NEWS: Himan Brown, BAFTA, Michael Nouri, Sabine

Himan Brown, Developer of Radio Dramas, Dies at 99
Himan Brown, who long before there was television created immensely popular radio dramas, employing an arsenal of beguiling sound effects that terrified or tickled the shows’ many listeners, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.

In his prime, in the 1930s and 1940s, he was a jack-of-all-trades, once estimating that he produced or participated in over 30,000 shows. He wrote and doctored scripts, sold shows to advertisers, and directed actors like Orson Welles, Helen Hayes, Boris Karloff and Peter Lorre. As a teenager, he was the voice of the first Jake, Molly Goldberg’s husband, in the earliest version of the show about the Goldbergs, a homespun Jewish family in the Tremont section of the Bronx. But he also played the Italian father in another ethnic soap opera called LITTLE ITALY.

EASTENDERS wins BAFTA Award
EASTENDERS saw off competition from CORONATION STREET and THE BILL to take the Continuing Drama award, while THE INBETWEENERS, the Channel 4 comedy with a U.S. remake coming soon, took the Audience Award, the only prize voted by the public.

Danniella Westbrook reprising EASTENDERS role
Westbrook will once again play Sam Mitchell for a handful of episodes this summer.

AMC's Michael Nouri on his soap career
"The bottom line is that I really love working," Nouri explains, "and I'm very excited about this character, who's very unusual for a soap. The first time I did a soap was in 1975; that was SEARCH FOR TOMORROW, and Kevin Kline was on the show with me. I did that for maybe a year and a half. "I have great respect for the people who do daytime television. Back in the days when I did SEARCH we had teleprompters (displays showing dialogue or other instructions) ... which never worked for me. I found them to be very distracting. Now actors have to learn pages and pages of dialogue, and I'm not used to that. We'll see how that goes for me. Susan (Lucci) is going to be my teacher."

Sabine Singh to appear on ONE LIFE TO LIVE
The actress, who exited ALL MY CHILDREN amidst a "Real Greenlee" campaign by ABC, will play a hooker on ONE LIFE that hooks up with David Vickers.