett’s little girl, Bonnie Blue, who tragically fell from her pony in the film and died. The event was the turning point in the story for Scarlett and Rhett.
The most recent cast member to pass away was one of the Tarleton Twins – Fred Crane – who are seen at the very start of the film in the opening sequence with Scarlett. The other Twin was George Reeves, who later went on to television fame as Superman before committing suicide in the late 1950′s. Fred Crane died in 2008.
Ann Rutherford, who played Scarlett’s younger sister, is still alive at 90 years of age and still active in Hollywood circles.
