Guilty Pleasures
By Associated Press
King Charles III to visit Australia and Samoa as he recovers from cancer
LONDON | King Charles III is preparing to visit Australia and Samoa in October, an itinerary that will span 12 time zones and test the monarch’s stamina as he recovers from cancer treatment.
The trip, announced on Sunday by Buckingham Palace, marks a watershed moment for the 75-year-old king, who has been slowly returning to public duties after taking a break following his cancer diagnosis in early February. The decision to undertake such a long journey will be seen as a sign of Charles’ recovery, even though the program in Australia will be “limited.”
The visit to Australia will be a critical moment for the king as he tries to shore up support for the monarchy at home and abroad. The trip will mark the first time since he ascended the throne that Charles will visit one of the 14 countries outside the United Kingdom where the British monarch remains head of state, a link that is a source of pride for some but an unwelcome reminder of Britain’s colonial dominance for others.
While he will undoubtedly be welcomed by fans waving the flag and singing “God Save the King,” Charles is also likely to hear anti-monarchy voices in a country where 45% of voters in a 1999 referendum supported creating an Australian republic. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party supports ditching the monarchy, but the government says it isn’t a priority and there is no timeline for another referendum.
“It’s clear that there’s a real reevaluation going on there as to whether the Commonwealth, and certainly the realms, want to retain their connection to the British monarchy or not,” Ed Owens, a historian and author of “After Elizabeth: Can the Monarchy Save Itself?” told The Associated Press in an interview before the trip was announced. “So, you know, there are troubled waters ahead.”
Albanese said he and Governor-General Sam Mostyn, the monarch’s representative in Australia, would welcome Charles and Queen Camilla. Albanese noted Charles had already made 15 official visits to Australia, the most recent in 2018. The monarch had also spent several months in an Australian bordering school as a teen in 1966.
“The King has a deep regard for our great nation, and has always spoken warmly of the time he has spent here and the astounding beauty of our extraordinary continent,” Albanese said in a statement.
The palace provided few details of the tour. Charles and Camilla will visit the Australian Capital Territory and New South Wales as well as making a more formal state visit to Samoa, where the king will appear at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, the palace said.
The capital territory is home to Canberra, Australia’s national capital. Sydney, Australia’s largest city, is in New South Wales.
Charles holds the symbolic title of head of the Commonwealth, a voluntary association of 56 independent nations, most of which have historic ties to Britain. The annual heads of government meeting will be held Oct. 21-25.
However, the trip will not include a stop in New Zealand.
“The King’s doctors have advised that a further extension to Their Majesties’ trip should be avoided at this time, to prioritize His Majesty’s continued recovery,” the palace said in a statement.
Albanese said planning for the visit was still underway and more information would be made public in due course.
Isaac Jeffrey, national director and CEO of the Australian Republic Movement, the peak body advocating for an Australian republic with an Australian head of state, called for a meeting with Charles and questioned why Australia should pay for the royal visit.
“This visit is a great opportunity for all Australians to ask themselves whether the British Royals really represent a modern Aussie democracy,” Jeffrey said in a statement.
The trip comes at a time when the health problems of Charles and Kate, the Princess of Wales, have highlighted the challenges faced by a slimmed-down royal family as the king pledges to cut costs.
With fewer working royals available to carry out the endless round of ribbon cuttings, awards ceremonies and state events that make up the life of a modern royal, the remaining family members have been forced to take on more events.
Charles’ cancer diagnosis occurred at the same time that the Princess of Wales — one of the most popular royals — underwent abdominal surgery and later announced she, too, had cancer. Prince William took time off to support his wife and their young family.
That left Camilla, the king’s sister, Princess Anne, and his youngest brother, Prince Edward, to shoulder the load. Princess Anne was briefly hospitalized last month after an accident thought to involve a horse left her with a concussion.
James Sikking, star of ‘Hill Street Blues’ and ‘Doogie Howser, MD,’ dies at 90
James Sikking, who starred as a hardened police lieutenant on “Hill Street Blues” and as the titular character’s kindhearted dad on “Doogie Howser, M.D.,” has died at 90.
Sikking died of complications from dementia, his publicist Cynthia Snyder said in a statement Sunday evening.
Born the youngest of five children on March 5, 1934 in Los Angeles, his early acting ventures included an uncredited part in Roger Corman’s “Five Guns West” and a bit role in an episode of “Perry Mason.” He also secured guest spots in a litany of popular 1970s television series, from the action-packed “Mission: Impossible,” “M.A.S.H.” “The F.B.I.,” “The Rockford Files,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “Charlie’s Angels” to “Eight is Enough” and “Little House on the Prairie.”
“Hill Street Blues” would debut in 1981, a fresh take on the traditional police procedural. Sikking played Lt. Howard Hunter, a clean-cut Vietnam War veteran who headed the Emergency Action Team of the Metropolitan Police Department in a never-named city.
The acclaimed show was a drama, but Sikking’s character’s uptight nature and quirks were often used to comic effect. Sikking based his performance on a drill instructor he’d had at basic training when military service cut through his time at the University of California, Los Angeles, from which he graduated in 1959.
“The drill instructor looked like he had steel for hair and his uniform had so much starch in it, you knew it would sit in the corner when he took it off in the barracks,” he told The Fresno Bee in 2014, when he did a series of interviews with various publications marking the box set’s release.
When it debuted on the heels of a Hollywood dual strike, the NBC show was met with low ratings and little fanfare. But the struggling network kept it on the air: “Up popped this word ‘demographic,’” Sikking told the Star Tribune in 2014. “We were reaching people with a certain education and (who) made a certain kind of money. They called it the ‘Esquire audience.’”
The show ultimately ran until 1987, although for a brief moment it wasn’t clear Sikking would make it that far. A December 1983 episode ended with his character contemplating dying by suicide. The cliffhanger drew comparisons to the “Who shot J.R.?” mystery from “Dallas” not long before — although it was quickly resolved when TV supplements accidentally ran a teaser summary that made it clear Hunter had been saved.
“I remember when Howard tried to kill himself. My brother called and asked, ‘You still got a job?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘Oh good,’ and then hung up,” Sikking told The Fresno Bee.
Sikking would earn an Emmy nomination for outstanding supporting actor in a drama in 1984. The look and format of “Hill Street Blues” were something new to Sikking — and many in the audience, from the grimy look of the set to the multiple storylines that often kept actors working in the background, even when they didn’t have lines in the scene.
“It was a lot of hard work, but everybody loved it and that shows. When you have the people who are involved in the creation, manufacture — whatever you want to call it — who are really into it and enjoy doing it, you’re going to get a good product,” he told Parade.com in 2014. “We always had three different stories running through (each episode), which means you had to listen and you had to pay attention because everything was important.”
Aside from “Hill Street Blues,” Sikking played Captain Styles in 1984’s “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.” He wasn’t enthusiastic about the role, but had been lured by the idea that it would take just a day on set.
“It was not my cup of tea. I was not into that kind of outer space business. I had an arrogant point of view in those days. I wanted to do real theater. I wanted to do serious shows, not something about somebody’s imagination of what outer space was going to be like,” Sikking explained to startrek.com in 2014. “So I had a silly prejudice against it, which is bizarre because I’ve probably and happily signed more this, that or the other thing of ‘Star Trek’ than I have anything of all the other work I’ve done.”
After the end of “Hill Street Blues,” he acted in nearly 100 episodes of “Dougie Howser, M.D.,” reuniting with Steven Bochco, who co-created both “Hill Street Blues” and the Neil Patrick Harris-starring sitcom.
He married Florine Caplan, with whom he had two children and four grandchildren.
Sikking had all but retired by the time the box set of “Hill Street Blues” came out. He had fewer but memorable roles after the turn of the millennium, guest-starring on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and acting in the rom-com films “Fever Pitch” and “Made of Honor.” His last roles were as a guest star on a 2012 episode of “The Closer” and in a movie that same year, “Just an American.”
Sikking continued to do charity events. He was a longtime participant in celebrity golf tournaments and even once made it to the ribbon-cutting for a health center in an Iowa town of just 7,200 people. “Actually, I came to get something from you — air I can’t see,” Sikking told the crowd of 100 people. “Where we’re from, if it isn’t brown, we don’t know how to breathe it, The Associated Press reported in 1982.
“I probably would do something if it got me going. Acting is a license to do self-investigation. It’s a great ego trip to be an actor,” he told startrek.com in 2014. “I must say that, in the past few years in which I haven’t worked, the obscurity has been quite attractive.”
“The condiment of my life is good fortune,” he finished.
Acclaimed video artist Bill Viola
dies at 73
LONG BEACH, Calif. | Bill Viola, a video artist who combined with director Peter Sellars on a groundbreaking production of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” originally seen in Los Angeles, Paris and New York, has died at age 73.
Viola died Friday at his home in Long Beach of Alzheimer’s disease, his website announced.
What was called “The Tristan Project” opened in concert form at Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2004, premiered on stage at the Paris Opéra the following year and was presented in concert at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall in 2007.
His staging has been revived several times in Paris, as recently as 2023, and versions have been presented in Helsinki; Kobe, Japan; London; Madrid; Rotterdam, Netherlands; St. Petersburg, Russia; Stockholm; Tokyo; and Toronto. Videos were exhibited at New York’s James Cohan gallery in 2007.
“I hope that the audience will leave the theater having a deeper understanding of the nature of our short time here on Earth and the importance and power of love and any kind of relationship we’re in really with the things and people in the world,” Viola said in a 2013 interview with the Canadian Opera Company.
While singers performed on the stage, a huge video showed images of individuals, water and candles and fire that ran from grainy gray to high-definition color. His technique included Viola filming in Vermont woods for a week alone with a camcorder; to building a waterfall on a soundstage and lowering an actor on a wire, then using the video in reverse during the performance to make the actor appear to rise; to a crew of 70 in an airplane hangar with a 90-foot pool of water and 25-foot-high wall of flame.
“A defining moment in nearly 140 years of continual staging of an opera that transformed (and continues to influence) music more than any other single work,” Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed wrote after a 2022 revival at Disney Hall.
During the Liebestod, the love-death that concludes the opera, Tristan’s body starts to bubble and he dissolves like Alka-Seltzer as he rises.
“This was the time I realized where I can put into play these experiences and these images that I’ve been working with about, let’s say, take fire and water, and actually make them work inside a larger whole,” Viola said in the COC interview.
He married Kira Perov, director of cultural events at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, in 1980, three years after they met when she’d asked him to show videos at an exhibition. Perov became his artistic collaborator and they spent a year in Japan on a cultural exchange program before moving to California.
Viola said four hours of video were shot for the opera and the production strained his marriage.
“We put in a lot of our own personal money to finish it,” he said in the 2013 interview. “Once we realized we were two-thirds of the way and the money was running out, we looked at each other and we said: ‘This must be done.’”
Born in New York, Viola was a 1973 graduate of Syracuse, where he was mentored by Jack Nelson and began developing his video art. He worked at art/tapes/22, a video arts studio in Florence, Italy, and had his first major European exhibition at Florence in 1975.
Viola moved to New York and spent from 1976-80 at WNET Thirteen’s Television Laboratory as artist-in-residence and in 1976 created “He Weeps for You,” a live camera magnifying an image within a water drop, which traveled to New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
By the mid-1980s, Viola’s work was seen at the Whitney and the Museum of the Moving Image, and in 1987 he had what MoMa said was the first video artist to have a retrospective there.
He received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1978, 1983 and 1989, and a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 1989. His work was shown at several of the Bienielle exhibitions of the Whitney Museum of Art.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by sons Blake and Andrei Viola, and daughter-in-law Aileen Milliman.
—From AP reports
