Award-winning actor and comedian Red Buttons has died at the age of 87 He was one of the first funny men to show that comedians could also be Oscar-winning actors. He won the Supporting Actor award for Sayonara (1957), in which he co-starred with Marlon Brando as a U.S. airman who embarks on a tragic romance with a Japanese woman. He was also a quick-witted master of his craft as a comedian. A longtime fixture at Friar's Club, few there could touch him.

Buttons started out in showbiz 70 years ago as a teenage singing bellhop named  Aaron Chwatt, a name that he soon swapped for one suggested by his bellhop uniform and red hair. He played a memorable role in the original Poseidon Adventure and just last year, he earned an Emmy nomination for a guest role as a patient on ER.

 

Actor and documentary-maker Kenneth Griffith has died at the age of 84.

He was born in Tenby, Pembrokeshire and had been  a familiar face on TV and cinema screens since the 1940s, including the 1960's cult TV hit, The Prisoner.

Griffith, who died at his London home, also made often controversial films on such subjects as the Boer War - on which he was an expert - and Ireland.

Allan Kaprow (August 23, 1927 - April 5, 2006) helped to develop the "Environment" and "Happening" in the late 1950s and 1960s, as well as their theory. His Happenings - some 200 of them - evolved over the years, and attempted to integrate art and life by blurring the separation between life and art, and artist and audience. He has published extensively and was Professor Emeritus in the Visual Arts Department of the University of California, San Diego. Kaprow is also known for the idea of "un-art", found in his essay "Art Which Can't Be Art".

"Happenings are notoriously difficult to describe, in part because each was a unique event shaped by the actions of the audience that participated on any given performance. Simply put, Happenings, such as Household from 1964, were held in physical environments – loft spaces, abandoned factories, buses, parks, etc. – and brought people, objects, and events in surprising juxtaposition to one another. Kaprow views art as a vehicle for expanding our awareness of life by prompting unexpected, provocative interactions. For Kaprow, art is a continual work-in-progress, with an unfolding narrative that is realized through the active participation of the audience." (from ArtMuseum.net)

Hollywood cult film director and producer, Frank Q Dobbs, has died at 66. Dobbs, a Texan who loved writing Westerns, became a legend in the Texas film industry. He died from cancer.