Tommy Ramone

Tommy Ramone was a founder member of the Ramones, the punk band whose raw aggression revolutionised the rock scene

Tommy Ramone 

Tommy Ramone, who has died aged 65, was the last surviving member of the Ramones, the New York punk band whose brand of primitive in-your-face energy helped to reshape the rock scene; in later years he cut an unlikely figure on the old-time bluegrass circuit.

It was Tommy Ramone (real name Tommy Erdelyi) who conceived the idea of forming the group in the early 1970s after he saw a concert by the glam rock group the New York Dolls. “It hit me: 'These are guys who can hardly play their instruments and they’re more entertaining than 90 per cent of the bands out there now who can play!” he recalled. “So I started thinking about some guys I knew in Queens.” The Ramones took their name from Paul Ramon, a pseudonym once used by Paul McCartney, each member adopting Ramone as their surname. Although Tommy began as the Ramones’ manager, he became its drummer when no one else proved capable of keeping up with their breakneck machine-gun tempi.

Pounding out songs such as I Wanna Be Sedated, Blitzkrieg Bop, Suzy is a Headbanger, Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue, and Beat on the Brat, the Ramones created a sensation in the summer of 1974 with a residency at CBGB, a seedy establishment in lower Manhattan. They divided opinion from the outset. Writing in the New Musical Express, Charles Shaar Murray found them “so funny... so tight and powerful that they’re just bound to enchant anyone who fell in love with rock and roll for the right reasons”. But a review in the Washington Post dismissed them as “the worst of the New York punk bands”, and accused them of insulting, posturing and staggering their way through “mindless” songs. In 1976 a Ramones gig at London’s Roundhouse is credited with kickstarting the British punk scene, inspiring the Sex Pistols, the Clash and dozens of others.

The band specialised in three-chord scatter-gun musical rampages, many of them corrupted versions of 1960s girl band bubblegum pop (including a punk version of the Ronettes’ Baby, I Love You), bashed out hell-for-leather at maximum volume with screaming vocals and distorted riffs underpinned by Tommy Ramone’s frenetic drumming. “Our music is an answer to the early Seventies when artsy people with big egos would do vocal harmonies and play long guitar solos and get called geniuses,” Tommy explained. In place of the overproduced pap that accounted for much pop output at the time, the Ramones offered raw teenage angst — a nihilistic, fortissimo snarl of rage.

The Ramones in Liverpool in 1977: (l-r) Johnny, Tommy, Joey and Dee Dee Ramone (IAN DICKSON/REX)

In accordance with the anti-establishment image they projected, the Ramones were social misfits. The bassist Dee Dee (real name Douglas Colvin) was a junkie and sometime male prostitute; the singer Joey (Jeff Hyman) had spent time in a psychiatric hospital with OCD; while the guitarist Johnny (Johnny Cummings) was a teenage delinquent turned Right-wing control freak.

Tommy was the only relatively sane band member (Dee Dee once noted, contemptuously, that he cooked his own dinners), and without him the Ramones would probably never have got going at all. He is credited with creating the band’s distinctive look of ripped jeans, leather jackets and white trainers, and he wrote many of their most celebrated songs — including I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend and their best-known number, Blitzkrieg Bop, with its “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go” chant. In addition he produced the band’s albums when his colleagues were too non compos to function. “They would come in and do the basic tracks and the vocals, and then I wouldn’t see them for a month or two,” he recalled.

The Ramones’ first three albums — Ramones (1976), Leave Home (1977) and Rocket to Russia (1978) — came to define the sound of punk, but by the last of these Tommy Ramone had had enough and left the band “to keep my sanity”. His colleagues, he said, had made him feel “like I was losing my mind... Johnny was getting more and more power, becoming harsher and harsher... he could be really mean, and he was good at getting the other guys to side with him.”

Tommy Ramone continued to manage the group until 1984, producing their fourth album Too Tough To Die, after which he threw in the towel.

The Ramones soldiered on until 1996, but relations between its original members remained poisonous. Joey died from lymphoma in 2001, and when Tommy and the remaining original line-up were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, they ignored each other. Dee Dee died of a heroin overdose later that year and Johnny Ramone from cancer in 2004. By the time the Ramones were given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2011 Grammies, Tommy was the only surviving founder member.

He was born Tamas Erdelyi in Budapest on January 29 1949 to Jewish parents who had survived the Holocaust by hiding in friends’ houses. The family left Hungary during the uprising of 1956, moving to New York the following year. Tommy was educated at a school in the Queens district where he met Johnny Cummings and played with him in a high school garage rock band, the Tangerine Puppets. After leaving school he worked as a trainee engineer at the Record Plant studio, where he worked on Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys album.

After his stint with the Ramones, Tommy Ramone produced albums by groups such as the Replacements, Talking Heads, and Redd Kross.

In 2005, to the astonishment of many punk fans, Tommy Ramone returned to the performing music scene playing bluegrass and country banjo and mandolin as one half of Uncle Monk, an acoustic bluegrass folk duo with his partner, the guitarist Claudia Tienan. To the equal astonishment of the critics, he proved to have a good bluegrass voice and to be a fine instrumentalist. “There are a lot of similarities between punk and old-time music,” he claimed. “Both are home-brewed music .”

Claudia Tienan survives him.

Tommy Ramone, born January 29, 1949, died July 11 2014

Mickey Rooney

Mickey Rooney was an icon of American youth and energy who was as prolific in his marriages as he was on screen

Mickey Rooney

Mickey Rooney, the actor, who has died aged 93, was in the Thirties and for much of the Forties the very image of how Americans liked to think of themselves — brash, energetic and eternally young.

As a child star and later a teenager, he epitomised American get-up-and-go, with a cheeky, cocksure arrogance that won him a wide following, especially in the United States. Though he never got an Oscar for his work, in 1938 he shared a special award with Deanna Durbin “for their significant contribution in bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth, and as juvenile players setting a high standard of ability and achievement”. In keeping with their stature, the awards were pint-size Oscars.

GALLERY: Mickey Rooney's life in pictures

• Mickey Rooney in a film still for Not to be Trusted 

Diminutive but pugnacious, Rooney managed to look like an adolescent until well into maturity. He was still playing Andy Hardy, the chirpy judge’s son which was his most famous role, until the late Forties, when he was nearly 30.

Like many young players renowned in their teens, however, Rooney found difficulty in landing suitable adult roles. He continued to work and was prolific into, and beyond, his seventies - at the age of 90 he filmed a cameo for The Muppets (2011). But the parts were seldom challenging and many of his films barely received a cinema release even in America.

He became better known for his private life than for his work. A prodigious earner at the peak of his popularity, he amassed some $12 million but kept none of it. Most of it went in back taxes and to pay alimony to his many wives (he had eight, of whom the first, Ava Gardner, was the best known). By 1962, he was forced to file for bankruptcy.

^{Ava Gardner and Mickey Rooney after their marriage in 1942} 

Drink was also a problem, but one to which the solution appeared in remarkable circumstances. As he recounted it, he was dining in a Los Angeles restaurant when up stepped a heavenly messenger with bright golden hair. “God loves you,” the angel said. From that moment Mickey Rooney was a born-again Christian and mended his ways. None of his fellow diners saw the angel.

Mickey Rooney’s real name was Joe Yule Jr. He was born in Brooklyn on September 23 1920, the son of vaudeville performers Joe Yule and Nell Carter, who divorced when he was seven. He joined the act almost from the cradle and, at the age of only 15 months, appeared on stage as a midget, dressed in a tuxedo and sporting a huge rubber cigar. At six, he was a movie actor, making his screen debut (again as a midget) in Not to Be Trusted (1926).

His real screen career began when his mother saw an advertisement placed by the cartoonist Fontaine Fox, who was looking for a child to impersonate his comic strip character Mickey McGuire. Fox took a shine to the boy and he got the job, appearing in some 80 episodes between 1926 and 1932, when the series was wound up. In fact, he was so closely identified with the part that his mother wanted him to adopt the name Mickey McGuire professionally. Fox refused so he became Mickey Rooney instead.

In his early years Rooney worked for a number of studios and was eventually placed under contract by MGM because David O Selznick thought he would be ideal to play Clark Gable as a boy in the film Manhattan Melodrama (1934). MGM guaranteed him 40 weeks’ work a year but reserved the right to loan him out to other studios.

One such arrangement, with Warner Bros, resulted in the best performance of Rooney’s career, as the mischievous Puck in Max Reinhardt’s 1935 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Barely 15 at the time, he was perfect casting — impish and with a gurgling laugh that might be construed as innocent or knowing; it was hard to tell.

At MGM, his career took off in 1937 when he first played Andy Hardy, son of Lionel Barrymore’s Judge Hardy in A Family Affair. Planned only as a programme filler, based on a minor Broadway play, it became an unexpected hit and exhibitors begged MGM for a sequel. In the end, the series ran to 15 episodes over the next 10 years, with one ill-judged afterthought in 1958, Andy Hardy Comes Home. Lewis Stone replaced Barrymore as the judge after the first film.

^{Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Strike up the Band} 

Rooney appeared in much else besides, often opposite the equally youthful Judy Garland. In such films as Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry (1937); Babes in Arms (1939); Strike Up the Band (1940); Babes on Broadway (1942); and several of the Andy Hardy series, they became the most popular team in movies. He also played a juvenile delinquent opposite Spencer Tracy’s priest in Boys’ Town (1938), and its 1941 sequel Men of Boys’ Town and took the title role in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1939).

The success of these films and especially of the Andy Hardy pictures was good for Rooney’s image but bad for his ego. Increasingly bumptious and swollen-headed, he was the only actor on record to have come to blows with MGM’s feared studio boss Louis B Mayer. Rooney wanted the rights to do the Andy Hardy series on radio as well and lost his temper when Mayer said no. Rooney got a hike in salary out of the fracas, but Andy Hardy was never broadcast.

During the war, Rooney served in the Jeep Theatre, entertaining more than two millin troops, but was unable to recover his popularity in peacetime. Summer Holiday (1948), a musical version of Ah Wilderness!, proved a dismal failure, while nobody had anything good to say of Words and Music (also 1948), in which he played lyricist Lorenz Hart to Tom Drake’s Richard Rodgers. What attracted particular criticism was that the script ignored Hart’s homosexuality, portraying him as a red-blooded American male.

^{Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney in Babes in Arms}

Rooney’s subsequent film career was mostly a catalogue of further disappointments. Especially regrettable was his bucktoothed Japanese photographer in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and his contribution to Stanley Kramer’s leaden comedy It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963).

Against these and many equally as bad, can be set only occasional high points, such as Baby Face Nelson (1957), in which he was cast against type as a Tommy gun-wielding gangster; Pulp (1972), again as a gangster, this time inviting Michael Caine to write his memoirs, and The Black Stallion (1979), for which he received an Academy Award nomination (but did not win) in his supporting role as a horse trainer.

In 1983 he was presented with a second Oscar honouring his lifetime’s work. By the end of his career he had appeared in several hundred films.

He enjoyed a big stage hit in 1979 with a nostalgic tribute to vaudeville called Sugar Babies opposite the dancer Ann Miller. It ran for five years on and off Broadway but failed to translate successfully to London.

In 2003 Rooney and his eighth wife Jan Chamberlin began an association with Rainbow Puppet Productions, providing voices for some of the company’s films. Four years later, in 2007, Rooney made a debut in British pantomime as Baron Hardup in Cinderella at the Sunderland Empire, a role he reprised in the subsequent two years at Bristol and Milton Keynes.

In 2011, as well as his role in The Muppets, he appeared in an episode of Celebrity Ghost Stories, recalling how his dead father had appeared to him one night at a low point in his career telling him not to give up.

Rooney published two volumes of autobiography, of which the second, Life Is Too Short (1992), was conspicuously ungallant about such former movie queens as Norma Shearer and Betty Grable.

Mickey Rooney married, first, Ava Gardner; secondly Betty Jane Rase; thirdly Martha Vickers; fourthly Elaine Mahnken (all the marriages were dissolved). He married, fifthly, Barbara Thomason (who was shot dead by her lover in what may have been a double suicide pact); sixthly Margie Lang; seventhly Carolyn Hockett (both dissolved); and eighthly Jan Chamberlin, who survives him. He had seven children.

Mickey Rooney, born September 23 1920, died April 6 2014

Sue Townsend

Sue Townsend was the writer whose diaries of spotty teenager Adrian Mole became a publishing sensation

Sue Townsend

Sue Townsend, who has died aged 68, was the creator of Adrian Mole, the spotty, lovestruck teenager from Ashby-de-la-Zouch whose comic chronicles of myriad anxieties – political, intellectual, social, sexual – proved the publishing phenomenon of the 1980s and were turned into successful television series, starring Gian Sammarco as the title character.

Including various omnibuses, there were eventually nine volumes of Mole’s diaries; the last – The Prostate Years, published in 2009 – documented him battling cancer as a middle-aged man who runs a bookshop. But it was the early books that particularly gripped the reading public, selling millions of copies and transforming Sue Townsend, a self-confessed “Old Labour type”, from a poverty-stricken single mother-of-three into a rich woman.

^{Sue Townsend's 'The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole aged 13 3/4'}

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾, as the first volume was titled on publication in 1982, unveiled a boy clear-eyed enough to assess the world around him but powerless to shape his own fate. His pursuit of the treacle-haired, middle-class Pandora is defeated by acne, and his self-declared intellectual inclinations by the fact that “I am not very clever”. His slight teenaged frame carried a large dollop of guilt about the state of the nation itself.

While The Secret Diary was devoured by teenagers looking for fiction that accurately reflected their own experiences, Adrian Mole was also a sufficiently convincing Everyman to appeal to other generations too. On the canvas that he provided, Sue Townsend was able to paint a satirical portrait of the day. Mole, she admitted, “is me. He is all of us, to a greater or lesser degree.”

Susan Lillian Townsend was born on April 2 1946 in Leicester, the eldest child in a working-class family. Her father worked in a factory making jet engines before becoming a postman; her mother was a housewife who also worked in the factory canteen. They were, Sue Townsend later said, “very clever” but “idiosyncratic”, and she did not learn to read until she was eight.

No scholar, Sue failed her 11-plus and left South Wigston High School at 15. But, belatedly, the internal, secret world of books increasingly played a central part in her existence. Having started on Richmal Crompton’s Just William, she quickly graduated to Jane Eyre, and from there to Dostoevsky. “Jane Eyre was the first book I read right through, non-stop,” she said. “It was winter, freezing cold, and I remember seeing this thin light outside and realising it was dawn. I got dressed reading, walked to school reading and finished it in the cloakroom at lunchtime. It was riveting.”

She devoured “all the Russians, then the French, then the Americans. I remember getting in trouble for reading The Grapes of Wrath under my desk in a boring lesson.” Yet her going to university “wasn’t even considered. You went into shoes or hosiery.”

She took on a series of unskilled jobs – on a garage forecourt, in a café making “tropical coffees” – and, at 18, married a sheet-metal worker. By the time she was in her early twenties she had three small children.

Life was hard. “Poverty grinds you down – it just pins you to a certain location,” she said. “There’s no movement – no freedom to move. Being poor with three small children is terrifying. You can’t make any plans. You know you’re not going on holiday, ever. There’s no way you could ever afford driving lessons or a car. And the guilt I used to feel: they had holes in their shoes and at one point I had to send them to school wearing Wellingtons when the sun was shining.”

^{Sue Townsend}

But to the secret world of books she added, in the small hours of the night when the children were asleep, the secret world of writing. Her efforts accumulated in an empty box under the stairs: “I knew I wasn’t good enough. When you’re reading Updike, how can you be?” But whatever voice, whatever genre, she tried, the results always tended to the comic.

She was 25 when her husband left her, having belatedly discovered the hippie movement. Slaving away to make ends meet, she took on several jobs, one of them helping to run adventure courses for children. On a canoeing course she met Colin Broadway, who would become her second husband.

Her writing began to emerge from the shadows in 1978, when she joined the Writers’ Group at Leicester’s Phoenix Arts Centre. There she produced a play, Womberang, which won her a Thames TV bursary. (There would be several other stage plays, including Bazaar and Rummage (1982) and, in 1989, Disneyland It Ain’t.) It was one Sunday around this period when the character of Adrian Mole “descended” fully formed into her head.

“I was living in a council house at the time,” she recalled, “on my own with three kids and three part-time jobs to keep us going. So Sunday was a total collapse; I was exhausted. My eldest son said: 'Why can’t we go to safari parks like other families do?’” It was she, said, “that adolescent, self-pitying voice. Mole’s voice. I just heard it.”

Sue Townsend set out to capture the claustrophobia that teenagers feel in the family home, “a brooding and seething: you feel it coming through the floorboards”. Mole’s first incarnation was as Nigel, but Nigel Mole was too similar to another fictional schoolboy, Nigel Molesworth. So she changed the name to Adrian and sent a radio play to John Tydeman, head of drama for Radio 4. Broadcast in January 1982, it was a huge popular success and led to a book contract. Nine months later The Secret Diary was published, and within a month it was top of the bestseller lists; within a year it had sold a million copies.

^{Gian Sammarco as Adrian Mole}

Her books were adapted into three television series, The Secret Diary Of Adrian Mole, Aged 13¾ and The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole ( Thames Television, both starring Gian Sammarco, 1985-87) and Adrian Mole: the Cappuccino Years (starring Stephen Mangan, BBC One, 2001). The fame and fortune Adrian Mole brought Sue Townsend ultimately allowed her to escape the poverty of her early years. She even bought the pretty Victorian vicarage to which, in her days as a struggling young mother, she had come to pay rent to her landlord.

But she was not able to enjoy her new, comfortable existence for long. In the mid-1980s, when she was still in her 30s, she suffered a heart attack, the first dramatic sign of the debilitating diabetes that would afflict her for the rest of her life. That ill health was compounded, in her last decade and more, by Charcot’s joint – degenerative arthritis, which meant she could not move far without a wheelchair.

She was, by her own admission, “the world’s worst diabetic”, finding the disease hard to manage. Worst of all, however, was the loss of her sight. For someone as passionate about books as Sue Townsend, it was a heavy blow. “Learning to be blind is incredibly hard work,” she told The Observer in 2001. “In my sleep I had a haemorrhage in both eyes and when I woke my eyes were full of this black haze, like thick black smoke. I thought there was a fire. I staggered around, trying to put it out. It wasn’t on the stove, so I thought it was upstairs, and of course I took the black smoke with me, looking for it. It was inside my head. Oh God. So I went to the doctor and said: 'Am I utterly blind now?’ And he said to me, 'Yes, you’re quite blind.’ And that was it. All very English. There are no ceremonies for these things.”

She mourned the fact that she would “never see an individual snowdrop again... never see my grandchildren grow and change”. But she remained resolutely upbeat — at least in public, confessing that when it came to bouts of self-pity: “I prefer to do it in private.”

The many interviewers she met recorded the tumbling, throaty laughter that continued to lace her conversation. And the books kept coming too. As well as the periodic arrival of a new volume of Adrian Mole, she wrote six other novels, including The Queen and I (1992), a satire about the Royal family living on a housing estate after a republican uprising. A sequel, Queen Camilla, came out in 2006. Her last book, The Woman Who Went to Bed for a Year, was published in 2012. These she completed by dictating, usually to her son Sean, who in 2009 donated to his mother one of his kidneys .

Last year Sue Townsend suffered a stroke. She had plans for a new volume of Adrian Mole, which she hinted, possibly jokingly, might be “about anarchy, with the ensuing rape and pillage”. Social media was another possibility: “He will be blogging and twittering – but in a quite incompetent way.”

As her health continued to deteriorate, however, Sue Townsend realised that she was unlikely to complete a new volume. This did not dispirit her: “I honestly think of [Adrian Mole] as a character living his own life. He’s doing things that I don’t even know about. And he hasn’t told me; I haven’t been to see him for a while.”

Sue Townsend was awarded two honorary doctorates, including one from the University of Leicester, her home town.

She is survived by her husband and four children.

Sue Townsend, born April 2 1946, died April 10 2014

Bob Hoskins

Bob Hoskins was the actor who excelled as the tough but engaging anti-hero of Mona Lisa and The Long Good Friday

Bob Hoskins 

Bob Hoskins, the actor, who has died aged 71, was hailed as the original tough guy of British film, but once described himself as “short, fat and bald, the only actor who had to diet and wear lifts to play Mussolini”.

His cuboid frame, villainous features and Cockney accent fitted him for a series of roles which he described as “animals, thugs and heavies”. These included the gangland boss Harold Shand in The Long Good Friday (1980) and the violent minder George in Mona Lisa (1986), a portrayal that earned him an Oscar nomination. Hoskins won critical success in both films, mainly for his ability to exude menace while suggesting the vulnerability beneath the violent surface of his characters.

Ultimately it was Hoskins’s versatility and eye for a good part that made him a star. He played Arthur Parker in Dennis Potter’s innovative and hugely successful Pennies from Heaven (1978); Nathan Detroit in the National Theatre’s first musical Guys and Dolls (1981); and cameo parts such as the police chief in The Honorary Consul (1983) and Robert de Niro’s plumbing partner in Brazil (1985).

Like his friend Michael Caine, Hoskins was one of the few British actors to become equally successful in Hollywood. Films such as The Cotton Club (1984), Sweet Liberty (1986) and the box office smash Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) consolidated his position as a British actor who could make the transition to the United States. A contributing factor in his American success may have been that Hoskins was one of a small minority of British actors able to produce a convincing American accent.

^{Bob Hoskins in 'The Long Good Friday'} 

Robert William Hoskins was born on October 26 1942 in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, but grew up in Finsbury Park, north London. His father was a clerk for the Pickfords removal firm, his mother a school cook. At Stroud Green secondary modern school, his dyslexia meant that he was often written off as stupid.

During his adolescence, the beatings he endured in street fights toughened him up, and a knife wound across the bridge of his nose left him with a hollow between the eyes. A life in the gangs beckoned — he was once taken to meet the Kray twins who ran London’s underworld in the 1950s — but he dreamed of becoming an actor.

Hoskins had never been formally trained, and was always proud that he had never attended a single acting lesson. Instead, on leaving school in 1959, he took on a series of temporary jobs, including as a merchant seaman in the Norwegian navy, a banana-picker on a kibbutz, camel-herder in Syria and porter at Covent Garden market.

^{Hoskins in 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit?'}

In 1969, after an abortive attempt at going into accounting with his father, Hoskins claimed that he “fell sideways into acting by mistake”. While waiting in a pub with a friend who wanted to audition for the Unity Theatre, Hoskins was mistaken for the next candidate. “I was too pissed to argue,” he recalled, “so I got on stage and acted my socks off.” He was offered the lead in The Feather Pluckers, and at the play’s first night was signed up by an agent.

Hoskins spent the next 12 months in repertory, building up a reputation as an actor who was content to do anything, including fire-eating and running headlong at brick walls. “In those days we just passed round the hat,” he recalled. “I had a wife and kid to support on that, and so I wasn’t going to say no to anything that was for the good of the show.”

In 1975 he was offered his first television role, as an illiterate truck driver, in the BBC’s adult literacy programme On the Move. The programme established him as a “screen natural”, and attracted a wide following and an almost cult status. After his television appearance, offers of work on stage and screen doubled. One critic described Hoskins as having “cornered the market in the cheeky Cockney chappie”.

^{Hoskins with Frances Barber in the 2009 drama The Street} 

In 1980 The Long Good Friday established Hoskins as a global star. The film was enormously successful in the US, but Hoskins was angered by the fact that his speeches were dubbed into “stage Cockney”.

“They thought the Yanks wouldn’t be able to understand me”, he complained. “In the film I end up sounding like Dick Van Dyke.”

In 1981 Hoskins starred in the National Theatre’s production of Guys and Dolls. It was the Theatre’s first attempt at a musical and was a major critical and box office success. As in Pennies from Heaven, Hoskins’s charismatic performance carried him over any deficiencies in his singing and dancing. “The choreographer convinced me I looked like Fred Astaire,” he remembered, “but I really looked like a little hippopotamus shaking its hooves.” Critics described Hoskins’s “animal appeal” and “considerable panache”. They began to compare him with Edward G Robinson and George Raft, and to call him “the Cockney Cagney”.

^{Bob Hoskins with Michael Caine and Cathy Tyson in Mona Lisa} 

In 1983 Hoskins was miscast in The Honorary Consul, with Michael Caine, and gave an embarrassing performance as a South American police chief. Despite this setback, however, he received an early morning call from Francis Ford Coppola asking him if he would appear in Coppola’s next film. Hoskins thought it was a joke and shouted down the line: “It’s three o’clock in the morning and you’ve just woken up my kid, you bastard” — before hanging up.

Coppola called back later and signed Hoskins as the nightclub owner in The Cotton Club (1984).

In Heart Condition (1990) Hoskins played a bigoted white policeman kept alive by a heart transplant from a black donor. He went on to make Mermaids (also 1990), a comedy in which he starred opposite Cher . In Hook (1991), a live-action version of Peter Pan with Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams, Hoskins played the fusspot Mr Smee.

Although largely self-educated, Hoskins co-wrote and directed the feature film The Raggedy Rawney (1988), a gipsy story set in central Europe, which was reckoned an ambitious failure and had only a limited distribution. On television he won critical approval for his portrayal of the Italian dictator in Mussolini: the Decline and Fall of Il Duce (1985); while his appearance in The Street in 2009 earned him the accolade of Best Actor at the International Emmy Awards of 2010.

In 2012, after being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, Bob Hoskins announced that he was retiring from acting.

He married, in 1970 (dissolved 1978), Jane Livesey, with whom he had a son and daughter. In 1982 he married Linda Banwell, who survives him with their son and daughter, and the children of his first marriage.

Bob Hoskins, born October 26 1942, died April 29 2014

Busby Babe Bill Foulkes dies aged 81

Bill Foulkes captained Manchester United in the aftermath of the 1958 tragedy

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Former Manchester United captain Bill Foulkes, who survived the 1958 Munich air crash, has died aged 81.

Only Sir Bobby Charlton, Ryan Giggs and Paul Scholes have played more times for United than the Busby Babe, who made 688 appearances.

Sir Bobby Charlton said the defender was a "marvellous man" and United executive vice-chairman Ed Woodward added "he will never be forgotten".

St Helens-born Foulkes played for United in their 1968 European Cup win.

Foulkes was a key member of Sir Matt Busby's team of talented young players, who were nicknamed the Busby Babes.

On 6 February 1958, the plane that was carrying the team back from Belgrade crashed in a blizzard after re-fuelling at Munich airport.

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“Twenty-three people died - eight players, eight newspaper journalists and seven members of backroom staff.

Speaking about the disaster in 2008, Foulkes said he had been "put in a bad way" by the crash.

"The back end came up and I saw it came up and down again and this meant all the stuff came out of the back and hit me in the back of the head."

However, he managed to escape from the plane and ran to safety before returning to help the survivors.

"I ran over to Matt and we put an overcoat underneath him and he just turned over, groaned and passed out," he said.

'Hard as nails'

After the Munich tragedy, Foulkes took over the captaincy and became a pillar of some of United's most successful teams.

Foulkes was a four-time league champion and a FA Cup winner.

He also won the European Cup at Wembley with United, when the team beat Portuguese side Benfica 4-1 in 1968.

Bill Foulkes captained Manchester United in the aftermath of the 1958 tragedy

Sir Bobby, who played alongside him for over a decade, said the defender was "as hard as nails [and] as tough as teak".

"I was always glad I didn't have to play against him," he said.

He added that Foulkes had been "a really, really good defensive player and you could say he helped change the course of history for United".

Fellow former United captain Gary Neville tweeted that Foulkes was "a legend", while current player Rio Ferdinand added that he had been a "great servant to the club".

Mr Woodward said Foulkes was "a giant character" in the club's post-war era.

He said the defender had been "a very gentle man, who I was privileged to meet on several occasions, including most memorably with his team-mates at the Champions League final in Moscow, 50 years after his heroics in the Munich air crash".

Foulkes made his United debut against Liverpool in December 1952 and went on to score nine goals in his career. He won his only England cap in 1954.

He joined the club as an amateur in March 1950 and began playing professionally in August 1951 after he left his mining job at Lea Green Colliery in St Helens.

Foulkes left United in June 1970 and went on to manage clubs in the US and Norway.

Shirley Temple

Shirley Temple was film's most popular child star, with ringlets and dimples that dazzled audiences and studios alike

Throughout the Depression years, her sunny disposition helped audiences forget their woes and a special Oscar was presented to her for “bringing more happiness to millions of children and millions of grown-ups than any other child of her years in the history of the world”. It might have turned many a tiny tot’s head, but Shirley had her mother constantly at her side to ensure she was kept on an even keel.

Gertrude Temple was the architect of Shirley’s career, masterminding every aspect, every contract, what she ate, when she slept. Before each take, she would coach her, ignoring the director, and give her last-minute instructions. “Sparkle, Shirley,” she would say. A shrewd businesswoman, she knew instinctively how to manipulate the studios and their publicity machines to her daughter’s advantage. For good or ill, she turned little Shirley into a phenomenon. Everything she did was news. In October 1936, the world gasped as a bulletin flashed over the Reuters wire: “Shirley Temple has been sent to bed with a slight fever resulting from a cold.”

She was acting in pictures from the age of four and rapidly captivated filmgoers with her blonde ringlets and dimpled charm. Dolls, books and games were named after her in a merchandising campaign matched only by Walt Disney and Mickey Mouse. Yet her talent was modest. She sang off-key and cynics dismissed her dancing as “mere jigging up and down”. She liked to do impersonations but her acting was generally regarded as cute rather than compelling.

She had the child star’s built-in self-destruct mechanism — what had seemed peachy in a moppet became arch in adolescence. Attempts to extend her career into young womanhood were unsuccessful and she made her last film in 1949 — washed up in Hollywood at 21.

Yet that was not the end of the Shirley Temple story. Against all sceptics’ expectations, the little girl who had never had a normal childhood matured into a distinguished politician and diplomat. She stood (unsuccessfully) for Congress before representing America at the United Nations and serving as US ambassador to Ghana and Czechoslovakia under her married name of Shirley Temple Black.

She was born on April 23 1928 in Santa Monica, California, the daughter of a bank teller. Like many a proud mother, Gertrude Temple enrolled her child in dancing classes at the age of three and promoted her vigorously. A talent scout from Educational Pictures, a small company specialising in shorts, spotted Shirley and invited her for a screen test, which led to her appearance in 1932-33 in a string of film spoofs known as Baby Burlesks. Among them were The Incomparable More Legs Sweetrick (as Marlene Dietrich), The Pie-Covered Wagon and Polly-Tix in Washington.

She alternated these performances with small parts in now forgotten feature movies such as The Red-Haired Alibi (1932) and To the Last Man (1933), opposite Randolph Scott. While filming a second series of shorts for Educational under the title Frolics of Youth, she and her mother were approached by the much bigger Fox Film Corporation (later Twentieth Century-Fox) with a view to Shirley featuring in the film Stand Up and Cheer (1934). She passed the audition and was signed up for $150 a week. When the film opened, she stole the show with the song and dance routine Baby Take a Bow.

Recognising her star potential, Fox swung its publicity department into action. But it did not have her under exclusive contract. Earlier in the year, the astute Mrs Temple had forged a two-picture deal with Paramount and it was that studio that initially reaped the benefit of her sudden fame. It rushed her into two pictures in 1934 to fulfil the contract — Little Miss Marker, based on a Damon Runyon story, and Now and Forever, in which she was the go-between who reunites an estranged couple played by Gary Cooper and Carole Lombard.

On the strength of these pictures, Shirley’s Fox contract was renegotiated to $1,250 a week. She was cast in Bright Eyes, where she sang one of the songs indelibly associated with her, On the Good Ship Lollipop, and from then on vehicles were written especially for her. By the end of 1934, aged six, she was the eighth biggest draw in America.

A year later, she was number one and held that position four years in a row, attracting more fan mail than Greta Garbo and being photographed more often than the President himself. “I class myself with Rin Tin Tin,” she volunteered brightly.

She churned out pictures at a tremendous lick — sometimes five a year through the late-1930s — and the public clamoured for more. Features included, in 1935, The Little Colonel, Curly Top, a remake of Daddy Long Legs, and The Littlest Rebel, in which she told Abraham Lincoln that he was almost nice enough to be a Confederate. The 1936 clutch had Captain January, Dimples and Poor Little Rich Girl, while in 1937, the title role in an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s Wee Willie Winkie was changed from boy to girl especially to accommodate her.

Her work in this film led to a notorious libel suit involving the future novelist Graham Greene, then employed as a film critic by the magazine Night and Day. At a cocktail party, after what he later described as “a dangerous third Martini” Greene dreamt up the idea of deflating the Temple balloon, but he peppered his review of her performance in Wee Willie Winkie with such litigious terms as “dubious coquetry”, “dimpled depravity” and “mature suggestiveness”.

Shirley and Twentieth Century-Fox sued. In court in March, 1938, Sir Patrick Hastings, counsel for the plaintiffs, was too mortified to bring himself to utter Greene’s words. “In my view”, he said, “it is one of the most horrible libels that one can imagine about a child. I shall not read it — it is better I should not — but a glance at the statement of claim ... is sufficient to show the nature of the libel. This beastly publication appeared but it is right to say that every respectable news distributor in London refused to be party to its sale.”

The plaintiffs won; $5,250 punitive damages were awarded to Fox, $7,000 to the actress and Night and Day folded. But as a postscript to the episode, the mature Shirley Temple bore the novelist no grudge. In 1989, she sent him an inscribed copy of her autobiography, Child Star, and invited him to tea.

The year 1938 marked the high-water mark of her popularity. She appeared in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (without ringlets for the first time), in Little Miss Broadway and Just around the Corner at a fee of $100,000 a picture, which made her Hollywood’s highest-paid earner after Louis B Mayer. By 1939 he fee had jumped to $300,000, but public taste was changing. Susannah and the Mounties was disappointing and The Blue Bird was, by common consent, a “turkey”.

MGM had wanted to borrow her for The Wizard of Oz, but Fox refused, casting her instead in what it hoped would be a rival children’s attraction . But Maeterlinck’s arty symbolism in The Blue Bird found no favour with the public. It opened in selected cinemas a few days before Christmas 1939, but proved such a dud that it had to be withdrawn after only a few days and replaced by a Sonja Henie ice-skating musical. When generally released in 1940, The Blue Bird met with no warmer response, becoming Shirley’s first unmitigated flop.

Gertrude Temple blamed Fox and offered to buy out the remainder of Shirley’s contract. Fox raised no objections and, at the age of 11, she took a “sabbatical” from the cinema, ostensibly to repair gaps in her patchy education. Though her vocabulary was officially said to be 750 words, “all of which she can write”, she had trouble with numbers over 50. According to her teacher, she still thought 47 cents was more than 55 cents.

In fact, Shirley’s absence from the screen was an opportunity for her mother to negotiate a fresh contract with another studio. She picked MGM, but it was not a happy choice. The studio was grooming its own child prodigy in Judy Garland and found only one vehicle for Shirley, the lacklustre Kathleen (1941). Roger Edens, who was Garland’s coach, let it be known that Shirley would have to put in a lot of singing and dancing practice if she hoped to be worthy of the studio. Mrs Temple took umbrage and took off.

After a remake of a Mary Pickford picture, Miss Annie Rooney (1942) at United Artists, Shirley gravitated to David O Selznick, who signed her to a seven-year contract, but as a teenager she could no longer command lead roles. Selznick cast her only in supporting parts in Since You Went Away (1944) and I’ll Be Seeing You (1945). In that year, aged 17, she also completed her interrupted education by graduating from Westlake High School for Girls in Los Angeles. She then published her first autobiography, My Young Life, and was married to army sergeant-turned actor John Agar.

The last four years of her screen career were an anticlimax. Her infant precocity gave way to mere pertness (of which there is no shortage in Hollywood) in such films as The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer (1947), That Hagen Girl (1947), with Ronald Reagan, and A Kiss for Corliss (1949), her screen swansong, opposite David Niven. This period also included the first film in John Ford’s cavalry trilogy, Fort Apache (1948), in which she co-starred, aged 20, with her husband.

When the marriage failed, she wed again in 1950 - her new husband was a wealthy San Francisco businessman, Charles Black. She largely retired from acting to concentrate on social work, though from 1957 to 1959 she narrated and appeared in a television series entitled Shirley Temple’s Storybook. This was followed in 1960 by Shirley Temple Presents Young America, a programme about the problems of high-school dropouts.

From 1960 she played a leading role in developing the San Francisco film festival, resigning in 1966 only over the decision to screen the Swedish film Night Games, which she denounced as “pornography for profit”. In 1967 she ran for Congress to fill a dead man’s shoes (Republican J Arthur Younger). Though her recording of On the Good Ship Lollipop was used as a theme song at rallies, she insisted that “Little Shirley Temple is not running. If someone insists on pinning me with a label, let it read Shirley Temple Black, Republican independent.” But in the era of Lyndon Johnson, her conservative stance on taxes, law and order and drug addiction lost her the seat.

After her election defeat, she continued to work for the Republican party, raising funds and urging Americans overseas to back Richard Nixon in the forthcoming presidential campaign. When elected, Nixon named her one of the five-member American delegation to the 24th session of the United Nations General Assembly. In this capacity she served in 1969 on the Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Committee. Her subsequent diplomatic career included US ambassador to Ghana (1974-76), sparking a trend for Ghanaian children to be named Shirley (including boys), and to the former Czechoslovakia, to which she was appointed by President Bush in 1989.

Shirley Temple married first, John Agar, with whom she had a daughter. The marriage was dissolved. She married second, Charles Black (who predeceased her in 2005), with whom she had two more children.

Shirley Temple, born April 23 1928, died February 11 2014

Ken Norton

Ken Norton, the former world heavyweight champion who  died aged 70, will always be remembered as the man who broke Muhammad Ali’s jaw on the way to outpointing “The Greatest” in a non-title fight in San Diego in March 1973.

Clash of the Titans: Ken Norton (left) defeats Muhammad Ali in 1973

A formidable opponent who ranked among the best in what can now be viewed as a golden era of heavyweights, the rugged former US Marine reinforced the view that he was Ali’s “bogeyman” by pushing him very close in two subsequent encounters.

In total the two men went 39 rounds together – and every one was closely-fought. While technically inferior to Ali, Norton clearly possessed the style to give him trouble. “I knew what to do and I never listened to his mouth,” he once reflected.

Norton’s other claim to fame was becoming heavyweight champion without throwing a punch. This farcical situation resulted when he was awarded the World Boxing Council crown in March 1978 after the WBC controversially stripped Leon Spinks of the title following his decision to give Ali a rematch. Norton – who had scraped past Jimmy Young on points the previous November – subsequently became their new champion.

Norton’s reign turned out to be one of the briefest in history, however, as he lost a titanic 15-round showdown with Larry Holmes just 72 days later. It proved to be his last great performance and a horrific first-round knockout at the hands of the emerging Gerry Cooney ended his career in 1981.

Born in Jacksonville, Illinois, on August 9 1943, Norton, who came from a stable, middle-class background, showed early promise as an athlete before leaving college to join the US Marines in 1964. Having been introduced to boxing during his service, he turned professional in September 1967 and proceeded to win his first 16 fights.

Norton’s first loss – an eighth-round knockout against Jose Luis Garcia in July 1970 – was attributed to over-confidence and led his trainer Eddie Futch to pin the photo of the knockout to Norton’s locker room door as an enduring warning against complacency.

Standing 6ft 3in and weighing 210 pounds, Norton had all the makings of a heavyweight champion; a fact recognised by Ali’s training camp, who in 1970 employed Norton as a sparring partner. Over the next two years he continued his rise up the rankings, knocking out Californian champion Henry Clark in nine rounds on November 21 1972, to ensure that his next showdown with Ali would be not as partner, but opponent.

A largely unknown 29-year-old, Norton was written off by most observers. Howard Cosell, the veteran fight commentator, even labelled the contest as “the worst mismatch in boxing history”.

Undeterred, Norton gave up his day job and prepared for the fight with a ferocious intensity. When the pair clashed in San Diego on March 31 1973, it was nothing like the routine victory Ali undoubtedly expected. The pair went toe-to-toe for 12 exciting rounds, Norton benefiting from the advice of cornerman Futch, who had first-hand knowledge of Ali’s style and tactics, having worked with Ali’s great nemesis Joe Frazier two years previously.

To the visible shock of many ringside, Norton was awarded a split decision, while Ali – whose jaw was broken in the early rounds – was whisked off to the nearest hospital to have his mouth wired shut.

Six months later, on September 10 1973, the pair met for the North American Boxing Federation title at the Los Angeles Forum. Again the outcome was desperately close with Ali, who had prepared far more diligently on this occasion, getting the nod on a split decision following a last-ditch effort in the final round.

Norton emerged from the defeat with his reputation enhanced, however, and on March 26 1974 he travelled to Caracas, Venezuela, to challenge the fearsome George Foreman – the WBC and World Boxing Association title-holder. Norton – by now without Futch – failed badly on the biggest night of his career. He was floored three times before being stopped in the second and later claimed he was distracted by promotional rows and a threat to kidnap his parents, who had travelled to watch the fight.

The biggest disappointment of Norton’s career was still to come, however. Following seven successive stoppage wins – including a revenge triumph over Garcia and fifth-round knockout of title contender Jerry Quarry – he sealed a third fight with Ali for the WBA and WBC titles at Yankee Stadium on September 28 1976.

Convinced he had Ali’s measure, Norton exuded confidence going into the fight. For 15 rounds the two men again went toe-to-toe, and Norton returned to his corner following the final bell convinced he had outworked the ageing champion. But the decision was a close but unanimous decision in favour of Ali, and Norton was heartbroken. “I was smiling and crying at the same time,” he recalled in his autobiography. “I had accomplished the unthinkable, beaten Muhammad Ali for the heavyweight championship of the world.”

Norton was now 31, but still not finished. On November 5 1977 he returned to face Duane Bobick, a much-touted white hope who had Futch in his corner, at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Bobick was on the cusp of a world title shot and Futch clearly felt Norton was there for the taking; yet Norton turned back the clock to leave the hapless Bobick unconscious after just 58 seconds, effectively ending his career.

“I thought it was a fight Bobick could win,” Futch said plaintively afterwards. “Norton wasn’t a big puncher, except with the uppercut. If you kept him busy he couldn’t get it off.”

After two more victories Norton unexpectedly became WBC champion after Spinks was stripped of the title. Then on June 9 1978, Norton and Holmes staged one of the great heavyweight fights at Caesars Palace, the latter just edging the decision following 15 pulsating rounds. Norton was never able to scale such heights again.

Nine months later the big-hitting Earnie Shavers flattened him inside two minutes, and a draw with the limited Scott LeDoux – in which he was downed twice – should have persuaded Norton he was on the decline.

Instead, he took on future title challenger Randall “Tex” Cobb in Texas on November 7 1980, dropping a split decision. A final bout with Cooney at New York’s Madison Square Garden on November 5 1981 resulted in a gruesome first-round exit after a helpless Norton took dozens of unanswered punches. In all he had won 42 of his 50 bouts, losing seven with one draw.

Norton went on to reinvent himself as a film and television actor, with roles in Mandingo (1975), Drum (1976) and The A-Team (1983), among others. For a time he worked with NBC as a fight analyst, and also formed a management agency.

In 1986 a road accident in Los Angeles left him with brain injuries, but following a long spell in rehabilitation he had recovered sufficiently to open his own gym. His final years were blighted by ill health.

Ken Norton’s first marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by his second wife, Jacqueline, whom he married in 1977, and by five children.

Ken Norton, born August 9 1943, died September 18 2013