Sees New Lease of Life 007 ‘Jaws’ Villain Richard Kiel Dies Aged 74
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Lifestyle FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2014 Kabul’s Old City sees new lease of life 007 ‘Jaws’ villain Richard Kiel dies aged 74 Afghan residents write during a class at the calligraphy school in the Murad Khane district of Kabul. hen workers began renovating than 60 houses with the help of members of fraction of the money can be accounted for. Richard Kiel Murad Khane district, a jewel of Old the local community who were paid to lift Turquoise Mountain believes its model - of WKabul that breaks up the city’s oth- out the rubbish. Some buildings had goats connecting local artisans to foreign buyers - ichard Kiel, who played the towering, steel-toothed erwise bland facade of concrete high-rises living upstairs and others had been trans- could pave the way for a more sustainable baddie “Jaws” in two James Bond movies, has died. He and blast-walls, it was hidden under piles of formed into banana store rooms. The deli- approach that is tailored to needs on the Rwas 74. The 7-foot-2 inch (2.18-meter) US actor, who garbage. Now the teeming quarter is home cate woodwork had been destroyed and the ground. Hadayatullah Ahmadzai, the head made a career impersonating giants and villains, passed away to bustling bazaars, a revitalized calligraphy flooring was a mud bath.By 2006 the area, engineer of the renovation project, said the Wednesday in the Saint Agnes Medical Center in Fresno, and woodwork school and a courtyard that which overlooks the Kabul River, had taken key was getting the local community deeply California, hospital spokeswoman Kelley Sanchez told AFP. won a UNESCO conservation award last year. on the shape it retains today-with stalls sell- involved. “Before starting our work we had a His representatives Andrew Boyle and Gareth Owen called In the 1700s and 1800s the area was ing arts and crafts, metal workers, a shrine, meeting with the community. We received a Kiel “a giant of a man in every respect”. “We were honored to home to the city’s administrators, but fell school and playground. pledge from the community.” They hired know him and be part of his life,” they said in a statement. into disrepair in the 20th century and had Turquoise Mountain has set aside some dozens of laborers from the area and the Kiel would have been 75 on Saturday. Besides Jaws, Kiel been scheduled for demolition. The restora- buildings to teach students calligraphy, work began. After years of toil, they found appeared opposite Adam Sandler in the 1996 comedy tion project, undertaken by a British NGO, is ceramics and woodwork, under the watchful original architecture undisturbed and “Happy Gilmore” and also voiced Vlad in Disney’s Oscar-nom- arguably a rare success story for international eye of 85-year-old Abdul-Hadi, who once untouched, with the garbage acting as a pro- inated animated film “Tangled”. But he hit the big time with aid in Afghanistan, with its role as a broker worked for the last king of Afghanistan Zahir tective shield. Among the NGO’s notable suc- his 007 performances. Kiel was an immediate hit with filmgo- for local artisans to global clients seen as a Shah. “The Soviet period was good too, I was cesses is a $650,000 interior design order for particular positive. a teacher with a lot of students. But the a five-star hotel in Mecca. A recent female ers in “The Spy Who Loved Me” (1977) fighting 007 star Roger Tommy Wide, country director of the Taliban period was a very tough time,” he graduate also received an $80,000 calligra- Moore, and returned two years later in “Moonraker”. “I had Turquoise Mountain project, explained: said. “This was my father’s craft and it’s phy order. The NGO accepts a two percent convinced the producer that Jaws should have some charac- “Over the second half of the 20th century the extremely important for me that I’ve been brokerage fee. Wide believes the recent suc- teristics that were human to counteract the steel teeth,” he idea emerged among the Afghan ruling able to hand this on to new students.” cess befits the quarter’s rich heritage that said, quoted by the Hollywood Reporter in a 2009 interview. classes that this kind of area was backward, had come to fall on hard times. dirty, everything that they were trying to Rare success? It was home to a Turkic ethnic minority ‘Too likeable to kill off’ move away from. “For outward-looking The development sector has come under called the “Qizilbash” who were administra- “I guess I overdid it-I became too likable to kill off!” On the Afghans, what they were looking for was sky- criticism the world over for high profile fail- tors and bureaucrats for the Afghan royal small screen, Kiel played an alien in “The Twilight Zone” in scrapers, concrete, cement, big factories. And ures, but in Afghanistan the problem is par- family - in keeping with long time Islamic tra- 1959 and appeared in horror TV series “Kolchak: The Night so these small intricate alleys, higgledy pig- ticularly acute. High profile white elephants ditions of using outsiders less likely to try to Stalker” in the 1970s. Born in Detroit, Kiel-who had worked as gledy houses and courtyards didn’t really fit include the ghost town of Aliceghan outside effect a takeover. Ordinary residents see a nightclub bouncer and cemetery plot salesman before get- into their vision of what it was to be modern Kabul, USAID funded hospital projects in more practical benefits too. “People’s living ting into show business-also appeared in TV shows including in Afghanistan.” The project was founded by Kabul and energy and dam projects. conditions here have improved-we did not “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “The Wild Wild West”. former diplomat Rory Stewart and grew out The United States alone has spent around have a hospital and now we have one. There Other big-screen credits included playing a hitman along- of a conversation between Prince Charles $100 billion to rebuild Afghanistan over the was no school and they built a school,” said side Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor in the 1976 comedy and outgoing President Hamid Karzai in past decade, but the special inspector gener- Sayed Sharif, a fortune teller and purveyor of “Silver Streak”, as well as “The Longest Yard” (1974) with Burt 2002. It involved the renovation of more al for Afghan reconstruction has said only a aphrodisiacs. —AFP Reynolds. In 1978, he appeared in “Force 10 From Navarone” and in 1985 worked with Clint Eastwood on “Pale Rider”. He also took a turn behind the camera, co-writing and producing the 1991 family movie “The Giant of Thunder Mountain”, in which he also starred. He reprised his Jaws character in 1999 action adventure movie “Inspector Gadget” with Matthew Broderick. In 2002, he published his autobiography, appropriately called “Making it Big in the Movies”. The TMZ celebrity news website, which first reported his death, said Kiel had been in hospital in Fresno since breaking his leg last week, a detail the hospital spokeswoman could not confirm. While Jaws defined his career, Kiel said he did not consider it his greatest achievement, according to Entertainment Weekly. “My best part would probably be Captain Drazak in ‘Force 10 from Navarone’. A lot of people don’t even know it’s me because I had a big beard and a great costume,” it quoted him as saying. “As Jaws, I start off as a bad guy and turn into a good guy, whereas in this I appear to be a good guy and turn into a really nasty guy.” — AFP In this photograph taken on April 17, 2014, an Afghan resident walks through the Murad Khane district of Kabul. —AFP photos.