Yeah, and here he is with Elvis Presley!
Posted on 11/25/2004 2:28:58 PM PST by Tumbleweed_Connection
Arthur Hailey, author of "Airport," "Hotel" and other novels that became hit movies, has died, his wife said Thursday. He was 84.
Hailey, who plucked characters from ordinary life and threw them into extraordinary ordeals, died in his sleep Wednesday at his home in Lyford Cay on New Providence island, his wife Sheila said. She said doctors believe he had a stroke.
"It is obviously a shock to wake up to, but it was peaceful," she said. "Arthur was a very humble man, but was delighted with the letters he used to get from readers praising his books. He was incredibly proud of them."
Hailey's knack for turning the mundane into thrilling tales brought 11 books published in 40 countries and 38 languages, with 170 million copies in print.
He used the nitty-gritty of bank procedures and hotel management as backdrops for page-turning plots, preferring real-life characters like managers and doctors to vampires and spies.
"I don't think I really invented anybody," Hailey said in a 2001 interview with The Associated Press. "I have drawn on real life."
In the 1968 novel "Airport," manager Mel Bakersfield faces a crisis when a mad bomber boards a flight. "Airport" later hit movie screens, with Burt Lancaster starring as Bakersfield and Dean Martin as a womanizing pilot. The film opened the door for other disaster movies of the 1970s.
Other novels made into movies include "Wheels," "The Moneychangers" and "Strong Medicine."
Born April 5, 1920, in Luton, England, Hailey had to stop school at 14 because his parents couldn't afford to send him beyond England's free education system. He served as a pilot in the Royal Air Force during World War II, flying patrol fighters in the Middle East and transport planes in India.
Hailey left England in 1947 for Canada, where he later received citizenship (while retaining his British citizenship) and worked as a sales promotion manager for a tractor-trailer manufacturer in Toronto. He quit to write television screenplays.
"My mind has always been a storyteller's mind," Hailey told the AP in 2001.
His first novel, "The Final Diagnosis," was published in 1959 - about a hospital pathologist who causes an infant's death by mistake.
Critics praised Hailey's research but sometimes said his writing was clichDe. Reviewing his 1979 novel "Overload" - about an energy crisis - one critic wrote in The Globe and Mail of Toronto: "His lack of literary finesse is overcome by his unerring instinct for a hot subject."
Hailey and his wife settled in the Bahamas in 1969. In later years, he stopped writing for the mass market, but still wrote as a hobby.
Sheila Hailey said her husband's memory began deteriorating after two heart surgeries in recent years and a stroke two months ago.
"I began to grieve about eight weeks ago for him. He was not the man I knew and loved," she said.
His body would be cremated in a private ceremony in Nassau this weekend, she said.
Hailey had four sons and two daughters from two marriages. Sheila Hailey said she and his children plan a party to celebrate his life in January, as was his wish.
Airport was a pretty good novel, and the original movie--not any of the cheeseball sequels--was a good movie as well.
}:-)4
Well, Hailey outdid himself when he came up with the idea for 'Airplane', that is the funniest air travel spoof movie I've ever seen.
"What do you make of this?"
"WELL, it can be a hat, or a broach, or a pterodactyl!"
:)
Arthur Hailey's dead? Surely you can't be serious!
"Roots" was a fraud. I think he admitted to it in the 1980's.
"Roots" was written by another guy, Alex Haley.
But as to your claim that "Roots" is a fraud, I think the general consensus was that he had the names and vital statistics of his ancestors right but might have "borrowed" some of the biographies from other works.
Yeah, and here he is with Elvis Presley!
Thanks.
I don't think he had anything to do with Airplane except for writing the book that was made into the movie that it satirizes.
Also, it was nice they named that comet after him.
The original idea was his.
Makes you wonder what he could have done if he had concentrated on comedy rather then drama.
I didn't realize that. He had a good sense of humor.
There's a comet named Arthur?
Airport ain't Airplane.
The whole thing was supposed to be a narrative of oral history characterized by a fictional descendant; what statistics have you in mind?
No, but there's a coffee cup.
Alex Haley is probably best known for his book , a fictionalized account of his family's history, starting with the story of Kunta Kinte, kidnapped in Gambia in 1767 to be sold as a slave in the United States. He was permitted to settle out-of-court for $650,000, having admitted that he copied large passages of his novel Roots from The African by Harold Courlander.
I loved reading Airport, the novel was much better than the movie as usual.
RIP, and thanks for the wonderful books you created. They will live on.
..<-- click on the pic.
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