Sharon Acker, a Canadian film, television and theater actor best known for her roles in “Point Blank,” “The New Perry Mason” and “Happy Birthday to Me,” has died. She was 87.
Acker’s death was confirmed by her cousin, David Glover, in a tribute to his family member on Facebook: “My wife Judy and I were very close with Sharon and we spoke regularly even after she moved back to Toronto to be close to with daughters and family. I can never forget Sharon’s million dollar smile. She made everyone she came in contact with feel so much better.”
According to reports, Acker died March 16 at her retirement home in Toronto.
Across an acting career spanning four decades, Acker found one of her most enduring roles in the 1967 neo-noir “Point Blank,” helmed by John Boorman. Acker played the wife to Lee Marvin’s lead, who betrays her conman husband after a robbery on Alcatraz.
Acker’s death was confirmed by her cousin, David Glover, in a tribute to his family member on Facebook: “My wife Judy and I were very close with Sharon and we spoke regularly even after she moved back to Toronto to be close to with daughters and family. I can never forget Sharon’s million dollar smile. She made everyone she came in contact with feel so much better.”
According to reports, Acker died March 16 at her retirement home in Toronto.
Across an acting career spanning four decades, Acker found one of her most enduring roles in the 1967 neo-noir “Point Blank,” helmed by John Boorman. Acker played the wife to Lee Marvin’s lead, who betrays her conman husband after a robbery on Alcatraz.
- 4/1/2023
- by J. Kim Murphy
- Variety Film + TV
Sharon Acker, best known as Lee Marvin’s unfaithful wife in the 1967 film Point Blank, died March 16 in a Toronto residential home. She was 87 and her death was confirmed by daughter Kim Everest, a casting director.
Acker had a long and varied resume in film, television, and the stage. In 1956, she played the teacher Mrs. Stacey on a CBC adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. She then joined the Stratford Shakespeare Festival company, starring as Anne Page opposite future Star Trek costar William Shatner in a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor.
In addition to Point Blank, her film credits include Lucky Jim (1957). Acker also was in Don’t Let the Angels Fall (1969), which played in competition at Cannes. She was selected by the Motion Picture Exhibitors of Canada as their Film Star of Tomorrow that year,
Her memorable TV roles included a 1976-77 CBS adaptation of Executive Suite, playing...
Acker had a long and varied resume in film, television, and the stage. In 1956, she played the teacher Mrs. Stacey on a CBC adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. She then joined the Stratford Shakespeare Festival company, starring as Anne Page opposite future Star Trek costar William Shatner in a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor.
In addition to Point Blank, her film credits include Lucky Jim (1957). Acker also was in Don’t Let the Angels Fall (1969), which played in competition at Cannes. She was selected by the Motion Picture Exhibitors of Canada as their Film Star of Tomorrow that year,
Her memorable TV roles included a 1976-77 CBS adaptation of Executive Suite, playing...
- 4/1/2023
- by Bruce Haring
- Deadline Film + TV
Sharon Acker, the Canadian actress who portrayed Lee Marvin’s unfaithful wife in the 1967 neo-noir classic Point Blank and the right-hand woman Della Street opposite Monte Markham on a rebooted Perry Mason in the 1970s, has died. She was 87.
Acker died March 16 in a retirement home in her native Toronto, her daughter Kim Everest, a casting director, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Star Trek fans know Acker for her January 1969 turn as Odona, a desperate woman from an overpopulated planet, on the third-season episode “The Mark of Gideon.”
She also starred on a 1976-77 CBS adaptation of Executive Suite, playing the wife of Mitchell Ryan‘s Dan Walling. (Acker and Ryan assumed the parts performed by William Holden and June Allyson in the 1954 MGM film directed by Robert Wise.)
In John Boorman’s Point Blank, Acker’s character takes up with John Vernon’s Mal Reese after he shoots Walker (Marvin...
Acker died March 16 in a retirement home in her native Toronto, her daughter Kim Everest, a casting director, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Star Trek fans know Acker for her January 1969 turn as Odona, a desperate woman from an overpopulated planet, on the third-season episode “The Mark of Gideon.”
She also starred on a 1976-77 CBS adaptation of Executive Suite, playing the wife of Mitchell Ryan‘s Dan Walling. (Acker and Ryan assumed the parts performed by William Holden and June Allyson in the 1954 MGM film directed by Robert Wise.)
In John Boorman’s Point Blank, Acker’s character takes up with John Vernon’s Mal Reese after he shoots Walker (Marvin...
- 4/1/2023
- by Mike Barnes
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis was a mournful widow after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, but later in her life she was also playful and had crushes on famous men — including Alec Baldwin, despite being 28 years his senior.
All of this is recounted in James Hart’s new memoir, Lucky Jim, which came out on Tuesday. In the book Hart reveals that he and then-wife Carly Simon had a long-standing friendship with Onassis in which she shared these two sides of herself.
“‘Not long ago, someone told me about an African tribe that beat their drums and scream in anger for...
All of this is recounted in James Hart’s new memoir, Lucky Jim, which came out on Tuesday. In the book Hart reveals that he and then-wife Carly Simon had a long-standing friendship with Onassis in which she shared these two sides of herself.
“‘Not long ago, someone told me about an African tribe that beat their drums and scream in anger for...
- 4/11/2017
- by Sam Gillette
- PEOPLE.com
Jim Hart was married to singer Carly Simon for almost 20 years, and in his upcoming memoir Lucky Jim he reveals a marriage filled with kinky sex and mutual jealousy. Ultimately, their union ended with his addiction to crack cocaine and not-so-secret homosexuality.
According to the book, their connection was intense but problematic from the beginning. Around the time they met, Hart recalls visiting a movie theater that he describes as a “gay cruising space.”
“It was the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and the men looked more and more suspicious to me,” he writes. “I never touched anyone — I was petrified.
According to the book, their connection was intense but problematic from the beginning. Around the time they met, Hart recalls visiting a movie theater that he describes as a “gay cruising space.”
“It was the beginning of the AIDS crisis, and the men looked more and more suspicious to me,” he writes. “I never touched anyone — I was petrified.
- 4/11/2017
- by Sam Gillette
- PEOPLE.com
It may be tasteless, but National Lampoon captured the campus experience in a way no UK film has ever managed
I once saw National Lampoon’s Animal House at a back-to-school midnight show at the University of California at Santa Barbara in September 1984. I hadn’t counted on the entire two rows of frat-boys behind me who recited every single line of dialogue, in unison, just seconds before the characters onscreen did. It was the first time I realised the term “cult movie” really meant something. Here were a group of people who were modelling their lives – for good or ill, mostly ill – on a movie that spoke directly to their own college experience. One that, as a few epic, real frat-house parties soon showed me, was infinitely more colourful than my own, albeit infused with a sinister sense of everyone growing up way too fast.
Compared to my monochrome,...
I once saw National Lampoon’s Animal House at a back-to-school midnight show at the University of California at Santa Barbara in September 1984. I hadn’t counted on the entire two rows of frat-boys behind me who recited every single line of dialogue, in unison, just seconds before the characters onscreen did. It was the first time I realised the term “cult movie” really meant something. Here were a group of people who were modelling their lives – for good or ill, mostly ill – on a movie that spoke directly to their own college experience. One that, as a few epic, real frat-house parties soon showed me, was infinitely more colourful than my own, albeit infused with a sinister sense of everyone growing up way too fast.
Compared to my monochrome,...
- 9/19/2016
- by John Patterson
- The Guardian - Film News
Chatting about writing, The Muppets, DreamWorks, Clockwise and Charles Crichton, all with Mr John Cleese...
Now out in hardback is John Cleese's autobiography, So Anyway. It's a genuinely interesting read, very much written in his own voice, and he spared us some time to have a chat about it, and his career.
Here's how it went...
Can we start with the predictable stuff first, but I always wonder this when anyone writes an autobiography: why do it? Why put your life down in a book, who is it for, and did you enjoy it?
Well let's go backwards on that. Yes I enjoyed it very much. Who is it for me? In a funny kind of way it was for me, because some people seem to think that I've had a very interesting life, which compared with people who have fought in wars, and been spies, and discovered rivers in Africa,...
Now out in hardback is John Cleese's autobiography, So Anyway. It's a genuinely interesting read, very much written in his own voice, and he spared us some time to have a chat about it, and his career.
Here's how it went...
Can we start with the predictable stuff first, but I always wonder this when anyone writes an autobiography: why do it? Why put your life down in a book, who is it for, and did you enjoy it?
Well let's go backwards on that. Yes I enjoyed it very much. Who is it for me? In a funny kind of way it was for me, because some people seem to think that I've had a very interesting life, which compared with people who have fought in wars, and been spies, and discovered rivers in Africa,...
- 12/8/2014
- by sarahd
- Den of Geek
In the 1940s and 50s, the Boulting brothers won over filmgoers and critics with a series of classics – from Brighton Rock to Private's Progress. As the BFI begins a retrospective, Michael Newton explores their version of Britain
The history of the Boulting brothers is the history of British cinema in miniature. The brilliance, the comforts and the disappointments are all there. In the 1940s, they take off from documentary realism to reach the heights of noir extravagance, before falling back into a gently unexciting worthiness. At the start of the 1950s they produce two fascinating oddities, characteristic of the oddity of the times. Later that decade, they turn to cosily satirical farce, the products of an exasperated, grump. The 1960s see them trying to get with it and making a middle-aged effort to "swing", but also creating one work that finds a vulnerable, extraordinary beauty in ordinary lives. And after that comes a petering out,...
The history of the Boulting brothers is the history of British cinema in miniature. The brilliance, the comforts and the disappointments are all there. In the 1940s, they take off from documentary realism to reach the heights of noir extravagance, before falling back into a gently unexciting worthiness. At the start of the 1950s they produce two fascinating oddities, characteristic of the oddity of the times. Later that decade, they turn to cosily satirical farce, the products of an exasperated, grump. The 1960s see them trying to get with it and making a middle-aged effort to "swing", but also creating one work that finds a vulnerable, extraordinary beauty in ordinary lives. And after that comes a petering out,...
- 7/26/2013
- The Guardian - Film News
Count Arthur Strong's transition from radio to TV falls flat, but Jane Campion's first foray into television is intriguing
Count Arthur Strong (BBC2) | iPlayer
Top of the Lake (BBC2) | iPlayer
Piper Alpha: Fire in the Night (BBC2) | iPlayer
NewsTalk Live (C5)
I used to enjoy, very much, listening to Count Arthur Strong. But that was when it was on the radio, and I was in the bath. Six-thirty of a pm, the purple glower of dusk, risotto glooping away gently on the stove, and life doesn't get much better than that. I fully appreciate that expectations can vary hugely according to, for instance, personal childcare needs, personal mental health, local proliferation of guns, wholly imagined threat of incipient alien attack, etc. But the programme used to make me smile. Now, instead, it's on my television, and that is, I think, a mistake, and not just because of the...
Count Arthur Strong (BBC2) | iPlayer
Top of the Lake (BBC2) | iPlayer
Piper Alpha: Fire in the Night (BBC2) | iPlayer
NewsTalk Live (C5)
I used to enjoy, very much, listening to Count Arthur Strong. But that was when it was on the radio, and I was in the bath. Six-thirty of a pm, the purple glower of dusk, risotto glooping away gently on the stove, and life doesn't get much better than that. I fully appreciate that expectations can vary hugely according to, for instance, personal childcare needs, personal mental health, local proliferation of guns, wholly imagined threat of incipient alien attack, etc. But the programme used to make me smile. Now, instead, it's on my television, and that is, I think, a mistake, and not just because of the...
- 7/13/2013
- by Euan Ferguson
- The Guardian - Film News
Years in the making, Walter Salles's movie adaptation of Kerouac's beat classic is bold, affecting and inherently sad
The first two books I bought when I arrived in New York as a graduate student in August 1957 were William H Whyte's The Organization Man and a special edition of the avant-garde quarterly Evergreen Review on the "San Francisco scene". They complemented each other. Whyte's book is a devastating assault on American conformity by a senior editor of the business magazine Fortune. The Evergreen special was a celebration of the countercultural artists soon to be famous as leaders of the beat generation, and the writers featured as members of the San Francisco scene were Allen Ginsberg, whose poem "Howl" was published earlier that year, and Jack Kerouac, whose On the Road was to be the literary sensation of 1957 when it appeared a month or so later.
During that autumn my principal...
The first two books I bought when I arrived in New York as a graduate student in August 1957 were William H Whyte's The Organization Man and a special edition of the avant-garde quarterly Evergreen Review on the "San Francisco scene". They complemented each other. Whyte's book is a devastating assault on American conformity by a senior editor of the business magazine Fortune. The Evergreen special was a celebration of the countercultural artists soon to be famous as leaders of the beat generation, and the writers featured as members of the San Francisco scene were Allen Ginsberg, whose poem "Howl" was published earlier that year, and Jack Kerouac, whose On the Road was to be the literary sensation of 1957 when it appeared a month or so later.
During that autumn my principal...
- 10/13/2012
- by Philip French
- The Guardian - Film News
'Cheeky cockney' character actor who graced British screens for more than 60 years
While working on the classic Ealing comedy Hue and Cry in 1947, the actor Harry Fowler, who has died aged 85, was given sage advice by one of his co-stars, Jack Warner: "Never turn anything down … stars come and go but as a character actor, you'll work until you're 90."
Fowler took the suggestion and proved its near veracity. Between his 1942 debut as Ern in Those Kids from Town until television appearances more than 60 years later, he notched up scores of feature films and innumerable TV shows, including three years as Corporal "Flogger" Hoskins in The Army Game.
He never attained star status but created a gallery of sparky characters, including minor villains, servicemen, reporters and tradesmen enriched by an ever-present cheeky smile and an authentic cockney accent. He was Smudge or Smiley, Nipper or Knocker, Bert or 'Orace, as...
While working on the classic Ealing comedy Hue and Cry in 1947, the actor Harry Fowler, who has died aged 85, was given sage advice by one of his co-stars, Jack Warner: "Never turn anything down … stars come and go but as a character actor, you'll work until you're 90."
Fowler took the suggestion and proved its near veracity. Between his 1942 debut as Ern in Those Kids from Town until television appearances more than 60 years later, he notched up scores of feature films and innumerable TV shows, including three years as Corporal "Flogger" Hoskins in The Army Game.
He never attained star status but created a gallery of sparky characters, including minor villains, servicemen, reporters and tradesmen enriched by an ever-present cheeky smile and an authentic cockney accent. He was Smudge or Smiley, Nipper or Knocker, Bert or 'Orace, as...
- 1/5/2012
- by Brian Baxter
- The Guardian - Film News
This is Groggle.com, an Australian price-comparison Web site that hunts down the cheapest alcohol for your pleasure (and pain, the following day). It's just been sent a cease-and-desist letter by Google.com--for those of you not in the know, it's an online search engine firm based in the U.S. which is diversifying into other markets. And it's all to do with the Groggle founders' choice of name.
Cameron Collie and Alec Doughty registered the name with the Aussie trademark office last year, and it was approved in February. Tens of thousands of dollars later, Google pounced, asking the dipsophilic startup to withdraw its trademark, change its name, transfer the domain name--groggle.com.au to Google, acknowledge in writing that it had been a very naughty boy, that it had committed the tort of passing off, and so on and so forth.
Talk about using a piledriver, a few tons of plastic explosive,...
Cameron Collie and Alec Doughty registered the name with the Aussie trademark office last year, and it was approved in February. Tens of thousands of dollars later, Google pounced, asking the dipsophilic startup to withdraw its trademark, change its name, transfer the domain name--groggle.com.au to Google, acknowledge in writing that it had been a very naughty boy, that it had committed the tort of passing off, and so on and so forth.
Talk about using a piledriver, a few tons of plastic explosive,...
- 4/28/2010
- by Addy Dugdale
- Fast Company
Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have given us a lively Likely Lads throwback, says Peter Bradshaw
Like Clement and Le Frenais or Waterhouse and Hall, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have written a big-hearted movie about working-class lads from the sticks who want to get off with girls and get on with their lives, but feel a gravitational, detumescent pull of loyalty, to each other and to their boring, boring hometown. And they've got a sinking feeling that this sinking feeling is the natural order of things, however big their dreams. Coming down in the world at last, like a punchline to a lugubrious gag, is the way it has to be.
It's a film which is at once dated and backdated: the British kitchen-sink genre this superficially resembles conjures up the monochrome image of the late 1950s and early 60s. But Gervais and Merchant have chosen the 70s as...
Like Clement and Le Frenais or Waterhouse and Hall, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant have written a big-hearted movie about working-class lads from the sticks who want to get off with girls and get on with their lives, but feel a gravitational, detumescent pull of loyalty, to each other and to their boring, boring hometown. And they've got a sinking feeling that this sinking feeling is the natural order of things, however big their dreams. Coming down in the world at last, like a punchline to a lugubrious gag, is the way it has to be.
It's a film which is at once dated and backdated: the British kitchen-sink genre this superficially resembles conjures up the monochrome image of the late 1950s and early 60s. But Gervais and Merchant have chosen the 70s as...
- 4/15/2010
- by Peter Bradshaw
- The Guardian - Film News
Actor who brought sympathetic dimensions to the comic twerp Bertie Wooster and the shrewd detective Lord Peter Wimsey
Actor known for his roles as the archetypal blithering Englishman
Playing the archetypal silly ass was the sometimes reluctant business of the stage, film and television actor Ian Carmichael, who has died aged 89. In the public mind he became the best-known postwar example of a characteristic British type - the personally appealing blithering idiot who somehow survives, and sometimes even gets the girl. One of his most characteristic and memorable sorties in this field was his portrayal of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim – the anti-hero James Dixon, who savaged the pretensions of academia, as Amis had himself sometimes clashed with academia when he was a lecturer at Swansea. Appearing in John and Roy Boulting's 1957 film, he was able to suggest an unruly but amiable spirit at the end of its tether,...
Actor known for his roles as the archetypal blithering Englishman
Playing the archetypal silly ass was the sometimes reluctant business of the stage, film and television actor Ian Carmichael, who has died aged 89. In the public mind he became the best-known postwar example of a characteristic British type - the personally appealing blithering idiot who somehow survives, and sometimes even gets the girl. One of his most characteristic and memorable sorties in this field was his portrayal of Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim – the anti-hero James Dixon, who savaged the pretensions of academia, as Amis had himself sometimes clashed with academia when he was a lecturer at Swansea. Appearing in John and Roy Boulting's 1957 film, he was able to suggest an unruly but amiable spirit at the end of its tether,...
- 2/7/2010
- by Dennis Barker
- The Guardian - Film News
Katharine Whitehorn on a survey of Britain in the 1950s
What was it like to live in the 1950s? Until recently the decade was thought of as a bare patch between the battleground of the 40s and the fairground of the 60s, but recently its complexities and excitements have exercised historians Peter Hennessy and Dominic Sandbrook; and now there's Family Britain, the second book in David Kynaston's three-volume New Jerusalem project. Mercifully, this massive work – nearly 800 pages – is made highly readable by all sorts of extracts and quotations from diaries, columns and oral records, and deals as much with ordinary, everyday lives as with the machinations of politics and power.
There are surprises in it even for someone who lived delightedly through those years: was rationing really not finally called off until July 1954? Was a Tory government cheerfully still subsidising milk and National Butter in 1956? Some things I remember all...
What was it like to live in the 1950s? Until recently the decade was thought of as a bare patch between the battleground of the 40s and the fairground of the 60s, but recently its complexities and excitements have exercised historians Peter Hennessy and Dominic Sandbrook; and now there's Family Britain, the second book in David Kynaston's three-volume New Jerusalem project. Mercifully, this massive work – nearly 800 pages – is made highly readable by all sorts of extracts and quotations from diaries, columns and oral records, and deals as much with ordinary, everyday lives as with the machinations of politics and power.
There are surprises in it even for someone who lived delightedly through those years: was rationing really not finally called off until July 1954? Was a Tory government cheerfully still subsidising milk and National Butter in 1956? Some things I remember all...
- 11/14/2009
- by Katharine Whitehorn
- The Guardian - Film News
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