Stephen Jones - The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 23

Angela[Margaret] Scoular, the second wife of actor Leslie Phillips, died on 11 April, aged sixty-five. The bi-polar and alcoholic British actress feared that her bowel cancer would return (despite a successful operation in 2009) and killed herself by drinking drain cleaner. Scoular appeared in two James Bond films, Casino Royale (1966) and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service , an episode of The Avengers , and starred as “Cathy” opposite Ian McShane’s “Heathcliff” in a 1967 BBC-TV serial of Wuthering Heights (the inspiration for the Kate Bush song and video).

British character actor Trevor[Gordon] Bannister, best known for his role as “Mr Lucas” in the BBC sitcom Are You Being Served? , died of a heart attack while repairing his allotment shed on 14 April, aged seventy-six. He also appeared in such TV series as Object Z, Object Z Returns, The Man in Room 17 (“The Black Witch”), The Avengers, Doomwatch, The Tomorrow People, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles and Woof! .

American actor Jon Cedardied the same day, aged eighty. He appeared in episodes of TV’s The Girl from U.N.C.L.E ., The Invisible Man (1975), The Incredible Hulk, The Greatest American Hero and Tales from the Darkside , along with the movies Stowaway to the Moon (with John Carradine), Time Travelers (1976), Day of the Animals, Capricorn One, The Manitou (based on the novel by Graham Masterton), By Dawn’s Early Light and Asteroid .

Canadian-born leading man Michael Sarrazin(Jacques Michel André Sarrazin) died in Montreal of cancer on 17 April, aged seventy. He starred in Eye of the Cat, The Groundstar Conspiracy, Frankenstein the True Story (as “The Creature”), The Reincarnation of Peter Proud, Earthquake in New York, The Second Arrival (aka Arrival II ) and FeardotCom , and appeared in episodes of the 1988 Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Ray Bradbury Theatre, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, The Outer Limits, Poltergeist: The Legacy, Mentors (as Edgar Allan Poe) and Earth: Final Conflict . Sarrazin was in a relationship with actress Jacqueline Bisset for fourteen years.

British actress Elisabeth[Claira Heath] Sladen, who starred as “Sarah Jane Smith” in the BBC’s Doctor Who and her own spin-off series, died of cancer on 19 April, aged sixty-five. She first joined John Pertwee’s Doctor in the 1973 series “The Time Warrior”, and went on to appear alongside Tom Baker’s incarnation of the Time Lord until 1976. She recreated the role for the TV specials K-9 and Company: A Girl’s Best Friend (1981), Doctor Who : “The Five Doctors” (1983) and Doctor Who : “Dimensions in Time” (1993), along with the independent video, Downtime (1995), and various radio serials. She returned to Doctor Who as the inquisitive journalist in 2006 and subsequently got her own children’s spin-off series, The Sarah Jane Adventures (2007–11). Sladen also appeared in the TV movies Gulliver in Lilliput (1982) and Alice in Wonderland (1986), as well as an episode of Doomwatch .

British character actor Terence Longdon(Hubert Tuelly Longdon) died of cancer on 23 April, aged eighty-eight. He appeared in the first four Carry On films, along with What a Whopper, The Return of Mr Moto , and episodes of The Avengers, The New Avengers, The Martian Chronicles and The Return of Sherlock Holmes . Longdon also starred as the titular charter pilot in the BBC children’s adventure series Garry Halliday (1959–62). He was married to actress Barbara Jefford from 1953 to 1960.

Sixty-six-year-old French actress, novelist and director Marie-France Pisierwas found dead in the swimming pool at her home in Saint Cyr sur Mer on 24 April. Born in French Indochina (now Vietnam), her credits include The Vampire of Dusseldorf (1965), Luis Buñuel’s surreal The Phantom of Liberty and Céline and Julie Go Boating .

Cult American B-movie star Yvette Vickers(Iola Yvette Vedder) was found dead from heart failure in an upstairs room of her dilapidated Bendedict Canyon home in Los Angeles on 27 April. The mummified state of the eighty-one-year-old actress’ body indicated that she could have been dead for nearly a year. The July 1959 Playboy Playmate appeared in Sunset Boulevard (uncredited), Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958), Attack of the Giant Leeches (aka Demons of the Swamp ), Beach Party (uncredited), What’s the Matter with Helen? The Dead Don’t Die! (scripted by Robert Bloch) and Evil Spirits , along with an episode of TV’s One Step Beyond .

William Campbell, who portrayed Klingon commander “Koloth” in the classic Star Trek episode “The Trouble with Tribbles”, died on 28 April, aged eighty-seven. He appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dementia 13 (aka The Haunted and the Hunted ), Hush. Hush Sweet Charlotte, Portrait in Terror, Blood Bath (aka Track of the Vampire ), Pretty Maids All in a Row and The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman , along with episodes of TV’s The Wild Wild West, Star Trek (“The Squire of Gothos”), Shazam! The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries, The Next Step Beyond, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (reprising his role as “Koloth”) and Kung Fu: The Legend Continues . From 1952 to 1958 he was married to Judith Campbell Exner, a paramour of President John F. Kennedy and Mafia figure Sam Giancana.

Veteran Hollywood character actor and director Jackie Cooper(John Copper, Jr.) died after a short illness on 3 May, aged eighty-eight. He began his career as a child actor in 1929, and is best known for portraying Daily Planet newspaper editor “Perry White” in Superman (1978) and its three sequels. He was nominated for an Oscar in 1931 when he was just nine years old, and his other credits include Chosen Survivors, The Invisible Man (1975) and episodes of TV’s Tales of Tomorrow, Suspense, The Twilight Zone and Ghost Story . Cooper was also an Emmy Award-winning director, with the Holmes and Yo-Yo pilot and the TV movie The Night They Saved Christmas to his credit.

American actress Mary Murphy, who co-starred with Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953), died of heart disease on 4 May, aged eighty. A former shop assistant, she began her acting career with uncredited appearances in When Worlds Collide, My Favorite Spy and The Atomic City , before moving on to such films as The Mad Magician (with Vincent Price) and episodes of TV’s Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Outer Limits, Honey West and Ghost Story . In 1956 she was married to actor Dale Robertson for just three months.

German-born actress Dana Wynter(Dagmar Winter), who helped Kevin McCarthy battle the pod people in the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), died of congestive heart failure in California on 5 May, aged seventy-nine. Her other credits include the Gene Roddenberry TV movie The Questor Tapes and episodes of Suspense, Colonel March of Scotland Yard (with Boris Karloff), The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Wild Wild West, The Invaders, Get Smart, Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries and Fantasy Island .