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Nicholas Pryor, the busy character actor who portrayed Tom Cruise’s father in Risky Business and Kathleen Robertson’s dad on Beverly Hills, 90210 during a career that spanned seven decades, has died. He was 89.

Pryor died Monday of cancer at his home in Wilmington, North Carolina, his wife, actress Christine Belford, told The Hollywood Reporter.

In a note to be delivered to THR after his death, he wrote: “Nicholas Pryor was enormously grateful to have been, for nearly 70 years, a working actor.”

From 1997-2002, Pryor played the former spy Victor Collins on the General Hospital spinoff Port Charles, culminating a long career in daytime soap operas that included stints on The Secret Storm, The Edge of Night, Love Is a Many Splendored Thing, All My Children and Another World.

Pryor recurred on Fox’s Beverly Hills, 90210 as A. Milton Arnold, the chancellor of California University and father of Robertson’s Claire Arnold,...

Richard Foronjy, who spent more than eight years in prison before he turned to acting and appeared in such films as Serpico, Midnight Run, Repo Man and Carlito’s Way, died Sunday, his family announced. He was 86.

Foronjy said he was arrested more than 20 times for “forgery, bank robbery, credit card rip-offs, assorted crimes and skullduggery … [guilty of] almost everything except drugs and homicide,” he said in a 1987 interview with Upi’s Vernon Scott.

The Brooklyn native was convicted only once, but that got him an 8½-year stretch in the New York prisons Sing Sing and Attica before he was released when he was 32.

In Hollywood, not surprisingly, Foronjy specialized in portraying cops and crooks.

He was a cop killer in his screen debut, Serpico (1973), and cops in The Morning After (1986) and Prince of the City (1981), all for Sidney Lumet. “I was especially good at playing cops, no doubt because I got to...

A review of this week’s Winning Time, “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” coming up just as soon as I’m the guy without the catheter for once…

Winning Time Season One heads into the home stretch(*) with the Lakers on the verge of the playoffs, and playing a style and caliber of basketball that could make them look like obvious favorites to win the title. It’s not impossible to tell a dramatically interesting story about a dominant team or competitor, but it’s more complicated. Which...

A review of this week’s Winning Time, “The Good Life,” coming up just as soon as we attend the premiere of The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh…

Midway through “The Good Life,” Magic Johnson joins the rest of the Lakers for the world premiere of The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, a 1979 basketball comedy which features several of his new teammates in small roles. Before we can talk more about this episode, we must first discuss a few things about one of the most infamous sports movies ever made:

1) The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh...

Jack Kehoe, a character actor whose 50-year career was highlighted by appearances in Serpico, The Sting, The Untouchables, Car Wash and Warren Beatty’s Reds, died Jan. 14 at age 85. The Hollywood Hills resident had suffered a debilitating stroke in 2015.

Kehoe’s family announced his death today.

Kehoe made his Broadway debut in 1963 as a supporting player in Edward Albee’s The Ballad of the Sad Cafe starring Colleen Dewhurst, and would appear on Broadway again in 1977’s The Basic Training of Pavel Hummel starring Al Pacino.

The role in Pavel would be his second opposite Pacino: Kehoe appeared as a crooked cop in 1973’s Serpico, the first in a string of high-profile movies throughout the 1970s and ’80s that would include Melvin and Howard, The Sting (as the con man called The Erie Kid), Reds, Car Wash, The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, The Star Chamber, The Untouchables and Midnight Run,...

Jack Kehoe, best known for his roles in the Al Pacino-led crime drama “Serpico” and “Midnight Run,” died on Jan. 10 at a nursing home in Los Angeles. He was 85. The actor suffered a debilitating stroke in 2015, which left him inactive in recent years.

Kehoe also appeared in several Academy Award-winning films during his 50-year career, including “Melvin and Howard,” “The Sting” alongside Robert Redford and Paul Newman, and Warren Beatty’s “Reds.”

Other notable movies on Kehoe’s resume: “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” “The Star Chamber,” “The Untouchables,” “The Paper,” “Midnight Run,” “Young Guns II,” “The Game,” and the cult classics “Car Wash” and “The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh.” He also appeared on the TV shows “Murder, She Wrote” and “The Twilight Zone.” Additionally, he reunited with Pacino in 1977 on Broadway in “The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel.”

Born on Nov. 21, 1934, in Astoria, Queens, Kehoe served in the...

Jack Kehoe, the top-notch character actor who supported such outstanding films as Serpico, The Sting, Midnight Run and The Untouchables, has died. He was 85.

A resident of the Hollywood Hills, Kehoe died Jan. 14 in after suffering a debilitating stroke in 2015, his family announced.

In '70s cult classics, Kehoe portrayed Scruggs, the cowboy who pumps gas, in Car Wash (1976) and the marksman "Set Shot" Buford in The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh (1979). His résumé also included Melvin and Howard (1980), Warren Beatty's Reds (1981) and The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984).

In the best picture Oscar winner The Sting (1973), directed by George Roy Hill,...

Jack Kehoe, the top-notch character actor who supported such outstanding films as Serpico, The Sting, Midnight Run and The Untouchables, has died. He was 85.

A resident of the Hollywood Hills, Kehoe died Jan. 14 in after suffering a debilitating stroke in 2015, his family announced.

In '70s cult classics, Kehoe portrayed Scruggs, the cowboy who pumps gas, in Car Wash (1976) and the marksman "Set Shot" Buford in The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh (1979). His résumé also included Melvin and Howard (1980), Warren Beatty's Reds (1981) and The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984).

In the best picture Oscar winner The Sting (1973), directed by George Roy Hill,...

By 1979, Loretta Lynn had been recording country music for almost 20 years, with some 50 albums to her credit. The first female artist to be nominated for — and to win — the Cma Entertainer of the Year award in 1972, Lynn’s string of major solo hits was accompanied by five Number Ones with duet partner Conway Twitty. The pair also logged four chart-topping LPs as a duo between 1973 and 1976.

Also in 1979, Lynn was preparing for the big-screen adaptation of her autobiography, Coal Miner’s Daughter, published three years earlier. The story of her spotting...

What is it about some movies that no matter how badly scripted, acted, shot or directed they still possess a certain charm? We’ve all at some point, caught ourselves enjoying the visual equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries, gulping down every corny line, transfixed by ever dodgy special effect and blissfully ignoring the gaping plot holes.

Today, we take a look at some so bad they’re good movies that you’ve probably never seen, but definitely should take a look at.

5. Willie Dynamite (1973)

From the producers who brought you Jaws, The Sting and Driving Miss Daisy and the man who directed The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh comes this cinematic “classic.” Like the movie poster says, “Ain’t no one crosses Willie D. He’s tight, he’s together, and he’s mean. Chicks, Chumps, he uses them all. He’s got to be number-One.”

Willie Dynamite is...

Acting and basketball don't immediately seem to have much in common — one involves running, jumping, passing, dribbling and heaving a big orange ball through a ten-foot-high net; the other involves standing in front of a camera. So it's safe to say that being good at one does not make you good at the other.

That hasn't stopped plenty of basketball players from making the leap to feature films, though. So with March Madness upon us, we thought we'd take a look at basketball stars whose acting turns were either slam dunks — or flagrant fouls.

We've ranked the players from worst to best in terms of their acting, but ranking them in terms of their basketball skills would be much tougher: Every one of the eight players on our list won at least one NBA championship. But do any of them have a chance at an Oscar? Check it out and let the Madness begin.

The New Jersey Nets finished the 2009-2010 NBA season with a record of 12 wins and 70 losses, good enough -- well, bad enough -- to rank them amongst the worst teams in league history. The New Jersey Nets of the new film "Just Wright," on the other hand, are playoff contenders, thanks to the play of their star point guard Scott McKnight (Common). In other words, "Just Wright" is a ludicrous fiction, which puts it squarely in the dubious tradition of films set in and around the National Basketball Association. Movies about the NBA are, at best, wildly unfaithful to the realities of the pro game and, at worst, strange concoctions of mediocre hoops and outlandish and sometimes downright bizarre storylines. While we patiently wait for someone to make the "Slap Shot" of pro basketball -- or at least release the long-unavailable "The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh" on DVD -- let's...

Follow your dreams, but not if they get you injured says Joe Queenan, as he attempts to extract the essential pearl of wisdom from the grit of sports films such as Caddyshack, Invictus and The Blind Side

I have just found out that a professor at a Florida university has been using the 1980 film Caddyshack in a course as "a forum for discussing everything from civility and class distinctions to sports gambling and animal rights". Theodore Curtis teaches sports management at Lynn University in Boca Raton, Florida. Sports management is a discipline that prepares students for careers as, among other things, golf pros. This is precisely the managerial position that comes under siege in Caddyshack, a film in which drunks, gamblers, sluts, drug addicts and pesky subterranean critters wreak havoc at a posh country club. In one of the most memorable scenes, Bill Murray, playing a vigilante groundskeeper, uses high-powered...