POWERS BOOTHE

15 May

(1 June 1948 - 14 May 2017)

Texas-born actor Powers Boothe gave up football in high school and turned to theatre. He gained a Masters Degree in Fine Arts and for the early part of his career appeared only in Shakespeare in Oregon, Philadelphia and New Haven. His Broadway debut was in James McLure’s comedy Lone Star in 1979. After that he never played comedy again and became typecast as either villainous characters or authority figures in films and on television. His film debut was in Neil Simon’s screenplay of The Goodbye Girl (1977), in which he played a member of the Richard III cast. He had a small part in William Friedkin’s Cruising and then a TV series called Skag. More TV followed including The Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones for which Boothe won an Emmy playing the title role. He then appeared in several genre movies such as Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort and Extreme Prejudice, John Milius’s Red Dawn, John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest and Yuriy Ozerov’s Stalingrad. He had the title role in the TV series Philip Marlowe, Private Eye. Boothe made his mark opposite Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer in Tombstone, about Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. He was Alexander Haig in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, and then played a Sheriff in the same director’s U Turn, a Captain in Men of Honour, an FBI Agent in Frailty, a Senator in Sin City and its sequel Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, and a colonel in MacGruber. His last work included Avengers Assemble and the TV series Agents of SHIELD. Also on TV he was in the Deadwood, 24 and Nashville series. Powers Boothe claimed that his favourite movie was Mutant Species (1994), about a man infected with bio-hazardous material. His wife Pam Cole and their children Parisse and Preston survive him.

MICHAEL DARVELL

Michael Darvell

Michael Darvell trained as a librarian at Watford and in Surrey before joining Ealing Libraries where he became Music Librarian for the borough. He edited Masthead, the magazine of the University of North London School of Librarianship, The Surrealist, the staff magazine of Surrey County Library, and contributed to the Assistant Librarian and London Librarian professional journals. A freelance film reviewer since 1970, he has written for Film, Films Illustrated, Film Review, Movie Maker and Radio Times, as well as editing Montage, the London film societies magazine, for ten years. A change of career saw him joining What’s On in London as Features Editor and he eventually stepped into the shoes of the late F. Maurice Speed (founding father of Film Review annual) as the magazine’s Editor. From 2007 to 2015, he was co-editor of the Film Review annual with Mansel Stimpson. As well as writing about films, Michael has reviewed theatre for The Stage newspaper, and has written about music theatre and cabaret for the Classical Source and Musical Theatre Review websites. He is also a former restaurant critic for the ViewLondon website. Michael has been a member of the London Film Critics’ Circle since 2005.

POWERS BOOTHE

DINA MERRILL

BRAD GREY