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Page 1: Harold Kress, Michael Samuelson and Peter Taylor
Page 2: Dawn Steel, Alfred Roome and Leo Jaffee
Page 3: Vanda Jones and Harrison Marks
Obituary: Dawn Steel From The Independent December 24th, 1997, written by Tony Sloman
Dawn Steel, film producer: born New York 19 August 1946; married 1975 Ronald Rothstein (marriage dissolved), 1984 Charles Roven (one daughter); died Los Angeles 20 December 1997. It is hard to imagine a Hollywood without Dawn Steel, the New York vulgarian workaholic who rose to the uppermost echelons of, respectively, Paramount, Columbia and Disney. Famed for her "big hair", and many would add her big mouth, Steel was an atypical brash New York Jew, a marketing merchant who applied a hard- sell technique to the movie business. Neither agent nor movie boss, nor graduate of any East Coast business school, Steel rose to the top of a particularly slippery pole, as a female executive in a resolutely man's world, and helped, inadvertently, to free up top industry positions to women. Her roll call of films - love 'em or loathe 'em - defined the look of the New Hollywood, every inch as vulgar as the old, albeit lacking the former's sense of taste and genuine style, and in so doing created the populist culture of incoming generations, also by the by generating an awful lot of hard cash for an ever- inflationary industry. Steel was born in 1946 on Manhattan's Upper West Side, the daughter of second-generation Jewish immigrants who met at a dance at 92nd Street Y. The family name was, ironically, Spielberg, but her father was a muscleman bodybuilder who called himself Nat Steel, and it became the family moniker. Her father's eventual breakdown led to a troubled and impoverished childhood, and she worked her way through both Boston and New York Universities, studying marketing at the latter's School of Commerce, working as a bookkeeper in the evenings. Steel never finished her schooling and in 1968 began full-time employment, determined not to be a mere receptionist or secretary in an era when women were fighting for equal position in the workforce. She fetched up at Stadia Publishing in New York, sent to cover a Giants football game at Yankee Stadium, garnering a place for herself in her own press box on behalf of the National Football League Digest, knowing nothing about football and commentating on the costumes that the Vikings were wearing: it was a stop-at-nothing approach that would serve her well in Hollywood. Steel worked for Penthouse magazine as merchandiser, placing Penthouse logos everywhere, aping Playboy, and trawled the world searching for apt products. In Frankfurt she secured the rights to a hand-knitted item that she successfully marketed as a Cock Sock: her next big success, in tandem with her first husband Ronnie Rothstein, was the wholesale sale of Dutch bulbs, marketing amaryllis as "Penis Plants" with the slogan "Grow Your Own Penis - all it takes is $6.98 and a lot of love". Steel's next big success outlasted her marriage: toilet paper embossed with a symbol suspiciously similar to the interlocked "G" of Gucci. Gucci sued, but Steel continued to produce designer toilet paper, utilising such items as The Book of Lists and The Dieter's Guide to Weight Loss During Sex. Such shameless marketing triumphs could only end her up in one place. Her marriage over, her only ambition to open a gift store in Greenwich Village, Steel was invited out to Los Angeles by a friend, a junior production executive at Paramount, who realised that if Steel could market Penis Plants and Designer Toilet Paper, she was ready for movies. For Steel's part, she had been inspired by the 1976 film Rocky, a movie about the will to succeed, and her personal taste inclined to Doctor Zhivago and The Godfather, but she had no filmic consciousness to speak of. In the cynical words of the Los Angeles Times columnist Jack Mathews: "Marketing designer toilet paper seems as good a background for success in Hollywood as anything else." Steel's move on Hollywood was as swift as it was unpredictable. The Paramount powerbroker Michael Eisner (later "whiz-king" at Disney) hired Steel immediately after she related to him her life story to date ("It's a television series like Rhoda," Eisner is alleged to have said - "the Dawn Steel story starring Penny Marshall"), and put her on to marketing Mork and Mindy merchandise. Given Star Trek - The Movie to market, and denied access to the unfinished film, Steel put on a spectacular show utilising the whole Enterprise cast, which was beamed on to the main Paramount theatre stage via lasers, and successfully ended up with Klingons promoting McDonald's and Coca-Cola. Eisner was so impressed he immediately promoted Steel to Vice-President of Feature Production, and so, quite literally, a Hollywood legend was born. Despite the myth, Steel wasn't quite the first woman to run production. By 1980 Sherry Lansing was already President of 20th Century-Fox, and both Zoetrope and United Artists had female executives. But Steel's own personal publicity was considerable, and her rise undeniably swift, and by 1983 she had become Senior Vice-President, Production, at Paramount, her position proceeded by her reputation and a variety of nicknames: "Hell on heels", for instance, or the "Queen of Mean". "Abrasive" would be too mild a word for a woman who changed secretaries on a monthly basis, but the style suited her immediate boss, the equally abrasive Don Simpson. Under Simpson, Steel found and produced Flashdance (1983) - a trite, novelette-ish fantasy flick she parlayed through three writers (with one of whom, Tom Hedley, she had a torrid affair) into a fast- moving, energetic, identifiable smash hit. It cost $7m and took $90m domestic, and began the now-common device of marketing theatrical features via pop promos on MTV. Steel followed Flashdance with a virtual clone, Footloose (1984), an equally artless smash hit. Steel's star was on the rise, as was her image. She was becoming perceived as the American career woman par excellence. In 1983 she met and embarked on a long and torrid romance with the director Martin Scorsese, and learnt about the cinema. It was Scorsese who urged Steel to turn a current news story into a movie and the result was The Accused (1988), which won an Academy Award for Jodie Foster. It was also Scorsese who introduced Steel to another aspect of film culture: Steel loved to relate how, prior to playing Trivial Pursuit with Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Ingmar Bergman, no less, she stayed up the night before memorising the cards. Steel's formidable presence was responsible for a slew of popular successes at Paramount: she continued working with the Flashdance director Adrian Lyne on the box-office success Fatal Attraction (1987), forging a working relationship with that film's star, Michael Douglas, and immensely aided the success of the action movie Top Gun (1986) by astutely suggesting that, since the star Tom Cruise was the film's main attraction, all flying masks be dropped from the character's faces as often as possible, and where such masks were absolutely necessary, the character's name was to be written on their helmets. Realistic? Who cares - in marketing terms a major triumph. But Steel's personal publicity was making enemies at corporate Paramount, and while actually greeting her new husband, Chuck Roven, after the birth in 1989 of her baby Rebecca, she learnt from a headline in Variety in Roven's pocket that she was no longer President of Production at the studio. However, the head of Columbia, David Puttnam, had managed in his all- too-brief tenure to upset, offend, and generally rile agents and management at Paramount's sister studio, and the Columbia powerbrokers Ray Stark, Victor Kaufman and Herbert Allen offered the prime position to Steel. In her candid and admonitory 1993 autobiography They Can Kill You But They Can't Eat You Dawn Steel states that it was the call of her life, the proverbial offer she couldn't refuse, and on 28 October 1987 Dawn Steel became President of Columbia Pictures, effectively the first woman to head a major Hollywood studio. The very antithesis of Puttnam, Steel had the extraordinarily difficult task of mending nets, bringing back into the Columbia field movies that Puttnam had no interest in; films like Ghostbusters II and The Karate Kid III (both 1989). Steel is on record as saying that David Puttnam thought these sequels were just crass and commercial movies. "To us, they were unmined gems." Also at Columbia, Steel restored David Lean's epic Lawrence of Arabia and turned the 1962 film into a successful 1989 re-release, on the advice of her former lover Martin Scorsese. The nine-Oscar winner The Last Emperor (1987) also, as Steel put it, fell into her lap. Steel's Columbia regime began to reek of prestige product and box-office hits: The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen (1989), Postcards From the Edge (1990), When Harry Met Sally (1989), plus Look Who's Talking (1989) and its two sequels. Many of the Puttnam- instigated titles were tried, and failed, and left a crippling legacy of celluloid. Columbia became ripe for takeover. On 25 September 1989 Victor Kaufman called Dawn Steel at 7am and announced that the company had been sold to Sony, and by 1991 Steel had settled her contract at Columbia, leaving Flatliners and Awakenings (both 1990) as her last two movies there. Invited by Michael Eisner, who had first started her in the business, to join him at Disney, Steel didn't hesitate, and finally achieved that which was denied her previously: no title, plus her name on the credits of her own movies. (Traditionally, Hollywood studio executives take no credit on their own films.) Her first self-produced film was Disney's most successful 1993 release Cool Runnings, with a world-wide theatrical gross take of over $140m, and her own outfit, Steel Pictures, also produced Honey I Blew Up the Kid (1992) and Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit (1993), both tremendously successful. It was a matter of time before Dawn Steel was courted by the mogul of moguls, Ted Turner, but Steel demanded complete autonomy before accepting Turner's offer as Chairman and Chief Executive, and negotiations collapsed, only to re-surface in 1994 when, as Atlas Entertainment (named for her father Nat Steel, who performed as "Mr Atlas"), she struck a first-look, multi-year production agreement with Turner Pictures, a 10-feature slate jointly funded by Britain's BBC, France's TFI, and Germany's TeleMunchen. But rumours started to circulate in Los Angeles about Steel's health, and the family issued a wish for personal respect on behalf of the press; such was Steel's standing in the Hollywood community, this wish was observed. Although she had been heavily active with 12 Monkeys (1995) and Angus (also 1995), the New York Post broke the silence in 1996 with the news that Dawn Steel had an inoperable brain tumour. Steel dealt with the revelation by immediately hiring the director Gregory Hoblit to helm her new Denzel Washington-starrer, Fallen, which, with City of Angels, starring Meg Ryan and Nicolas Cage, will premiere in early 1998. Hollywood's First Lady, Dawn Steel, will not be around to see them open. INDEPENDENT, 24th December 1997
Obituary: Alfred Roome From The Independent December 12th, 1997 Tony Sloman
Alfred Wallace Roome, film editor: born London 22 December 1908; married Janice Adair (died 1996; one daughter, and one son deceased) died Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire 19 November 1997. Alfred Roome's career as a film editor spans virtually the whole history of mainstream British popular cinema: he began editing Aldwych farces, graduated to the classic Will Hay comedies and progressed - if that's the correct word - through Will Fyffe, Arthur Askey and Ronald Shiner vehicles to three "Doctor" films and no less than 14 Carry Ons. His other work includes a major feature for Alfred Hitchcock (The Lady Vanishes - surely the best of Hitch's British output?) plus editing for such major British directors as Anthony Asquith and Sir Carol Reed, while his working relationships with Launder and Gilliatt and Betty Box and Ralph Thomas embraced many of the best films of these distinguished British producer- director teams. Though everybody called him "Alfie", his screen credits began as A.W. Roome and ended as Alfred Roome. Roome came from a Somerset family. His father was managing director of the Daily Mirror and family shares in the Mirror Group gave the youngster independent wealth. His father wanted young Alfie to follow him in the newspaper business, but Roome had been given a camera at an early age, and was smitten with the cinema. At school he began experimenting with projectors and lamps, and founded his school film society. Sent to finish his education in Paris, he made amateur movies featuring his cousins. To deter his ambition to work in the film industry, his father offered him a world cruise, but Alfie refused, and secured a job as assistant in the property department at Elstree in 1927, at the age of 18. His real goal was the editing department, and the producer Herbert Wilcox gave him the opportunity the following year to work as a cutting-room assistant. However, when extra camera assistants were needed on Blackmail in 1929, Roome moved across to the studio floor, working for the first time with the young director Alfred Hitchcock. While on Blackmail Roome met and married Janice Adair, the leading lady of another British film concurrently shooting - Red Aces (1929), written and directed by the novelist Edgar Wallace - and they remained married until her death in 1996. Roome went back into the cutting rooms, and fetched up as an assistant in 1933 at the Shepherd's Bush Lime Grove studios of Gaumont-British, where he achieved his cutting break, hired as editor on the film version of the famous Ben Travers Aldywch farce Thark (1933), starring Tom Walls and Ralph Lynn, directed by Walls and produced by Herbert Wilcox. This was followed by a sequence of six Tom Walls features which led to a reputation for comedy and a subsequent association with Will Hay, first editing Boys Will Be Boys (1935), then that memorable sequence of comedy classics featuring Hay and his associates "Old" Moore Marriott and the Fat Boy Graham Moffatt, most notably the timeless Oh, Mr Porter! (1939; recently rescreened to celebrate the Odeon Leicester Square's 60th birthday), Ask a Policeman (1938) and Where's That Fire (1939). It became clear Roome had a natural aptitude for editing a specific style of British comedy. In 1938 he was hired for The Lady Vanishes for Alfred Hitchcock, establishing a relationship with the actors Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne. Roome also edited another key British film, the young Carol Reed's Bank Holiday (1938), which led to Reed's classics Kipps (1941) and The Young Mr Pitt (1942). Interspersing these with a run of popular films featuring the music-hall stars Flanagan and Allen and radio's Arthur Askey, including Alf's Button Afloat (1937) and King Arthur was a Gentleman (1942) plus the film version of Askey's radio show Band Waggon (1939). A more distinguished feature was Dr Syn starring George Arliss (1937). With the outbreak of the Second World War, Roome found himself editing propaganda shorts for the Ministry of Information, and thus became exempt from military service, his work being rightly deemed of national importance. Among the more significant shorts he edited were the seven-minute Mr Proudfoot Shows a Light (1941) starring the music hall's Sidney Howard, and the five-minute Rush Hour (1941) directed by Anthony Asquith, plus the unfairly neglected Dunkirk eight-minute short Channel Incident (1940) containing Peggy Ashcroft's finest screen moment, also directed by Asquith. Roome also functioned as an Air Raid Warden, and continued to edit major features including the propagandist Launder and Gilliatt Millions Like Us (1943) and their immensely popular Waterloo Road (1944), in which the climactic punch-up was a triumph of film editing, convincing audiences world-wide that five-foot-nothing puny hero John Mills could beat up six- foot-plus muscular spiv Stewart Granger. His former assistant Frances Edge recalls that when an enemy bomb exploded shaking the Shepherd's Bush studios, Roome simply ignored it. The Borstal saga Boys in Brown (1940) was the first Gainsborough film to be based at Pinewood; Montgomery Tully directed it but Roome was associate director. Roome also directed, in tandem with Roy Rich, a pair of Gainsborough features: the Jack Warner vehicle My Brother's Keeper and It's Not Cricket (both 1948), reuniting the duo of cricket lovers from The Lady Vanishes, Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne. Although Roome did not direct again - "I had trouble dealing with actors" he said - his contribution to cinema was undoubtedly greater than that of the majority of the directors for whom he edited, and after a period as Associate Producer on such box-office disasters as Christopher Columbus and The Bad Lord Byron (both 1949), he returned to the cutting rooms, working almost solely for the unacknowledged dynastic royal family of Pinewood: at Gainsborough he worked for the studio head Sydney Box, brother of Betty E. Box. As producer, Box began a 20-year collaboration with the director Ralph Thomas, while her husband Peter Rogers began an equally fruitful partnership with Thomas's brother Gerald. Today, the admirable Betty Box/ Ralph Thomas pictures are unfairly neglected while the success of the Peter Rogers/Gerald Thomas "Carry On" series has passed into legend. Alfred Roome's tenure at Pinewood embraced many of the best of the Betty Box/Ralph Thomas output (and the worst - three late "Doctor" comedies) including the painfully moving Conspiracy of Hearts (1960) and the courageous and politically outspoken No Love For Johnnie (1961), Roome's only feature in CinemaScope, plus any number of features invariably starring Dirk Bogarde, Kenneth More or Michael Craig. Ken Annakin was another director Roome regularly worked with, and Annakin's best films, the very funny Hotel Sahara (1951) and the Graham Greene adaptation Across the Bridge (1957) owe much to him. Today as the craft of editing is eroded by electronic machines offering an infinite variety of edits, it is worth recalling Alfie Roome's classic method of working: he used to view all the material needed for a sequence before starting editing, including both selected and non- selected takes, and then edited the sequence as he saw fit. It seldom changed much. His former assistant Don Sharpe remembers that for the last part of the portmanteau film Trio (1951), called "Sanatorium", Roome's cut stood as assembled. "It went from his cut to neg cut," says Sharpe, "with no changes." Roome used to file his own trims with enormous exactitude, taking pains to ensure they all hung correctly to exactly the same sprocket hole on the trim bin. It was said of Roome that he was so neat that his cutting room looked as if hardly any work had been done by the end of the day. Eventually he never worked overtime, nor had any need to, a far cry from his early days at Islington and Shepherd's Bush when he worked all hours, and was grateful for the emergence of the film unions that called a halt to such exploitation. He made few close professional friends, preferring not to socialise but to return home at the end of his working day, and although he lived close to Pinewood, he never went home for lunch, preferring not to disrupt his routine. However, he did buy his house from Sir John Mills, and a frequent visitor to his huge estate in Fulmer was his long-time friend from the Gainsborough days Phyllis Calvert. When in 1967 the Peter Rogers-produced "Carry On" series moved to Pinewood with the Foreign Legion romp Follow That Camel, Roome was the logical choice to edit it, a man well known for his flair with British comedy, a genuinely funny man himself, full of humorous anecdotes. It was followed by 13 successive Carry Ons including some of the best (Up the Khyber, 1968; Doctor, 1967; At Your Convenience 1971) and several of the worst (Girls, 1973; Dick, 1974; Behind, 1975). This run was broken only by the film version of the television series Bless This House, also starring Carry On's Sidney James, a far cry from the prestige Rank features of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. In 1972, while working on a Carry On, Roome bumped into Alfred Hitchcock, then engaged on Frenzy, in the corridors at Pinewood. Hitch greeted Alfie with one of his noted barbs of laconic sadism: "You're getting fatter, Roome," was all he said. After Carry On Behind in 1975 Roome retired, feeling he was no longer well enough to do justice to film, and in 1988 recorded his reminiscences for the Bectu Oral History Project. A keen gardener, and avid amateur historian, his life was marred by tragedy when his son Christopher was killed in the appalling King's Cross station fire, almost 10 years to the day before Roome's own death. A granddaughter, Olivia, continues the family tradition and works in the film industry. INDEPENDENT, 12th December 1997
Obituary: Leo Jaffe From The Independent August 26th, 1997 Tony Sloman
As Chairman of the Board of Columbia Pictures, Leo Jaffe, a scrupulously honest and deeply honourable man, was responsible for chairing a series of astounding internecine boardroom struggles that resulted in the disgraced Columbia executive, the liar and felon David Begelman, having his forfeited position virtually restored to glory, and the honest broker executive Alan Hirsch-field removed from his position as President simply because he had incurred the wrath of certain board members. The so-called "Begelman Scandal", dubbed "Hollywoodgate" by the New York Post's reporter Liz Smith, broke in the autumn of 1976 when the actor Cliff Robertson discovered that a cheque made out to him and allegedly endorsed by his own signature had never reached him, nor was he due any payment from Columbia. It transpired that Robertson was one of four Hollywood residents, including the director Martin Ritt, whose names had been forged by the former agent David Begelman, then Columbia Pictures' senior executive vice-president, and head of Columbia Pictures Studios. Jaffe was the first person to be confided in by Hirschfield, the head of Columbia. Although much of Jaffe's own authority had been curtailed on Hirschfield's installation, Jaffe was rightly regarded as venerable and influential. Jaffe stayed on, weathering the Begelman scandal with dignity until 1981. Leo Jaffe had been majoring in business studies at New York University when he took a summer job at Columbia in 1930, only six years after the studio had been officially founded by Harry Cohn and his brother Jack Cohn. Jaffe was offered a permanent auditing position at the completion of his summer job. He accepted, and managed to complete his formal education at night. Under Harry Cohn, aided greatly by the director Frank Capra, Columbia dragged itself up from its poverty-row bootstraps, and Leo Jaffe rose through the ranks to become vice-president in 1954, assistant treasurer vice- president in 1956, first vice-president treasurer in 1958 and executive vice-president in 1962. Jack Cohn died in 1956, and Harry Cohn followed two years later - after Columbia's staggering 1957 multiple Oscar win with The Bridge On The River Kwai - ending a truly remarkable period where Columbia Pictures, unlike any other Hollywood studio, had never gone into the red. Sam Briskin succeeded Cohn as the head of production, and it was he who promoted Leo Jaffe to vice-president, and the associate Abe Schneider to chief executive. The studio enjoyed a run of European-based hits, including The Guns of Navarone (1961), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Dr Strangelove (1964), which were both critical and popular successes, prompting Jaffe and Schneider to open a London base in 1965. This resulted in a flurry of "swingin' London" movies, but also in the excellent A Man For All Seasons (1966) and Oliver! (1968). The Sixties were good for Columbia, with across-the-board triumphs like Born Free (1966) from the British base, and the tremendously influential Easy Rider (1969) and Five Easy Pieces (1970), key examples of a perceived new independence in American cinema. But the early Seventies saw a series of expensive catastrophes - Richard Harris as Cromwell (1970), Liv Ullman in the utterly unnecessary musical version of Lost Horizon (1973), the over-long and simplistic Independence musical 1776 (1972) - that seemed unstoppable. These were megabudget movies with little audience potential to justify their costs, leaving Columbia with debts of $220m, and extremely vulnerable. This led to the Wall Street investment banking firm of Herbert A. Allen & Company picking up the studios, and to the promotion of Leo Jaffe as chairman of the board in 1973. The veteran producer Ray Stark masterminded Allen's 1973 take-over. He hired Alan Hirschfield as head of Columbia Picture Industries, and David Begelman as president of Columbia Picture Studios, both with the title President and Chief Executive Officer, under Jaffe's Board Chairmanship. Under this new management, Columbia began the long climb back. New movies were openly more adult, the creative responsibility, though supervised as tightly as any studio in Hollywood, offering a degree of new freedom under Hirschfield and Begelman's benign liberal control. Their 1973 story purchase Watch The Skies! was to become 1977's success Close Encounters of the Third Kind; a tale loosely based on a local hairdresser became 1975's adult hit Shampoo; Martin Scorsese delivered the astonishing Taxi Driver (1975); Oliver Stone wrote the sensationalist expose Midnight Express (1977), while Tommy (1975), The Deep (1977), and Funny Lady (1975, the sequel to the smash Funny Girl) were proof, if proof were needed, that the studio was well and truly back on its feet under the new regime. But it was on the eve of the premiere of Close Encounters of the Third Kind that the Begelman affair burst wide open. In a year when Columbia was verging on a $300m take Begelman was revealed to have embezzled over $61,000 - a petty sum in Hollywood terms - by forging signatures and abusing his position. At a series of intense board meetings, presided over by Jaffe, Hirschfield rightly tried to have the errant Begelman removed, but Columbia's new track record and Begelman's own popularity within the closed film community made that exceedingly difficult, despite the fact that Begelman was clearly a habitual liar and appropriator of other people's money. The whole affair appalled Jaffe, whose boardroom speech was reported in David McClintick's Indecent Exposure (1982): "There are certain things you can forgive a man for doing as a human being, but that have no place in a publicly-owned company. We have to think about the public, the shareholders, and our employees. What do we say to the next person who steals? Do we have a double standard? Executives can steal, but employees at a lower level can't?" It was a powerful, reasoned, cogent, humanitarian argument, but the board, impressed by Begelman's own appearance before it, turned against Hirschfield and Jaffe, and amazingly Begelman, though initially suspended, was reinstated in a stronger position than ever. It was Jaffe who publicly announced that if Begelman was to return to Columbia, Hirschfield must have a new contract, to show that he was actually running the company. It was also Jaffe, as chairman, who was entrusted with informing the California police that Columbia would not file charges against Begelman. Understandably, Hirschfield was furious, and Begelman's victim Cliff Robertson went public over the affair. Hirschfield used Jaffe as a conduit to communicate with the board, and on 31 March 1978 Begelman was finally arrested on four charges of felony - one count of grand theft and three counts of forgery. Hirschfield had angered Herbert Allen by his handling of the affair, and Jaffe was asked to give him the news that Allen wished him fired along with the eventual removal of Begelman. Variety reported Jaffe as saying that he hoped Hirschfield would be retained, but on 5 July 1978 he was removed as President of Columbia, ceding power to Daniel Melnick and Frank Price, who became responsible for a run of success including Gandhi (1982) and The Karate Kid franchises. Jaffe stayed on as chairman until 1981, and was proud to witness a major Columbia success with Kramer vs Kramer (1979), a marvellous tear-jerker produced by Leo's own son Stanley. Jaffe stepped down as chairman immediately before the Coca-Cola Corporation bought Columbia Pictures for a figure of between $700m and $800m (about $70 per Columbia share), before the two smash hits of the Eighties, Tootsie (1982) and Ghostbusters (1984), and worked during the latter years of Columbia's disarray for President Reagan, as chairman of the US Information Agency, 1981-88. In 1979, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences recognised Jaffe by awarding him an Oscar, the select non-competitive Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, industry awareness that amongst one of the most appallingly corrupt scandals from a town drenched in scandal Leo Jaffe alone emerged with both honour and credit. Leo Jaffe, film executive: born New York 23 April 1909; vice-president, Columbia Pictures 1954-56, assistant treasurer vice-president 1956-58, vice- president-treasurer 1958-62, executive vice-president 1962-73, chairman of the board 1973-81; married; died New York 20 August 1997.INDEPENDENT, 26th August 1997
Page 1: Harold Kress, Michael Samuelson and Peter Taylor
Page 2: Dawn Steel, Alfred Roome and Leo Jaffee
Page 3: Vanda Jones and Harrison Marks
