James Garner

James Garner was the actor who breathed new life into the Western genre and excelled as the hero of The Rockford Files

James Garner, star of 'Maverick' and 'The Rockford Files'

James Garner, the actor and producer who has died aged 86, made his reputation in the late 1950s as the shrewd, anti-heroic gambler Bret Maverick in the iconoclastic Western series of the same name — and sealed it as the 1970s private investigator Jim Rockford in The Rockford Files.

Garner’s relaxed, shambling good looks made him an ideal leading man, equally at home opposite Doris Day in romantic screen comedies such as Move Over Darling or in action blockbusters such as The Great Escape (both 1963).

At his best in what he described as “off-centre” roles, Garner was likened to Cary Grant for his ability to charm the audience no matter what part he was playing. As Jim Rockford, he portrayed a genial detective who broke with all the traditions of the private eye. Rockford lived with his father in a dilapidated mobile home by the sea and used an answering machine rather than employ a secretary. “He was the sort of character who runs credit checks on his clients,” recalled the series writer Stephen Cannell, “and uses elaborate billing systems, a kind of Jack Benny of detectives.”

^{James Garner as Bret Maverick}

Garner had much in common with the characters he played. He was physically brave (he won two Purple Hearts in Korea), but he was also pragmatic, and took a Machiavellian delight in studio politics. He left Warner Brothers after extended and bitter legal struggles after he complained that he was not receiving a high enough salary for Maverick.

“It cost me $100,000 to get out of the show,” he claimed. “I only made $90,000 during the five-year run.” Nine years later Garner returned to Warner Brothers to make the ill-fated series Nichols. “I got back all the money I never got in Maverick in one day on Nichols,” he remembered, “but the series only lasted a season.”

Despite Garner’s obvious screen charisma, close friends and family admitted that he was prone to hypochondria and occasional displays of bad temper. “He’s a bit of a sissy when it comes to pain,” Garner’s closest friend, Bill Saxon, observed. “I once hit him by mistake with my golf club and he went down like a ton of concrete. Just dropped in front of several hundred people and lay there.” Garner’s anxiety about his health was such that on one occasion he delayed having a heart operation until he had saved enough of his own blood to avoid any risk of Aids contamination from a possible transfusion.

James Garner was born James Scott Bumgarner at Norman, Oklahoma, on April 7 1928, the son of Weldon and Mildred Bumgarner. After his mother’s death, when he was five, his father, an upholsterer, remarried a woman whom Garner later described as the “archetypal wicked stepmother”. He described his childhood as unhappy. “My stepmother used to beat me and my brothers all the time,” he recalled, “and she was crazy, she made me wear a dress and called me Louise.” Asked by his brother what he would do if he ever met his stepmother again, Garner replied: “I guess I’d kill her.”

After his father left the family, James ran away from home, and at 14 travelled to California, where he worked in a series of part-time jobs, including as a janitor in a boarding house. Aged 16 he joined the Merchant Marines, but discovered that he suffered from sea sickness; he was discharged after a year.

A promising career as a professional footballer was cut short when Garner suffered a series of knee injuries, and he returned to California to join his father in a carpeting business. “It was a bad career move,” Garner remembered. “My knees were already shot after my footballing injuries, kneeling down to lay carpet all day didn’t help.”

In 1950 Garner became the first Oklahoman to be drafted for the Korean War. On his second day in action he won his first Purple Heart after being wounded in a bombing raid. “I was hit in the backside,” he recalled. “I dived into my foxhole, but I wasn’t quick enough and I got it in the butt.” Garner described his second wound as “a lot more serious”: during an attack in which two-thirds of his battalion were killed, he was hit in the back and had to spend several months recuperating.

After receiving his discharge in 1952, Garner returned to Norman and went to the University of Oklahoma to study Business Administration. He had passed his high school diploma by taking correspondence courses while in the Army, but dropped out of university after only one semester. “My knees never recovered,” he remembered, “and I had the wound in my back. I spent most of my time playing pool instead of studying.”

^{Garner with Andra Martin in the film 'Up Periscope' (1959)} 

Garner had already sampled a multitude of casual jobs, including waiter, lifeguard, lorry driver, golf ball retriever dishwasher petrol station attendant and an oilfield hand. He now returned to California, where he came across an old acquaintance whom he found working as a theatrical producer. Through him, Garner was offered a small, non-speaking role in a production of Herman Wouk’s play The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial, which starred Henry Fonda. Garner formed a lifelong friendship with Fonda and later claimed that he had based all his acting technique on Fonda’s stage performance. “I spent months just watching Henry and not saying anything,” he later recalled. “I tried to be as much like him as possible, quiet and still but the centre of the action.”

After making his film debut in Towards the Unknown in 1957, Garner was offered the lead in a new television Western series, Maverick. He accepted because he was eager to play characters that upset traditional models: “At that time all cowboys were tough and spent their time shooting one another. Maverick was different because he avoided trouble wherever possible. He hardly shot anyone and he was always on the look-out for a fast buck.” The series was an immediate success and prompted one critic to claim that James Garner “defined 'cool’ for a whole generation”.

Throughout the 1960s Garner appeared in numerous films. He was Doris Day’s romantic partner in The Thrill of it All (1963), and the cynical Naval officer in The Americanization of Emily (1964). Although he never received top billing, he was always among the top five names at the box office. “Longevity was my plan,” he said. “I didn’t care if I was number one, I just wanted to be consistent and in work.”

^{James Garner and Bruce Willis in 'Sunset' (1988)} 

Garner’s relaxed approach to acting made him popular both with technical crews, who always found him cooperative, and with producers, who appreciated the fact that Garner rarely argued and was happy to take direction. “I’ve done a lot of casual work,” Garner recalled, “and acting is a lot easier than laying carpets.”

From 1974 he co-produced and starred in The Rockford Files, one of NBC’s most successful series. Technicians who worked on the series recalled that the atmosphere was extremely friendly and professional, and — more unusually — that shooting always finished on time and within budget. “Jim was the ramrod of the set,” recalled one of the writers. “It was his presence and attitude that made the set go.”

In 1981, after six series of The Rockford Files, Garner decided that he wanted to retire. He complained that working on the series had exacerbated his earlier injuries and that he was suffering from stress, knee problems and back pain. Universal had Garner under contract for a further year and was unwilling to release him from the programme. In a move typical of Maverick or Rockford, Garner sold his share of the series to NBC and promised them a further television series after his contract with Universal ended, thus setting NBC and Universal at odds.

Universal then asked Garner to continue for 12 more months making hour-long episodes of The Rockford Files. “I’ve saved them millions by bringing the show in on time,” he recalled. “I’m too exhausted to do any more, but if they make me do it, I can waste in three months all the money I’ve saved them. What do I care? I don’t own any of it any more.”

^{James Garner (left) in 'The Rockford Files' with Joe Santos} 

In 1984 Garner gave what was arguably his best performance, in Heartsounds, a television film documenting the death of a doctor after a series of debilitating heart attacks. Garner, who aged visibly during the film, surprised his fans by accepting a role which portrayed physical infirmity and death. “I’m too old for all the macho stuff these days,” he said. “I’m at the stage where nobody is going to believe I’m the hero type.”

Garner was nominated for an Oscar for his role in Murphy’s Romance (1985), a comedy in which he co-starred with Sally Field.

In 1988 Garner suffered a heart attack and underwent quadruple bypass surgery. Doctors claimed that he had endangered his life by delaying the operation for five months to accumulate enough of his own blood to for a transfusion.

After his operation Garner accepted fewer screen roles, insisting that he wanted to stop work and spend time watching television with his wife and family. Despite claiming that he wanted to retire, he continued to read scripts and to consider advertising, films and television work. In 1988 he starred opposite Bruce Willis in the forgettable Blake Edwards film Sunset, and appeared in a popular series of Kodak advertisements screened in the United States. When asked why he continued to make commercials instead of concentrating on film roles Garner replied: “I’m an actor, I hire out.”

He continued to take roles in television series (he reprised Rockford for several small-screen movies in the late 1990s) and in feature films, among them My Fellow Americans (1996), alongside Jack Lemmon; Space Cowboys (2000), with Tommy Lee Jones and Donald Sutherland; and The Notebook (2004), starring Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams.

In 2005 he received a Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award.

James Garner married, in 1956 after a two-week courtship, Lois Clarke, a former television actress. He had a daughter and a stepdaughter

James Garner, born April 7 1928, died July 19 2014

Bobby Womack

Bobby Womack was the 'Soul survivor' of an astonishingly lurid lifestyle who fused passionate gospel and dulcet crooning

Bobby Womack in concert in Stockholm in early 2013

Bobby Womack, who has died aged 70, was a rhythm and blues guitarist and songwriter and, despite a life that was luridly eventful even by the grand guignol standards of the milieu, the last great surviving exponent of the “testifying” style of soul singing.

“Testifying”, rooted in gospel music, came to the fore in the 1960s through the impassioned performances of such singers as Otis Redding, James Brown and Wilson Pickett. Womack’s own voice ran the gamut from a smooth, beseeching baritone to an urgent, gravelly growl, often rising to a piercing, full-throated scream that vividly suggested a man in the grip of powerful emotions beyond his control.

His songs, punctuated by moralising soliloquies on the subject of love and betrayal, saw him cast in the figure of “The “Preacher” – a role which had been his childhood ambition when performing on the gospel circuit, “because all the preachers had everything in the neighbourhood, they had all the money and the Cadillacs and they got the best part of the chicken”.

But Womack was not a preacher. Instead his life was laced with drug addiction, gunplay, financial exploitation and chaotic personal relationships. Nonetheless, he managed to outlive all his contemporaries, and as a result billed himself “the Soul Survivor”. As one song, Only Survivor, put it: “They call me a living legend/But I’m just a soldier who’s been left behind.”

Bobby Womack was born on born March 4 1944 in Cleveland, Ohio, the third of five sons of a steelworker, Friendly, and his wife Naomi. Friendly was also a sometime gospel singer, but channelled his musical ambitions into his sons, organising Bobby and his four brothers, Harry, Cecil, Friendly Jnr and Curtis, into a group, The Womack Brothers, which performed on the local gospel circuit.

It was there that Womack met the two men to whom he would later attribute his singing style: Sam Cooke, then the lead singer of the Soul Stirrers, and Archie Brownlee, from the Five Blind Boys of Mississippi. From the former, Womack took a dulcet, seductive crooning; from the latter the “testifying” screeches and yelps. A child musical prodigy, Bobby got first hand experience of Brownlee’s style at the age of 13, playing guitar for him.

^{An early publicity photo for Bobby Womack}

“I modelled my screams on Archie,” he once recalled, “but I never could get them as clear as he did, because he’d mellow it in gin. He’d lie down on stage to sing because the drink had eaten the lining of his stomach so much. They’d kneel down there and put a microphone up close. He always said he wanted to die right there, wailing his head off, and he did, singing Leave Me In The Hands Of The Lord.”

Womack would look back on his short period with the Blind Boys with great affection. “I would take them to their hotel rooms, dress them, take their clothes and get ’em cleaned, and they’d let me get a little nooky on the side when their girlfriends would go for it.”

At the same time The Womack Brothers were also spotted by Sam Cooke, who was shortly to abandon gospel for the more lucrative pastures of secular Rhythm and Blues. In 1962 he sent for the Womacks from Los Angeles and, encouraging them to follow his example, signed them to his SAR label, renaming them The Valentinos.

^{"The Valentinos" circa 1962 (Top, left to right) Bobby Womack, Friendly Jr. and Curtis. (Bottom, left to right) Cecil and Harry}

The group’s first single, Lookin’ For A Love (1963), sold a million copies, and provided an early lesson in music business practice. “We didn’t know that we were supposed to get paid,” Womack would later recall. “We was just honoured to be with Sam Cooke’s company, an’ we didn’t get no royalties. He said, 'Well, that car you bought was your royalties. You stayed in a hotel; you know what that cost me? We took care of you guys, paid for the session. You may be gettin’ screwed, but I’ll screw you with grease. James Brown, he’d screw you with sand.’”

Cooke provided a further lesson with the release of the group’s fourth single, a Womack composition entitled It’s All Over Now. Cooke – who had a piece of the song’s publishing – gave the song to The Rolling Stones, whose version went to the top of the British charts. “I was still screaming and hollering right up until I got my first royalty cheque from the song,” Womack recalled. “Man, the amount of money rolling in shut me right up.”

^{Bobby Womack with (back, left to right) Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman and (front, left to right) Ronnie Wood and Keith Richard of the Rolling Stones in the early 1970s}

Cooke took Womack under his wing, employing him as a guitarist in his touring group and treating him as his protégé. It was a relationship that would come to a violent end with Cooke’s untimely death in 1964, shot dead by the manageress of a motel where he had been enjoying a tryst with a prostitute.

Womack’s efforts at comforting Cooke’s widow, Barbara, resulted in them marrying three months after the singer’s death, angering Cooke’s friends who felt that Womack was exploiting a grieving widow. Womack insisted that the match had started at her instigation, and it was Barbara who put up the money to pay for Womack’s first solo recordings for the Chess label. But the marriage was to end catastrophically when she discovered he was having an affair with her teenage daughter, Linda, obliging Womack to beat a hasty retreat from the family home at the end of the barrel of a gun. Linda, in turn, would go on to marry Womack’s younger brother, Cecil, thus leaving Womack in the possibly unique position of having been the same woman’s stepfather, lover, and brother-in-law in short order. Cecil and Linda would later enjoy success as Womack and Womack with the singles Love Wars and Teardrops.

Bobby and Regina Womack at the Rock 'N' Roll Hall of Fame in 1989

With his early solo recordings having passed without notice, Bobby Womack concentrated on songwriting and session work. As a member of the house band at the famed American Sound Studio in Memphis he played on recordings by a host of artists including Joe Tex, Elvis Presley, Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett, who recorded no fewer than 17 Womack songs in three years.

In 1968 he resurrected his singing career with the R&B hit What Is This. More hits followed with judicious covers of such songs as Fly Me To The Moon, Sweet Caroline and California Dreaming, and Womack’s own, rootsier compositions. The albums Communication, Understanding, Facts of Life and Lookin’ For A Love Again, established him in the vanguard of soul music and provided a run of hit singles including A Woman’s Gotta Have It, Nobody Wants You When You’re Down And Out and the million-selling Harry Hippie, a song written by Jim Ford but which Womack adapted as a tribute to his younger brother.

Across 110th Street was a highly-lauded soundtrack album for one of the classic “blaxploitation” movies of the time (and later for the Quentin Tarantino movie, Jackie Brown). And Womack also recorded a country album, BW Goes C&W. (His record company balked at his original suggestion for the title, “Step Aside Charlie Pride And Give Another N----r A Chance”. Womack was also obliged to withdraw his interpretation of Gene Autrey’s song I’m Back In The Saddle Again, which he had retitled “I’m Black In The Saddle Again”, after Autrey threatened a lawsuit.)

But by the mid-70s Womack’s albums were showing signs of creative fatigue from his increasingly erratic lifestyle. He had become close friends with Sly Stone, playing on Stone’s There’s A Riot Going On, and proving an enthusiastic participant in Stone’s infamous drug-binges. And he was further undermined by a series of family tragedies.

^{Bobby Womack Partying at the Parrot Club in New York with Sly of Sly and the Family Stone}

In 1974 his younger brother Harry was murdered by a jealous girlfriend while he was staying at Bobby Womack’s house. The girl, happening upon some women’s clothes in the closet of the room where Harry was sleeping, assumed he was carrying on an affair and stabbed him in the neck with a steak knife. The clothes belonged to a girlfriend of Bobby.

Four years later Womack’s first child by his second marriage, Truth, died at the age of four months after suffocating in bed. Another son, Vincent, by Barbara Cooke, committed suicide at the age of 21.

Enveloped in what he would later describe as “the paranoia years”, Womack himself had taken to carrying a gun. Lying in bed one day he saw the handle on the bedroom door slowly turn. He reached for his gun and emptied it into the door. The door swung open to reveal his son Bobby Truth, “not yet in long trousers” standing there. The bullets had gone over his head. But the boy did not escape such an upbringing entirely without cost. Following his father’s troubled path, Bobby Truth would later be sentenced to 28 years imprisonment for second-degree murder.

In 1981 Womack returned triumphantly to form with the album The Poet, which couched the titanic passion of his voice in elegant arrangements. The album restored Womack to the R&B charts, but he saw none of the royalties, leading to a protracted, and fruitless, court case. “I owed money to everybody,” he would later recall. “The only reason they couldn’t sell my house is because I wouldn’t move; and the only reason I wouldn’t move is because I didn’t have a Master Charge to pay the truck. Things were bad.” He would later admit that it was only the timely intervention of his wife that prevented him from shooting firstly the record-company boss who owed him money, and then himself.

However, a follow-up album in 1984, The Poet II, featuring a guest appearance by Patti LaBelle, restored his fortunes.

Over the next 20 years Womack continued to record and tour, but with diminishing returns, until yet another surprising resurrection in 2010, when he was invited to perform with Damon Albarn’s loose aggregate of musicians, Gorillaz, singing live with the band and on two albums, Plastic Beach and The Fall. In 2012, Albarn produced Womack’s album The Bravest Man in the Universe. A 28th album, entitled The Best is Yet to Come, is to be released posthumously.

Bobby Womack married twice and leaves four children.

Bobby Womack, born March 4 1944 died June 27 2014

Alfredo Di Stefano

Alfredo Di Stefano was a Real Madrid star whose brilliant strategy and goalscoring secured victory in five successive European Cups

Alfredo Di Stefano

Alfredo Di Stefano, who has died aged 88, was, with the possible exception of Pelé, the finest footballer of all time. He was not merely an implacable scorer of goals but also a superb strategist. As Real Madrid’s field marshal, he led them to victory in the European Cup every year from 1956 to 1960, a monopoly that culminated in perhaps the greatest exhibition of play ever seen in Britain.

On the night of May 18 1960, 127,000 people packed Hampden Park to watch the white-clad might of Real take on Eintracht Frankfurt. The West German champions were formidable opponents, having put twelve goals past Glasgow Rangers in the semi-final. However, they were destroyed by the thrusts of Real’s two matadors, Puskas and Di Stefano.

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^{Alfredo Di Stefano (right) scores the first goal for Real Madrid against Eintracht Frankfurt at the European Cup Final in 1960 at Hampden Park, Glasgow} 

When Frankfurt impertinently took the lead after 19 minutes, Real retaliated by blending imagination and impudence to overwhelm their rivals through sheer skill. While the tubby Puskas plundered a hat-trick in the 7-3 triumph, it was Di Stefano who was the guiding influence, scoring the other four goals and asserting himself at moments of crisis. It was he who swept home the equaliser that renewed Real’s confidence, and when Frankfurt later rallied to make it 6-2 it was “The Blond Arrow” — as the stocky, balding Di Stefano was perversely known — who streaked away to score within 13 seconds of the restart. Real’s masterful display prompted overdue changes in the insular British game.

Di Stefano’s appetite for victory brought him 49 goals in 59 European ties, a record yet to be surpassed and one that lends weight to the judgment of both Johan Cruyff and George Best that he was the greatest of all.

^{Alfredo Di Stefano}

Alfredo Stefano Di Stefano Lauthe was born on July 4 1926 at Barracas, a poor suburb of Buenos Aires. His grandfather had emigrated to Argentina from Capri. His father played for the city’s premier club, River Plate, but left when professionalism was introduced, believing the game should be played purely for fun. Young Alfredo acquired his prodigious stamina running about the streets and working on a relative’s farm, to which his mother dispatched him in the hope it would take his mind off football. Her plan was scuppered when his sympathetic father asked how playing against cattle was going to improve Alfredo’s technique.

In 1942 Di Stefano joined River Plate, having given notice of a prickly temperament by quitting his youth team after a row with the coach. Di Stefano tolerated neither fools nor slights and when he was lent to the Hurucan club in 1944 he responded by scoring 50 goals in 66 games, including the winner against River Plate. He was rapidly brought back to lead a forward line known as La Maquina — The Machine — for the remorseless efficiency with which they dismantled opposing defences. In 1947 Di Stefano’s finishing won River Plate the Argentine League and Argentina the South American championship.

In 1949 the country’s players struck for more money. When club owners used amateurs instead, their star players decamped to Colombia, where a lucrative international pirate league was operating outside FIFA’S jurisdiction. Di Stefano signed for the aptly named Millonarios team. The league collapsed within four years but “The Blue Ballet”, choreographed by Di Stefano, had proved irresistible. He alone scored a remarkable 259 goals in 292 matches.

In 1953 Millonarios took part in Real Madrid’s 50th anniversary celebrations. Di Stefano caught the eye of the Spanish club’s owner, Santiago Bernabéu, who agreed a fee with the Colombians. However, Barcelona also believed they had secured Di Stefano after talks with River Plate, with whom he was still officially registered. A Spanish court ruled he must rotate each year between the two clubs, but after a seemingly slow start Barcelona sold their interest to Real. Four days later Di Stefano punished both the snub and their naivety with a hat-trick as his favoured team drubbed Barca 5-0.

Di Stefano’s combination of vision and endurance made him the total footballer a generation before the Dutch placed versatility at the heart of the modern game. One team-mate said that having him in the side was like having two players in every position. Unlike Pelé, he ran for 90 minutes, often scoring from attacks initiated by his own tackle at the other end of the field.

^{Alfredo Di Stefano (l) fires a shot at goal for the Rest of the World at the 1963 FA 100th Anniversary Match - England v Rest of the World} 

His supreme gift was the telling pass. Like some unruffled gadfly, he would effortlessly shield the ball until the right moment to strike came. Di Stefano was the team’s conductor, less concerned with solo virtuosity than maintaining rhythm and dictating tempo. He worked best with those who ran into space for him, like Puskas and the haring winger Gento. Those who sought to play otherwise received short shrift. When the Brazilian Didi arrived at Real the Argentine quickly judged their probing styles too similar. So impressed was the manager by Di Stefano that his rival was gone within the season. Di Stefano’s sour, aloof character did not always endear him to the media or his fellow players off the pitch. Nevertheless, Real’s fans revered him and it was esteem of his skill that persuaded Venezuelan guerrillas to release him after he was kidnapped there on tour in 1963.

Di Stefano played for Real Madrid from 1953 to 1964. Aside from their appearance in seven of the first nine European Cup finals, the club also won eight national titles. Di Stefano was top scorer in Spain every year but one from 1953 to 1959 and in 1957 and 1959 was voted European Footballer of the Year. In 624 matches for Real he scored 405 goals.

He was one of the few to represent three countries at international level. He was capped seven times for Argentina and three times by Colombia before qualifying in 1958 for Spain. Although he scored 23 goals in 31 matches for them, injury, selection squabbles and an unimaginable defeat by Scotland meant that he never graced the greater stage of the World Cup Finals. In 1963 he played for the Rest of the World against England.

Di Stefano was released by Real Madrid in 1964. He played two more seasons with RCD Espanyol in Barcelona before retiring at the age of 40. His tally of over 800 goals ranks him fourth behind Friedenrich, Binder and, of modern players, only Pelé, as the highest goal scorer ever.

He became coach at Elche before returning to Argentina in 1968. Although greeted by the nationalist press as a traitor, he revived Boca Juniors before returning to Spain as manager of Valencia in 1970. The next season the team won their first championship for 24 years. In 1980 Valencia won the European Cup Winners Cup, defeating Arsenal on penalties. He then briefly took charge at Real Madrid itself, losing to Alex Ferguson’s Aberdeen in the Cup Winners Cup in 1983. Made wealthy by the game, he had little formal contact with it thereafter, returning only as caretaker manager at Real in 1990.

His wife, Sara, died in 2005.

Alfredo Di Stefano, born July 4 1926, died July 7 2014

Michael Scudamore

Michael Scudamore was a jockey, trainer and veteran of 16 consecutive Grand Nationals who stormed his way to victory in 1959 and founded a notable racing dynasty

On their way to victory: Scudamore and Oxo clear the last fence in the 1959 Grand National 

Michael Scudamore, the patriarch of the racing dynasty who has died aged 81, notched up a record 16 consecutive rides in the Grand National, famously riding Oxo to victory for trainer Willie Stephenson in 1959.

Scudamore also won the 1957 Gold Cup on Linwell, and was one of the privileged few jockeys to have ridden a winner over jumps for the Queen Mother.

After hanging up his saddle in 1966 he watched as his son Peter Scudamore and grandsons, jockey Tom and trainer Michael, maintained family National Hunt tradition. But even though Peter Scudamore, an eight-time champion rider, managed to take home nearly every other piece of precious metal available to a top jump jockey, and though there has seldom been a National without a Scudamore involved in some capacity or other, Michael Scudamore was the only member of the family to land the top prize.

^{Linwell ridden by Scudamore winning the 1957 Cheltenham Gold Cup} 

Scudamore’s Aintree quest began somewhat unpropitiously in 1951 on a horse called Easter A Calling. “They went too fast to the first, over-jumped and piled into each other,” he recalled in an interview with The Guardian. “Twelve of us fell or were brought down and all I remember is bouncing along among a lot of hooves.”

But he refused to give up and in 1959 his mount, farmer Johnny Bigg’s eight-year old bay gelding Oxo, put in a near-perfect ride, while Scudamore’s main rivals saw their chances scuppered by the handicapper or by sheer bad luck.

The previous year’s winner, Mr What, weighed down with 11st 9lb, flagged badly with two fences to go, leaving Oxo and Wyndburgh, ridden by Tim Brookshaw, to contest the finishing line without him.

The two jockeys had been side-by-side throughout the race but, as Scudamore recalled, “When we jumped Becher’s for the second time, Tim shouted across to me that he’d broken his stirrup leather. I didn’t answer him back, I just thought, 'That’s a good thing, it’ll help me a bit’.”

But it was not that simple, for Brookshaw’s misfortune resulted in one of the most amazing pieces of riding in the history of the National. Instead of pulling up, the jockey freed his other foot and rode the rest of the race without stirrups. Although Oxo had a big advantage clearing the last fence, his lead by the lollipop winning post had been whittled down to just one-and-a-half lengths. “I could hear Tim and Wyndburgh behind me all the time,” Scudamore recalled. “It seemed a long time from the final fence to the finish.”

Out of a field of 34 there were only four finishers and the Pathé newsreel of the event hailed Oxo as “the horse who put beef into his backers”. But if Scudamore had expected to be congratulated by the trainer for his skill in avoiding the mishaps which had claimed other riders, he was disappointed. Stephenson ticked him off for letting the horse hit the front too early.

Michael Scudamore was born on July 17 1932 into a Herefordshire farming family. His father was a point-to-point trainer and amateur jockey and Michael made his debut on the racecourse in the late 1940s when his father called him from the stands to take a spare ride in a hunter chase at Hereford.

During a career as a National Hunt jockey, which ended in 1966 with a bad fall at Wolverhampton which left him with a permanently damaged left eye, Scudamore captured all the top jumps prizes bar the Champion Hurdle. He rode his first winner at Chepstow in 1949 and, as well as the National and the 1957 Cheltenham Gold Cup, he took the 1956 King George VI Chase on Rose Park and the 1957 Welsh Grand National on Creeola II. He was also successful in the Queen Mother’s colours on Gay Record at Wye in 1966. From 1950 to 1966 he rode 496 winners, finishing runner-up in the 1956-57 season.

Until he was forced to give up Scudamore largely avoided injury. His grandson Tom has recalled that he was in more danger off than on the course: “One of the worst injuries he received was on a shopping trip when he fell through a hole in the floor and dislocated his shoulder. Once, on a night out, he mistook the lamp on the table for a vinegar bottle, took out the wick and poured paraffin all over his chips. Luckily, he only had a couple before he realised something was not right.”

Following his retirement from racing, Scudamore took out a trainer’s licence in Herefordshire, where he trained several winners including Bruslee, the winner of the Mackeson Gold Cup at Cheltenham in 1974, Fortina’s Palace, winner of the 1970 Grand Annual and Charles Dickens, who came third to Red Rum in the 1974 Grand National. He later handed over the yard to his grandson Michael, who recently trained a Welsh National winner in Monbeg Dude.

In 1957 Michael Scudamore married Mary Duffield, who died three days before her husband. Their son Peter survives him.

Michael Scudamore, born July 17 1932, died July 7 2014

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