Capitol Hill Blue Forums Misc. Topics History Roundtable The Passing Parade: Obituaries: 2017

Well he is now officially declared dead not just by doctors but also by the family and the website reflects that now.
HEART.
BROKEN.

He died twice yesterday!

Roy Dotrice, a British stage, film and television actor who began performing as a prisoner of war in Germany and worked in Britain and America for six decades, notably in one-man shows portraying Abe Lincoln, the diarist John Aubrey and other historical figures, died on Monday at his home in London. He was 94...

While he kept a home in London, Mr. Dotrice lived in Los Angeles and worked mostly in the United States after 1980. He appeared in New York stage productions of Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People” (1985) and Harold Pinter’s “The Homecoming” (1991). On film, he portrayed Mozart’s father in Milos Forman’s “Amadeus” (1984) and a skating coach in Paul M. Glaser’s “The Cutting Edge” (1992).

On television, he played Charles Dickens in Masterpiece Theater’s 13-part “Dickens of London” (1976); a British monarch in the mini-series “Shaka Zulu” (1986); the father of the beast on the CBS crime series “Beauty and the Beast” (1987-90); and a priest on the CBS dramatic series “Picket Fences” (1993-96). In recent years he recorded many audiobooks, creating voices for hundreds of characters in the saga adapted for “Game of Thrones.” ...

With the death of Stan "The Big K" or "Krusher" Kowalski on October 20, the world lost more than just a father, a World War II veteran, a tireless fundraiser, and a professional wrestler. It also lost a great friend.

Ken Shapiro, a former child television actor whose hit 1974 film, “The Groove Tube,” anticipated “Saturday Night Live” by a year with sketches that wickedly satirized TV, died on Nov. 18 at his home in Las Cruces, N.M. He was 75.

His daughter, Rosy Rosenkrantz, said the cause was cancer.

Mr. Shapiro’s film, with a cast that included Chevy Chase, a future “S.N.L.” star, and the comedian Richard Belzer, was simultaneously inspired by Sid Caesar and Ernie Kovacs’s TV comedy shows of the 1950s and invigorated by the nudity, profanity and raunchiness commonplace in 1970s movies.

Bruce Brown, longtime surf filmmaker and director of the seminal “Endless Summer” just passed at 80 years old.

Drew Kampion wrote the following for our Surfing A-Z entry on Brown:

Prior to 1964, the media saw surfers as rebellious thugs, and Hollywood made them out to be a bunch of idiots. Filmmaker Bruce Brown single-handedly changed that with The Endless Summer. It portrayed the wave as a kind of Holy Grail and surfers as knights on a quest. In one stroke, he replaced Hollywood's buffoonery with the popular mythology that endures today.