[DeadCelebrityAlert] James Shigeta Dead at 81: Character Actor and Singer Had Memorable Roles in Die Hard and Flower Drum Song

 

James Shigeta Dead at 81: Character Actor and Singer Had Memorable Roles in Die Hard and Flower Drum Song

James Shigeta, Die Hard

Natalie Finn, eonline
Tue Jul 29, 4:40 AM UTC

James Shigeta started off by conquering the American Idol of his day.

The singer and character actor won first place on the 1950s staple The Original Amateur Hour, and that proved to be a launching pad to both big- and small-screen stardom. 

Shigeta, whose long career allowed for memorable appearances in the likes of the 1961 musical  Flower Drum Song and then 1988's  Die Hard, has died. He was 81.

"It is with great sadness that I report the loss of my long time friend and client James Shigeta," his agent said in a statement to E! News Monday. 


"James was the biggest East Asian U.S. star the country had known. He filled both A-movie starring roles and TV guest appearances with the same cool and classy style. James starred  in Ross Hunter 's glitzy production of Rodgers and Hammerstein 's musical  Flower Drum Song, A Bridge to the Sun  and Die Hard.  

"James passed peacefully in his sleep, July 28, 2014, at 2 p.m. The world has lost a great actor. Sadly, I lost a dear friend."

Born in Honolulu, Shigeta studed acting at NYU but joined the Marines and served during the Korean War, entertaining troops. He actually became a recording star in Japan first, despite not knowing a word of Japanese when he first arrived.

He made his big-screen debut in The Crimson Kimono in 1959 and shared the 1960 Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer with George Hamilton, Troy Donahue and Barry Coe. The following year, his song-and-dance background landed him the role of Wang Ta in the feature adaptation of the Broadway hit  Flower Drum Song.

Shigeta worked steadily in TV, making appearances on now classic series such as Perry Mason, Mission: Impossible and Hawaii 5-O, and also was a familiar character actor in movies, costarring in the 1966 Elvis Presley musical Paradise, Hawaiian Style and the 1973 dystopian musical Lost Horizon.

In 1988, he played ill-fated executive Joseph Takagi in Die Hard, who refuses to give up the security code to the under-attack skyscraper's bank vault and pays the price at the hands of Alan Rickman 's villainous Hans Gruber. 

Shigeta provided the voice of General Li in the Disney animated hit Mulan, and his final feature appearance was in the 2009 indie comedy The People I've Slept With.

Information about survivors wasn't immediately available.


© 2014 E! Entertainment Television, Inc. All rights reserved., http://www.eonline.com/about/copyright/index.jsp

__._,_.___
Posted by: Jodi <jodit92@comcast.net>
Reply via web post • Reply to sender • Reply to group • Start a New Topic • Messages in this topic (1)
Remember to visit the Dead Celebrity Alert
Blog, a searchable database of obituaries
back to 2001:

http://DeadCelebrityAlert.com

- - -

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section
107, any copyrighted work in this message is
distributed under fair use without profit or
payment to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving the included
information for non-profit research and
educational purposes only.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

.

__,_._,___

[DeadCelebrityAlert] Thomas Berger, 'Little Big Man' author, dead at 89

 




Thomas Berger, 'Little Big Man' author, dead at 89

HILLEL ITALIE, AP
Tue Jul 22, 3:07 AM UTC

NEW YORK (AP) — Thomas Berger, the witty and eclectic novelist who reimagined the American West in the historical yarn "Little Big Man" and mastered genres ranging from detective stories to domestic farce, has died at age 89.

Berger's literary agent, Cristina Concepcion, said Monday that he died in Nyack Hospital on July 13, just days before his 90th birthday. He had been in failing health, Concepcion said.

One of the last major authors to have served in World War II, Berger wrote more than 20 books, including the autobiographical "Rinehart" series, a "Little Big Man" sequel and "The Feud," about warring families in a 1930s Midwest community. "The Feud" was recommended for the 1984 Pulitzer Prize by the fiction jury but was overruled by the board of directors, which awarded another Depression-era novel, William Kennedy's "Ironweed."

Berger's biggest mainstream success was "Little Big Man," published in 1964 and an ultra-wry tale of 111-year-old Jack Crabb, who alleges that he was abducted by Indians as a young boy and later fought with the Cherokees in the Battle of Little Big Horn. The novel was adapted into a 1970 movie of the same name, starring Dustin Hoffman and directed by Arthur Penn. A leading American Indian writer, Sherman Alexie, would cite "Little Big Man" as an influence on his screenplay for the 1998 movie "Smoke Signals."

Other Berger novels made into films include "Neighbors," which starred John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, and "Meeting Evil," featuring Samuel L. Jackson and Luke Wilson.

Never as famous as such contemporaries and fellow veterans as Norman Mailer and Kurt Vonnegut, Berger became the kind of writer who made fans feel special just for knowing about him. Admirers regarded him as unique and underappreciated, a comic moralist equally attuned to the American past and present.

"Berger's books are accessible and funny and immerse you in the permanent strangeness of his language and attitude, perhaps best encapsulated by Berger's own self-definition as a 'voyeur of copulating words,'" Jonathan Lethem wrote in a 2012 essay. "He offers a book for every predilection: if you like westerns, there's his classic, 'Little Big Man'; so, too, has he written fables of suburban life ('Neighbors'), crime stories ('Meeting Evil'), fantasies, small-town 'back-fence' stories of Middle American life, and philosophical allegories ('Killing Time')."

Berger was born in Cincinnati, the son of a public school business manager and a housewife. He was a dreamer, seeking out new worlds on the nearest bookshelf. His favorite works included the legends of King Arthur and, since he was born close enough to the 19th century to hear firsthand accounts, histories of the Battle of Little Big Horn.

"Very early in life," he once said, "I discovered that for me reality was too often either dull or obnoxious, and while I did play all the popular games that employ a ball, lower hooks into the water, and, especially fire guns, I preferred the pleasure of the imagination to those of experience, and I read incessantly."

Berger served in the Army from 1943 to 1946 and used some of his experiences in Germany for his debut novel, "Crazy in Berlin." He was an undergraduate at the University of Cincinnati, then a graduate student at Columbia University, where he studied under the critic Lionel Trilling and attempted a book on George Orwell, a lasting influence.

Berger worked in libraries as a young man and for a variety of publications, from The New York Times Index to Popular Science Monthly. At a workshop at The New School for Social Research, Berger met such fellow students as Jack Kerouac, Mario Puzo and William Styron and a painter, Jeanne Redpath, who became his wife. He wrote short stories in his 20s but disliked the art form, believing he needed more space "to create my alternative reality."

"Little Big Man" was his third novel. As he told American Heritage magazine, he began the book in 1962 with "the intention of comprising in one man's personal story all the themes of the Old West that have since become legendary."

Jack Crabb was based on a fictional character, the blowhard Kit Carson in William Saroyan's play "The Time of Your Life."

"The book's appeal traces to two main currents: one, it's a tall tale in the great American tradition of Mark Twain, and, second, it's hip, modern and funny and anticipates appreciation and understanding of a vanished Indian culture by decades," the critic Allen Barra wrote for Salon.com in 2006.

In more recent novels, Berger satirized the frustrations of contemporary domestic life. In "Best Friends," he contrasted the overachieving Roy Courtright and the underachieving Sam Grandy, with Grandy's wife trapped in the middle. "The Houseguest" was a comic gangster story in which a thug ingratiates himself with a Long Island family, then keeps them hostage — at least they think he does. In "Adventures of the Artificial Woman," a technician unlucky in love constructs an ideal partner, only to have her leave him and become a movie star.

"I ... have never thought of my work as being funny except incidentally," Berger once said, disputing the idea that he was a comic novelist. "I write as I do because that's the way I instinctively look at things."

Associated Press


__._,_.___
Posted by: Jodi <jodit92@comcast.net>
Reply via web post • Reply to sender • Reply to group • Start a New Topic • Messages in this topic (1)
Your New Favourite Group is Waiting for You!
If you enjoy this group, we have suggestions for others you might like to join.
Yahoo Groups
Control your view and sort preferences per Yahoo Group
You can now control your default Sort & View Preferences for Conversations, Photos and Files in the membership settings page.
Remember to visit the Dead Celebrity Alert
Blog, a searchable database of obituaries
back to 2001:

http://DeadCelebrityAlert.com

- - -

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section
107, any copyrighted work in this message is
distributed under fair use without profit or
payment to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving the included
information for non-profit research and
educational purposes only.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml

.

__,_._,___
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)