TV Obits: Court, Grasshoff, Byrne, Oliver, Gilford
- Hazel Court: She was the actress known as the “Scream Queen.” Besides appearing in such classic horror flicks as The Masque of the Red Death, The Raven, and The Curse of Frankenstein, she also did a lot of TV, including episodes of The Twilight Zone, Mannix, Mission: Impossible, Burke’s Law, The Wild, Wild West, Gidget, Thriller, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Rawhide, McMillan & Wife, and many other shows. She died of a heart attack at age 82.
- Alex Grasshoff: He was a TV and film director/producer (he won and Oscar for Young Americans in 1969 but had to give it back when his film was declared ineligible) who worked on such shows as The Rockford Files, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Toma, The Rookies, CHiPs, several National Geographic Specials and several ABC Afterschool Specials. He died after surgery at age 79.
- Johnny Byrne: He wrote for several TV shows, including Space: 1999, Doctor Who, All Creatures Great and Small, Tales of the Unexpected, Noah’s Ark, One By One, Heartbeat, and many others. He died on April 2.
- Stephen Oliver: He played Lee Webber on Peyton Place and appeared on many other showed, including Bracken’s World, Streets of San Francisco, The Immortal, CHiPs, Starsky & Hutch, and Code R. He died of cancer at age 68.
- Madeline Lee Gilford: Sometimes credited as Madeline Lee (she was married to actor Jack Gilford for 40 years), Gilford made several apperances as a judge on Law and Order and appeared on such shows as Mad About You and The Beat. She also appeared in such movies as The Savages, Save The Tiger, and Cocoon: The Return. She died at age 84.
Monk star Stanley Kamel dead at 65
Stanley Kamel, who played Dr. Charles Kroger on the USA hit series Monk, was found dead in his Hollywood house earlier today. No cause of death has been announced yet. He was 65.
Kamel has had an incredibly long career in TV and the movies. He was a regular on such series as Beverly Hills, 90210, Melrose Place, Murder One, L.A. Law, and Cagney and Lacey, and appeared in dozens of TV shows over the years, including The West Wing, MacGyver, The Golden Girls, Hunter, Star Trek: TNG, Murder, She Wrote, Reba, The Guardian, General Hospital, NYPD Blue, 7th Heaven, The Mod Squad, Mannix, The Rookies, Three’s Company, Emergency, Kojak, and many more. Besides episodes of Monk, he was also filming a feature film titled For Better Or Worse, and a new movie, The Urn, which will be released later this year.
We’ll update this post once we found out what exactly happened. Access Hollywood and the other shows will have more later today.
Update: Kamel died of a heart attack.
Gail Fisher Biography
Gail Fisher helped break several barriers as a young black actress in television during the 1960s. She was the first black performer to get dialogue in a nationally aired commercial, and as Peggy Fair on Mannix, only the second black woman (the first being Nichelle Nichols of Star Trek) cast as a regular character in a dramatic hour-long network series, a role for which she won an Emmy award in 1970. Fisher was one of five children born in Orange, NJ. She was later a beauty pageant winner and became a model, using the money she earned in the latter profession and from her regular job in a local factory in New Jersey to take acting lessons in New York. Fisher studied with Lee Strasberg and was later a member of the Repertory Theater at Lincoln Center, where she worked with Elia Kazan and Herbert Blau, among other directors. It was Blau who gave Fisher her significant stage credit, portraying a major role in a production of Danton’s Death. She had already picked up some television work, including commercials, and it was her spot for All detergent that marked a breakthrough for black performers in that field. In 1968, the producers of the series Mannix, starring Mike Connors, revamped the series from its original format, transforming him from an employee of a high-tech security firm into a more traditional private detective, with an office and a secretary. Fisher won the latter role, which allowed her to do far more than answer phones and serve coffee, frequently putting her into the action and the drama. Along with Nichelle Nichols, Greg Morris of Mission: Impossible, Robert Hooks of N.Y.P.D., Don Mitchell of Ironside, and Diahann Carroll of Julia, Fisher was one of the most visible black actors on television during this period, and her Emmy in 1970 confirmed the quality of her work. She took great pride in having helped raised the presence of black performers on television from near invisibility in the early 1960s to major prominence at the end of the decade. After the cancellation of the series in 1975, Fisher’s chaotic personal life — which included several marriages and problems with substance abuse — caused her to leave acting for a time, although she did play a major role in the 1987 feature film Mankillers and appeared in the made-for-television movie Donor in 1990. Fisher died of kidney failure late in 2000 in Los Angeles.