Obituaries

The media has made much of Sylvia Robinson being a "founder" of hip-hop music, but actually she was better known to me and many others as the second half of the R&B duo Mickey & Sylvia, who came up with the classic 1957 song "Love Is Strange."

In case you have lived in a cave since 1957:



Robinson died of congestive heart failure at the age of 76.

Mickey Baker, the other half of the duo, is still alive and will be 86 years old this October 15.

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Some weeks ago, I was writing about my opinion of the 1939 French film Rules of the Game and noted at least two of the cast members were still alive. One of those two, Paulette Dubost, who played the chambermaid in the film, has died at the age of 100. She would have turned 101 on October 8.

Here is an obituary:

Although Paulette Dubost, who has died aged 100, appeared in far more films than the number of years she lived, most cinemagoers know her best as Lisette, the coquettish chambermaid in Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game, 1939), one of cinema's masterpieces. Lisette, who attends the Marquis de la Chesnaye during a lavish weekend party at a country chateau, flirts dangerously with a poacher turned servant (Julian Carette), while her overly jealous gamekeeper husband (Gaston Modot) tries to catch them at it.

Dubost and Carette play a deliciously sly and comic cat-and-mouse game with the absurdly rigid Modot, especially during the after-dinner entertainment, a breathtaking sequence, described by the critic Richard Roud as something from "a Marx brothers film scripted by a Feydeau who suddenly acquired a tragic sense". It is Lisette's behaviour that is the catalyst for the tragic ending of the film.

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Johnnie Wright, 97, country singer, manager and husband of country music legend Kitty Wells, has died. They were married close to 75 years, one the longest marriages in show business history.
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Gospel singer Jessy Dixon, 73.
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Character actress Frances Bay, 92.