The old Hollywood is passing. There are fewer and fewer of the old guard left. With Mickey Rooney’s passing yesterday at 93, who is still alive and well?
(with their birth-years)
1916–Olivia de Havilland (Gone with the Wind), the legendary Kirk Douglas
1924–Doris Day (happily long-retired with all her dogs), Lauren Bacall (Bogie’s actress-widow)
1925–Angela Lansbury (aka Jessica Fletcher)
1926–director Roger Corman (who did all the Vincent Price Poe films at American International and helped Nicholson, Coppola, and others to start their careers), Mel Brooks, Canadian director Norman Jewison (who directed In the Heat of the Night, Moonstruck, Cincinatti Kid, Fiddler on the Roof)
1927–Sidney Poitier (who made the earliest, ’50s and ’60s run of significant breakthrough films for a black actor)
1929–Bob Newhart (was never wittier than in The Bob Newhart Show)
1930–the likable Gene Hackman, the busy Clint Eastwood, Joanne Woodward (Paul Newman’s actress-widow)
1931–the beautiful Claire Bloom
1932–the fantastically versatile Michael Caine, director Richard Lester (A Hard Day’s Night)
1934–3 great character actors: Shirley Maclaine, Alan Arkin, Maggie Smith
1935–Woody Allen (best comedy actor-director of the past half-century; Chaplin’s successor)
1936–Burt Reynolds (who once posed nude for Cosmopolitan magazine, the great actor-director Robert Redford, Glenda Jackson (the hot ’70s British actress, now a U.K. M.P.), the steadily-working Albert Finney
1937–the deep Anthony Hopkins, the crazy Jack Nicholson, the busy Jane Fonda, the versatile Dustin Hoffman, the intense Vanessa Redgrave
1938–the funny Elliott Gould, Jon Voight
1940–Peter Fonda, James Caan, the legendary Al Pacino
1941–rough Nick Nolte
1942–Martin Scorcese (one of the major directors of all time–worked with Corman, too)
1943–smiling Robert de Niro