Stanley Middleton, 89, a prolific novelist who shared the prestigious Booker Prize in 1974, has died of cancer, his family said.
Middleton died in Nottingham in central England on July 25, a week short of his 90th birthday.
Middleton was 38 when he published his first novel, “A Short Answer,” but then produced a book nearly every year afterward. “Holiday,” which shared the Booker Prize with Nadine Gordimer’s “The Conservationist,” told of a man struggling with the death of his son and the decay of his marriage.
Ross Bradshaw of Five Leaves Publications, which has reprinted “Holiday,” noted that Middleton’s novels “were never exciting, trendy, cutting-edge.”
“Rather they were solid novels about people who lived relatively ordinary lives in ordinary streets. That was their strength,” Bradshaw said.
Steven Miessner, 48, the motion picture academy’s devoted “Keeper of the Oscars” who each year donned his signature white gloves to get the golden statuettes ready for their closeup before a worldwide audience, died at his home Wednesday of a heart attack.
Leading up to the Academy Award ceremony, Miessner would take loving custody of the Oscars as they arrived from the R.S. Owens foundry in Chicago, logging them into a computer file, keeping them safe and secure, and then on the big night, giving the coveted statuettes one last rubdown backstage before handing them to the show’s trophy presenters.
He would then record which individually-numbered Oscar was presented to whom and later arrange with the winners to get their statuettes properly engraved.
In addition to his Oscar duties, Miessner was an executive assistant to academy executive director Bruce Davis and president Sid Ganis.
