Chucky actor Ed Gale dies at 61 under investigation for sex offences
United States actor Ed Gale has died suddenly, aged 61.
The actor – best known for portraying murderous doll Chucky in the Child's Play horror franchise, died while under investigation for alleged attempts to solicit sex from minors, it emerged on Wednesday.
His family said in a statement: 'It
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NZ Herald
20 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Disgraced ex-MP Maguire jailed for misleading corruption inquiry over Australian property deal
The former Liberal Party MP will be eligible for parole in January. In sentencing, Farnan told the court the misleading evidence given by Maguire concerned his dealings with a multimillion-dollar property development. 'The evidence there was nothing in it for him was misleading … and he was to receive a commission if the property was to be sold,' she said. Daryl Maguire is the ex-boyfriend of former NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian. Photo / Getty Images Farnan said Maguire was 'clearly trying to protect his reputation, among other things'. 'The community is entitled to expect that those who hold power will conduct themselves with integrity,' she said. Maguire has maintained his innocence, saying he answered the Icac questions to the best of his ability. He is expected to file an appeal, with the court expected to resume on Wednesday morning before the magistrate to hear details of the appeal. Farnan said Maguire had displayed no remorse for his actions, though he had no history of similar offending, and his likelihood of reoffending remained low. 'The need for general deterrence does require a period of full-time imprisonment,' she said. While a 12-month stint behind bars was initially to be ordered, Maguire was offered a two-month discount because of delays in the court proceedings. Farnan also took into account the impact of 'significant media interest' in the case on the 66-year-old's mental health. Maguire, eligible for parole in January, plans to appeal the conviction. Photo / Jeremy Piper, NewsWire, The small courtroom was packed with members of the media on Wednesday, who watched on closely as Maguire was taken into custody. During the Icac probe, Maguire denied asking to receive a financial benefit for brokering a property deal in the Sydney suburb of Canterbury. However, in recorded phone conversations, the former MP admitted he had asked for a slice of the profits if the multimillion-dollar deal with a Chinese developer was finalised. Maguire was found guilty of the charge in June. The former Wagga Wagga MP resigned from the New South Wales Parliament in 2018 after Icac launched a separate investigation into his conduct while in office. The inquiry revealed he had been in a secret five-year 'close personal relationship' with ex-Premier Gladys Berejiklian. She resigned from her position in September 2021 after Icac announced it would investigate whether she breached the ministerial code of conduct. The commission found in July 2023 that both Maguire and Berejiklian engaged in serious corrupt conduct. More to come.
NZ Herald
2 days ago
- NZ Herald
Law & society: Govt review of NZ's legal aid system cannot threaten access to justice
David Harvey: "There can be no higher calling than the defence of the liberty of the subject." Photo / Getty Images When Clarence Earle Gideon was charged with burglary in Florida in 1961, he was too poor to pay for a lawyer and the court could not appoint counsel to represent him. Gideon was convicted and sentenced to prison. He appealed the decision that denied him counsel and the case went all the way to the US Supreme Court. Abe Fortas argued Gideon's case pro bono, which seemed apt. The Supreme Court held that Gideon had a constitutional right to a lawyer, funded by the state. Fortas later went on to become a Supreme Court Justice. I often reflected on Gideon's case when I sat in court in my early days in practice, when defendant after defendant, unrepresented, pleaded and was dealt with. It just seemed wrong. The complexities of the law were beyond most of these people, who just wanted to get the case out of the way. Legal aid was available, but not as extensively as now. In the early 1970s, committed lawyers made their time available pro bono to establish a duty lawyer scheme to advise people about their options when facing a criminal scheme was taken up by the government and is now an established part of the criminal justice system. Duty lawyers can now make initial appearances for a defendant pending a legal aid grant. The Bill of Rights Act 1990 enshrines the right to counsel. Everyone charged with an offence shall have the right to consult and instruct a lawyer and to receive legal assistance without cost if they have insufficient means and the interests of justice require it. The government is now reviewing the legal aid scheme. The review is wider than the provision of legal aid in criminal matters. The objective is to ensure the legal aid scheme is efficient and sustainable while also promoting access to justice. Legal aid is under pressure but that cannot mean those who need representation should be denied it. There are fears funding cuts will reduce access and force a return to people self-representing, to the detriment of the court system. In a criminal justice system where there is a presumption of innocence on the part of the person charged and a burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt on the prosecution, the right to counsel is critical. Although the prosecuting state has access to significant resources not enjoyed by the defence, the right to counsel, while not introducing equality of arms, provides a bulwark against the power of the state. There can be no higher calling than the defence of the liberty of the subject. In 2004, a new plan was devised to provide representation for legally aided defendants and a pilot for a Public Defence Service was set up servicing the Auckland and Manukau courts. I was a strong supporter of the PDS. From my early days as a lawyer, I had felt the need for such a service. Initially, there was push-back from the criminal bar. It was felt that the PDS would reduce the number of legal aid cases available to lawyers. But over time, the PDS established its credentials both with the legal profession and with the courts and judges. Four senior PDS lawyers have been elevated to the district court bench. Today, the PDS is located in 10 cities across the country in district and higher courts, and oversees the duty lawyer scheme in these centres. Committed criminal defence lawyers, most of them remunerated by legal aid, work alongside PDS lawyers, often earning less than they would in private practice, ensuring that the criminal process is carried out properly and with integrity in the interests of their clients. It is, without doubt, a frontline service. In this regard, criminal defence lawyers and legal aid funding are critical cogs in the criminal justice system and ensure an effective right to counsel, so important in Gideon's case and enshrined in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act. David Harvey is a retired district court judge.
NZ Herald
3 days ago
- NZ Herald
Terence Stamp, actor who epitomised swinging 60s London, dies at 87
'He'd slipped on a powder-blue wool shirt over the green one,' he recalled of the guru. 'The two colours looked good on him.' After his meeting with Krishnamurti, Stamp spent some time learning to whirl with dervishes before returning to Britain to appear in Superman in 1978. In later life, Stamp gained a reputation – matched only by that of Shirley MacLaine – as an enthusiastic follower of what he described as 'the path towards enlightenment'. Stamp re-established his career in the 80s: ('I need to be able to pay my rent and buy a bus pass') but preferred to spend his free time reading philosophical texts and reciting mantras while standing on his head. Terence Stamp was once described as the most beautiful man in the world. Photo / Getty Images His first perm Terence Henry Stamp was born on July 22, 1938, in the East End of London, the son of a Thames tug-boat pilot. Having taught himself to read by studying his mother's Woman's Own magazine, he began to show an avid interest in the astrological predictions of Gypsy Petulengro. 'I was completely misguided,' he recalled. 'I spent my whole early life believing myself to be a Leo. It wasn't until 1968 that I discovered I was really Cancer.' Stamp supplemented his reading with Rupert the Bear annuals, which he claimed to be of lasting value in times of emotional stress. 'I still read Rupert today,' he remembered at 50. 'I find it heightens my sense of my own emotions, clarifies things somehow.' Perhaps prompted by a desire to emulate his ursine hero, Stamp surprised his family at the age of 11 by persuading his mother to curl his hair with a 'Toni home perm'. 'My dad was a bit worried when he saw it,' Stamp recalled. 'I think he thought I was going to turn into a 'pansy'.' While still at primary school he developed a passionate interest in personal adornment. 'I dragged my mum all over the market,' he recalled, 'looking for just the right pepper and salt jacket.' By his early teens his family had given him the nickname 'Lord Fauntleroy' because he spent so much time on his appearance. After leaving grammar school, he was offered a job as a graphic artist with an advertising company, and at the age of 17 was earning twice his father's weekly wage. He recalled being delighted when he was turned down for National Service because his feet were different sizes. 'I thought I'd died and gone to heaven, two whole years to establish myself before my contemporaries caught up with me.' Terence Stamp had a high-profile relationship with Jean Shrimpton but the pair split when she discovered he was keeping part of her earnings. Photo / Creative Commons Devotion to art He auditioned for a place at the Webber Douglas School of Dramatic Art and, when accepted, stopped working. 'I didn't want the security of easy money to get in the way of my art,' he remembered: 'I needed to devote myself totally to it.' In 1962, Peter Ustinov offered him a screen test for the lead role in Billy Budd after having seen him on stage with a repertory company. Stamp had been instructed by his flatmate Michael Caine that film directors did not like actors to talk unnecessarily during screen tests. 'I was as quiet as a corpse,' Stamp remembered. 'I hardly said a word through the whole test and it seemed to work.' By the film's release that year, he had become an international star. Oscar-nominated for Billy Budd, he went on to make a string of successful films including Term of Trial (1962), The Collector (1965), Modesty Blaise (1966), Poor Cow (1967) and Far from the Madding Crowd (1967). He was also emerging as a one-man caricature of the 60s. His brief romance with Julie Christie gave the Kinks their lines about 'Terry and Julie' in Waterloo Sunset. He opened a fashionable canteen, Trencherman, in Chelsea with the photographer Terence Donovan, serving nursery food. And above all he had become, with the supermodel Jean Shrimpton, part of the most beautiful – and photographed – couple in London. Jean Shrimpton He described it as 'the perfect sexual and emotional partnership in my life'. After three years, however, Shrimpton left Stamp in 1968 when she discovered that he was receiving a percentage of her salary for organising the promotional work she undertook. 'Jean was totally wrong about the money,' he recalled. 'I was keeping 10% but had intended to present her with a lump sum as a surprise. Stealing never was my style.' Stamp was contracted to begin shooting a Western, Blue, in which he played a young bandit. During his time in the United States he discovered marijuana and spent most of his time when not filming smoking 'Acapulco Gold', which he bought by the kilo. He was also initiated into an American Indian ritual involving quantities of the hallucinogen peyote. 'There appeared to be a flickering pale blue light glowing from my fingertips,' he recalled. 'I closed my fingers together as if about to pray and the light jumped across. Was I starting to see the blue of my own aura?' Returning to Britain disillusioned at the end of Blue, Stamp moved to Italy. After Pasolini's Teorema, he worked with Federico Fellini on Spirits of the Dead and the following year appeared in The Mind of Mr Soames as a coma victim who must relearn the past 30 years. Journey to India But he was uninterested in the majority of parts he was offered, finding them glib and facile compared to his earlier roles in Billy Budd or The Collector. Announcing that the British 'lacked emotional depth', he departed for India in 1970. He chose India after having spent the great part of his adolescence identifying with Tyrone Power in the 1946 film Razor's Edge. Power played a young soldier, questioning the meaning of life, who is sent to India by a de-frocked priest and leaves Gene Tierney behind to seek enlightenment. After travelling through India, Stamp spent some time with the Bagwhan Rajneesh in Poona where he began wearing saffron robes and practising yoga. 'I got spotty as a vegetarian,' Stamp recalled, but held that 'on a macrobiotic diet you stay beautiful forever, you never grow old.' During his sojourn in India, Stamp was offered very little work. 'They couldn't give me away,' he recalled, 'everybody had forgotten I existed. David Puttnam offered me three grand to do That'll Be the Day, it was a terrible shock.' He continued to live in Poona, at the Blue Diamond Hotel, until in 1978 he received a telegraph addressed to 'Clarence Stamp at the Rough Diamond', offering him the part of the evil alien General Zod in Superman. Stamp in Superman Superman was an enormous box-office success and Stamp appeared in the sequel made the following year. He went on to make several forgettable films in Italy, including Divine Nymph (1979), Amo Non Amo (1979) and Meetings with Incredible Men (1979). But his career was rehabilitated, and during the 80s he made at least one film a year, choosing prestigious projects such as Stephen Frears' The Hit (1984), in which he dazzled opposite John Hurt; Legal Eagles (1986) with Robert Redford; The Sicilian (1987), in which he gave a performance described by one critic as 'languidly camp'; and Wall Street (1987), as Sir Larry Wildman, a character modelled on Sir James Goldsmith. During the filming of Legal Eagles, Stamp started writing his memoirs ('I had a lot of spare time waiting for Robert Redford to come onto the set'). What was intended as a short homage to his late parents developed into a three-volume autobiography. Condemned by some critics as self-indulgent, the three books dwelled at length on Stamp's East End childhood ('I knew the melody, it was Little Dolly Daydreams, the song Granny Kate would sing when she made my marmalade sandwiches in the kitchen at Barking Road') and ended in 1970 with a bleak Stamp on his way to India ('an emptiness inside me that mourns, that seeps darkness into my daily existence'). In 1990 Stamp made his first attempt at directing a film, but after three weeks the project was abandoned with a loss of $5 million. The following year he returned to acting, appearing in Twenty One opposite Patsy Kensit. Then came Priscilla His later film roles included the transvestite Bernadette in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), for which he won a Bafta; an assassin in The Limey (1999); and a general in Valkryie (2008). He glumly revisited General Zod territory with a cameo in Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace (1999). Despite flashes of brilliance, it was agreed that his career had never scaled the heights it once seemed to promise. The critic David Thomson wondered whether it was because Stamp was 'chilly, difficult, a loner – or does he just give haughtily good imitations of these qualities? Whatever, it is remarkable that he hasn't been more important: for he is a good actor … and seldom far from magic at his best.' Terence Stamp remained unmarried until 2002, when he married Elizabeth O'Rourke, about 30 years his junior; the marriage was dissolved in 2008. In later life he lived an almost ascetic existence in his rooms at Albany in Piccadilly. He travelled by bus (with a bus pass), spent little on food and nothing on clothes. 'Everything I have is made-to-measure,' he said, 'it will last longer than I will, besides I'm middle-aged and past all that now.' He devoted two hours a day to meditation and yoga and claimed that he taught his numerous godchildren to recite mantras and to stand on their heads. 'I've reached the point where all philosophy is essentially the same,' he recalled, 'it has the same flavour, like eating honey.' Terence Stamp, born July 22, 1938, died August 17, 2025.
