Recent Obituaries, Classic Films Only

[Staph]

59. TCM Remembers 2013

TCM has started showing their "TCM Remembers" for 2013, a remembrance of those associated with films who passed away in 2013. Many of those mentioned have already been remembered within this thread, but I noticed at least one pair who passed underneath my own personal radar.


Virginia Gibson

Virginia Gibson, a singer, dancer and actress who played one of the smitten girls in the classic MGM musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, died April 25 in Newtown, Pa. She was 88.

A regular on Broadway for more than decade starting in the 1940s, Gibson received a Tony Award nomination in 1957 for best featured actress in a musical for her work in Happy Hunting opposite Ethel Merman.

In director Stanley Donen’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), Gibson plays Liza, the dark-haired beauty who winds up with Ephraim (Jacques d’Amboise) and leads the girls in the musical number “June Bride.” The film, one of the most beloved movie musicals in Hollywood history, was nominated for best picture, losing out to On the Waterfront.

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/seven-brides-seven-brothers-virginia-gibson-dies-451646


Matt Mattox

Matt Mattox, a dancer, choreographer and teacher who helped shape contemporary jazz dance in the United States and Europe, died in France on Feb. 18. He was 91.

Mr. Mattox, who had made his home in France for many years, had a prominent career dancing in films and on Broadway in the 1940s and afterward. Though he was not as well known as some of the celebrated Hollywood dancers of his era, he was by all accounts every bit their peer.

“He was one of the greatest male dancers that ever was on a performing stage,” Jacques d’Amboise, the distinguished dancer and choreographer, said in a telephone interview. “He’s equal to Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.”

As a dancer, Mr. Mattox was celebrated for his “ballpoint ease, pinpoint precision, and catlike agility,” as Dance magazine wrote in 2007. He was perhaps best known to moviegoers as the young, bearded Caleb Pontipee, one of the marriageable frontiersmen at the heart of the 1954 film “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” directed by Stanley Donen and choreographed by Michael Kidd.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/arts/dance/matt-mattox-dancer-in-seven-brides-dies-at-91.html?_r=0