Actualités

Judy Balaban, the daughter of a longtime studio mogul who dated Montgomery Clift and Merv Griffin, married Tony Franciosa and served as one of Grace Kelly’s bridesmaids at her wedding to Prince Rainier of Monaco, has died. She was 91.

Balaban died Thursday night in a hospital in Los Angeles, her friend, author and documentary filmmaker Cari Beauchamp, told The Hollywood Reporter.

Balaban was a champion for civil rights, serving on the board of directors for the ACLU of Southern California for decades.

In a 2010 piece for Vanity Fair that she and Beauchamp co-wrote, Balaban described using LSD (then legal) as a form of therapy in the early 1960s when her good friends Cary Grant and his third wife, Betsy Drake, were using it, too.

“What I had with Cary and Betsy was a kind of soul-baringness that the culture didn’t start to deal with until years later,” she says in the story.

Peter Falk Peter Falk, the two-time Oscar nominee best known for playing television police detective Columbo, died Thursday, June 23, at his Beverly Hills home. Falk, who had been suffering from dementia (apparently a consequence of Alzheimer's disease), was 83. Falk's two Oscar nods, both in the Best Supporting Actor category, came back-to-back in the early '60s: as a cold-blooded hitman in Burt Balaban and Stuart Rosenberg's 1960 crime drama Murder, Inc., and as a typical Damon Runyon underworld character — named Joy Boy — in Frank Capra's dismal 1961 remake of his own Lady for a Day, Pocketful of Miracles. Among Falk's other notable film roles are those in two John Cassavetes movies: the very, very, very long 1970 drama Husbands, co-starring Ben Gazzara and Cassavetes himself, and the director' biggest box-office hit, the 1974 release A Woman Under the Influence, co-starring Gena Rowlands as the mentally unbalanced title character. In the film, which many consider Cassavetes' best work,...