Saturday, December 18, 2010

BLAKE EDWARDS PASSES

 

blake edwards

Blake Edwards, a Hollywood master of screwball farces and rude comedies who was probably best known for the "Pink Panther" movies, died Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 88.

His publicist Gene Schwam said the death, at St. John’s Health Center, was caused by complications of pneumonia. His wife, the actress Julie Andrews, and other family members were at his side, Mr. Schwam said.

What the critic Pauline Kael once described as Mr. Edwards’s "love of free-for-all lunacy" was flaunted in good movies and bad ones: in commercial successes like "Breakfast at Tiffany’s" (1961) and "The Pink Panther" (1963), the first of a series of films starring Peter Sellers as a bumbling French policeman, and in box-office disasters like the musical spy extravaganza "Darling Lili" (1970), staring his wife, Julie Andrews, and his slapstick tribute to silent-film comedy, "The Great Race" (1965), starring Jack Lemmon as a black-suited villain and Tony Curtis as a white-suited hero.

Mr. Edwards’s last major success, "Victor/Victoria" (1982), was a farce about a starving singer (Ms. Andrews) who pretends to be a homosexual Polish count who masquerades as a female impersonator. Mr. Edwards received an Academy Award nomination for his "Victor/Victoria" screenplay, adapted from a 1933 German film written and directed by Reinhold Schünzel. It was his only Oscar nomination. But he was given an honorary award by the Motion Picture Academy in 2004 for his "extraordinary body of work." That work spanned more than four decades.

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