JR finally succumbs

Famous people have a habit of dying at the most inopportune times when you would like to remember them but are so busy in life, one cannot even scatter a few words to record in their memory, let alone read full obituaries.  I first heard of Larry Hagman’s death from cancer on Saturday but the strains and stresses of that day, combined with being away mostly on the other side of London yesterday meant that it is only today, when the occasion to comment seems stale, that I have a certain (if circumscribed) freedom to offer up a brief homily.

Of course, Hagman was famous for playing the charismatic villain JR Ewing in Dallas and that will surely be his epitaph (unlike Brad Pitt, who played Randy between 1987 and 1988).  He even had the grace to appear in the relaunched Dallas, whose producers now have a set-piece funeral episode (closed casket) with which to make hay.  This time, a death in Dallas will not be a dream.

The old Dallas caught me a little too young and so the new version had no emotional pull on me (not that with my current schedule I would find time to watch it).  But I did see the movie Failsafe from 1964 (remade as a TV movie in 2000).  Contemporaneous with Dr Strangelove, it was a more sober appraisal of nuclear annihilation, Hagman playing the Russian-speaking aide to Henry Fonda’s president, translating for between Fonda and the Soviet Union leader.  His honest-to-goodness name of Buck has an unfortunate comparison with Buck Turgidsson in Dr Strangelove.

Outside of acting, Hagman was a proponent of green technology and energy, in direct contrast to his oil baron alter ago, as I recall from an interview he did with the BBC a few years ago.  All in all, a genuinely good guy and it saddens me that he is now gone.