Death Notices

[mouview]

Actor Herbert Lom, best known for playing Charles Dreyfus in the Pink Panther films, has died aged 95.

A great character actor. Forget about the silly Pink Panther roles; watch him as Louis in The Ladykillers where, in the face of fierce competition,  he effortlessly stole every scene.

Quote "Louis: [asked to get General Gordon, Mrs. Wilberforce's parrot] I'm not chasing any parrot! I don't care if he's a field marshall! "

Also effective in serious roles such as Spartacus and The Dead Zone.

[stew]

Kerry Mike, lovely photograph of the people walking to the Chapel.

Very sorry to hear of your dad's passing, may he rest in peace.

[Sandino]

Showband legend Larry Cunningham has died.

[Hardy]

Ah that's sad. I wonder if he was aware of his legacy to football?

[Dougal Maguire]

What bad news for poor oul Shamrock Shore to wake up to

[ONeill]

Larry - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZKACCy7OK8

[Shamrock Shore]

Ah - that's sad.

A daycent man to whom we owe plenty. He was like a God in the 60s to many as he played to the displaced Irish in all the far flung places of the world.

RIP Larry and I would have hoped someone, somewhere once explained where 'The Larries' nickname that younger GAA journalists use came from. I could see him chuckling at that one.

I assume Laureleye will be 'Our man at the scene' at the Finneral as Larry played for Laurel's club in the 50s before the bright lights beckoned.

[seafoid]

Larry - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZKACCy7OK8

some great comments


We used to sing this song with Dad as kids. He knew all the lyrics, and we would look to him to start a verse, so that we could carry on. We were born in Cork Ireland. Hearing this music always reminds me of my Dad, who passed last September. He played the harmonica and sang many Irish ballads. I get very emotional hearing some of these songs.

CatharinePatricia1 year ago

[Billys Boots]

Ah - that's sad.

A daycent man to whom we owe plenty. He was like a God in the 60s to many as he played to the displaced Irish in all the far flung places of the world.

RIP Larry and I would have hoped someone, somewhere once explained where 'The Larries' nickname that younger GAA journalists use came from. I could see him chuckling at that one.

I assume Laureleye will be 'Our man at the scene' at the Finneral as Larry played for Laurel's club in the 50s before the bright lights beckoned.

Nice oul divil apparently, owned a supermarket in Granard - I remember the day he got married, was like a royal wedding in Granard.

Kind of relatedly, when West Brom unearthed a star called Laurie Cunningham in the late 70s (he later played for Real Madrid I believe), some of the Irish wags on the team (Paddy Mulligan mainly I understand) christened him 'Lovely Leitrim'.  Another of Larry's legacies to sport.

RIP.

[T Fearon]

Remember my own dad ( thankfully still alive) singing Larry's songs when I was young too and vaguely remember a vinyl LP in the house as well (now my dad would never have been a record buyer and wasn't a noted music lover either). So Larry,like Joe Dolan had a genuine all ireland fan base!

[AQMP]

Missed this one but Sven Hassel died last weekend aged 95.

Essential reading for teenagers of a certain vintage.

[Billys Boots]

Missed this one but Sven Hassel died last weekend aged 95.

Essential reading for teenagers of a certain vintage.

Jaysus I'd forgotten all about him - there was a coterie in myself and Shamrock Shore's class in school that were addicted ... couldn't see the attraction to his oeuvre myself.

[Ulick]

Eric Hobsbawm dies, aged 95

Lifelong Marxist, whose work influenced generations of historians and politicians, dies after long illness

Eric Hobsbawm, one of the leading historians of the 20th century, has died, his family said on Monday.

Hobsbawm, a lifelong Marxist whose work influenced generations of historians and politicians, died in the early hours of Monday morning at the Royal Free Hospital in London after a long illness, his daughter Julia said. He was 95.

Hobsbawm's four-volume history of the 19th and 20th centuries, spanning European history from the French revolution to the fall of the USSR, is acknowledged as among the defining works on the period.

Fellow historian Niall Ferguson called the quartet, from The Age of Revolution to 1994's The Age of Extremes, "the best starting point I know for anyone who wishes to begin studying modern history".

Hobsbawm was dubbed "Neil Kinnock's guru" in the early 1990s, after criticising the Labour party for failing to keep step with social changes, and was regarded as influential in the birth of New Labour, though he later expressed disappointment with the government of Tony Blair.

Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, described Hobsbawm as "an extraordinary historian, a man passionate about his politics and a great friend of my family".

He said: "His historical works brought hundreds of years of British history to hundreds of thousands of people. He brought history out of the ivory tower and into people's lives.

"But he was not simply an academic, he cared deeply about the political direction of the country.

"Indeed he was one of the first people to recognise the challenges to Labour in the late 1970s and 1980s from the changing nature of our society

"He was also a lovely man, with whom I had some of the most stimulating and challenging conversations about politics and the world. My thoughts are with his wife, Marlene, his children and all his family."

Hobsbawm's lifelong commitment to Marxist principles made him a controversial figure, however, in particular his membership of the British Communist party that continued even after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.

He said many years later he had "never tried to diminish the appalling things that happened in Russia", but had believed in the early days of the communist project that "a new world was being born amid blood and tears and horror: revolution, civil war, famine. Thanks to the breakdown of the west, we had the illusion that even this brutal, experimental, system was going to work better than the west. It was that or nothing."

Hobsbawm was born into a Jewish family in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1917, and grew up in Vienna and Berlin, moving to London with his family in 1933, the year that Hitler came to power in Germany. He studied at Marylebone grammar school and King's College, Cambridge, and became a lecturer at Birkbeck University in 1947, the beginning of a lifelong association that culminated in his becoming the university's president.

He became a fellow of the British Academy in 1978 and was awarded the companion of honour in 1998.

He is survived by his wife, Marlene, his daughter, Julia, and sons Andy and Joss, and by seven grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

[Jonah]

Showband legend Larry Cunningham has died.

Only just heard this today.
RIP

[LaurelEye]

Ah - that's sad.

A daycent man to whom we owe plenty. He was like a God in the 60s to many as he played to the displaced Irish in all the far flung places of the world.

RIP Larry and I would have hoped someone, somewhere once explained where 'The Larries' nickname that younger GAA journalists use came from. I could see him chuckling at that one.

I assume Laureleye will be 'Our man at the scene' at the Finneral as Larry played for Laurel's club in the 50s before the bright lights beckoned.

I think the club had folded by the time he would have been of playing age so I think he played with Abbeylara and Granard rather than with us. But I believe one of his first public appearances was in the local hall in 1950 when he sang a song celebrating the team that had won the Senior Championship that year.

Very big crowd at the funeral with a lot of people from all over the country there (not just musicians either). A very different atmosphere to any other funeral I'd ever been at in the church, with TV cameras present and many people taking photographs; in many ways as much a reunion and a celebration of a life as anything else. The weather stayed dry, more or less, until they emerged from the church to go to the graveyard.