The Earth has lost its last great dictator

[sovay]

R.I.P. Milo O'Shea, a man with great eyebrows and a way with a rape piano. I saw him first as the owlish-eyed Friar Lawrence in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet (1968), but I remember him most vividly from Barbarella. This is probably unsurprising on some level. I have never heard that the 1966 Ulysses is a great adaptation of the novel, but I still want to see it someday.

I do not want to requiescat Iain Banks while he's still making personal statements, but I don't like this one. I still need to read The Crow Road (1992).

handful_ofdust, have a 1985 interview with Peter Cushing. Starlog has just gone up at the Internet Archive.

Comments

[rosefox]

a way with a rape piano

A... what?

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm glad to have the news on Iain Banks in time to warn B., who is going to be very upset, but it is terrible news and I am sad.

Have you read Whit? Please tell me you have and I can lend it to you if not.

Also, Milo O'Shea. ... it has not been the best day, has it.

[teenybuffalo.livejournal.com]

Rape piano? What the deuce can a rape piano b--

Oh. Barbarella. A-ha. Yes, there can be no other term for it. That scene would be a lot less fun if Jane Fonda wasn't so skilled at acting dim yet unfazed.

[kenjari.livejournal.com]

And R. I. P. composer Robert Ward, who wrote a good opera on The Crucible.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Although I claim to love his Culture books above all others, in fact The Crow Road is probably my favourite of Iain's novels, with Whit a close second. After those, I'd probably take most of the SF ahead of most of the others. And I'd live in the Culture sooner than I'd live anywhere else.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

That's horrible about Banks, but man, he's taking it with amazing sang-froid.

Thanks for the Cushing link! As always, I'm impressed by the way that he dedicates a paragraph and a half of it to listing off all of Christopher Lee's amazing qualities, including his abilities as a mimic. As Steve said: "Now I want to hear Lee doing Cushing."

[selidor]

Gosh I wish this news wasn't the case.
There's a shelf of (mostly M.) Banks books that need to travel in December from NZ back to where-ever all the other books will be living by then. I remember The Crow Road as disturbing as anything, and evocative.

[barry-king.livejournal.com]

I have yet to find a piece of fiction more disturbing than The Wasp Factory. Some of the imagery gets caught in the woolgather like burdock. An author should not be able to do that and then go on to write all the other.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

RIP

I'm sorry to hear about the state of Iain Banks' health, although I admire the way he's responding to it.