PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) — Ray Dolby, an American inventor and audio pioneer who founded Dolby Laboratories, has died at the age of 80.

The company said Thursday that Dolby died in his home at San Francisco. He had been living with Alzheimer’s disease for several years and was diagnosed with acute leukemia this summer.

Dolby founded his namesake company in 1965 and grew it into an industry leader in audio technology. His work in noise reduction and surround sound led to the creation of a number of technologies that are still used in music, movies and entertainment today.

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“Today we lost a friend, mentor and true visionary,” Kevin Yeaman, President and CEO of Dolby Laboratories, said in a statement.

Yeaman said that Dolby invented an entire industry around being able to deliver a sound experience. His work spanned helping to reduce the hiss in cassette recordings to bringing “Star Wars” to life on the big screen in Dolby Stereo.

Dolby held 50 U.S. patents and won a number of notable awards for his life’s work, including several Emmys, two Oscars and a Grammy.

He was awarded the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton and was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in the U.S. and the Royal Academy of Engineers in the UK, among many more honors. In 2012, the theater that serves as home to the Academy Awards was renamed the Dolby TheatreSM and the Ray Dolby Ballroom was named in his honor.

“Ray really managed to have a dream job,” said Dagmar Dolby, his wife of 47 years. “Because he could do exactly what he wanted to do, whichever way he wanted to do it, and in the process, did a lot of good for many music and film lovers. And in the end, built a very successful company.”

Dolby was born in Portland, Ore., and his family eventually moved to the San Francisco Peninsula. It was there that he started his professional work at Ampex Corp. working on videotape recording systems while he was still a student.

After graduating from Stanford University, he left Ampex to study at Cambridge University. Following his time as a United Nations adviser in India, he returned to England and founded Dolby in London. In 1976 he moved to San Francisco where the company established its headquarters.

Dolby’s co-workers described him as inspiring and thoughtful man, who cared passionately about engineering.

“To be an inventor, you have to be willing to live with a sense of uncertainty, to work in the darkness and grope toward an answer, to put up with the anxiety about whether there is an answer,” Dolby once said.

He is survived by his wife, Dagmar, his sons, Tom and David, their spouses, Andrew and Natasha, and four grandchildren.

Dolby and his wife were active in philanthropy and supported numerous causes and organizations. The Ray and Dagmar Dolby Regeneration Medicine Building at the University of San Francisco’s Stem Cell Center and the Brain Health Center at California Pacific Medical Center were opened with their support.

His family described Dolby as generous, patient, curious and fair.

“Though he was an engineer at heart, my father’s achievements in technology grew out of a love of music and the arts,” said Tom Dolby, son, filmmaker and novelist. “He brought his appreciation of the artistic process to all of his work in film and audio recording.”

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Colin Firth is to show off his softer side by voicing beloved British children’s character Paddington Bear in a new film.

“The King’s Speech” star will give voice to the cuddly character in a new movie based on the books by English author Michael Bond, about a bear from Peru who is adopted by a family after they find him lost and alone at the London’s Paddington station.

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Firth teams up with Nicole Kidman, who plays the movie’s villain, and “Downton Abbey” star Hugh Bonneville as head of the family who adopt Paddington. He tells Britain’s Daily Mail, “Paddington will be computer generated, and I will speak his lines with, I suspect, a slight Peruvian flavor. Every other character in the film will be real, live, human beings. But the idea is that Paddington will have something of me in his DNA, because I’m going to do some sessions wearing one of those helmets with cameras to capture my face muscles, and all that data will somehow be incorporated into Paddington. Then they’ll use motion-capture equipment on someone more bear-sized than me to do all the full body, bear stuff.”

Firth’s co-star Kidman insists she was thrilled to have been offered the chance to make a film about the famous bear as she has been a fan of the stories since childhood, adding, “I just had to do the bear film. My agent called and said: ‘We’ve got this offer from London for you to be in a film about a Paddington Bear.’ And I said: ‘You mean the Paddington Bear?’ I was read the stories when I was little, and I grew up with Paddington. I know all about his adventures and what mischief he got up to.” Filming will begin in London in the fall.

NEW YORK (AP) — Nicole Kidman says she was shaken up after being knocked down by a bicyclist on a city sidewalk.

Kidman appeared on the red carpet Thursday night celebrating Francisco Costa’s 10th anniversary as the women’s creative director of the Calvin Klein Collection.

Earlier, the 46-year-old actress was outside a hotel when she was hit by a bicyclist. She was knocked to the ground, but in an interview with The Associated Press at the Calvin Klein event, she said she was OK.

Kidman added: “I’m up, I’m walking around, but I was shaken.”

The New York Police Department says a 19-year-old bicyclist was issued three summonses for riding a bike on the sidewalk, riding a bike with no helmet and reckless endangerment.

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Mark Wahlberg‘s kids have landed their first film roles in dad’s new Transformers movie.

All four of the actor’s kids with his wife Rhea Durham will appear in “Transformers: Age of Extinction” — the fourth installment in the robot wars franchise.

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Wahlberg tells MTV News, “My kids just did a cameo, just scared people in the street looking up, but they did a great job.

“I was so nervous because (director) Michael (Bay) doesn’t have time for bad performances. You have to understand; you’re shooting a $300 million movie … You’ve got a lot going on. He’s got five, six takes. If you ain’t got it, you’re done. I didn’t want to see my kids get clipped. They were excited about it, but they started to get mad at me because I’m trying to over-direct them. It went great.”

The film will hit cinemas next summer.

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iranian authorities say a prominent center for filmmakers and artists can reopen, more than 20 months after it was closed by hard-liners.

The decision, reported Thursday by the official IRNA news agency, appears to reflect the more tolerant views on social and cultural issues by Iran’s new moderate-leaning president, Hasan Rouhani.

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IRNA quotes Hojjatollah Ayoubi, a deputy culture minister, as saying the reopening of the House of Cinema is an indication of support for film by Rouhani’s government.

The closure of the 20-year-old center in early 2012 brought outcry from many prominent filmmakers, including director Asghar Farhadi, who won Iran’s first Academy Award in 2012 for “A Separation.”

Hard-liners had repeatedly criticized the film center for supporting liberal views.

By Brent Lang
TheWrap

Warner Bros. is back in the J.K. Rowling business.

The studio is planning a film series that will once again be set in the world of witches and wizards, inspired by Harry Potters Hogwarts textbook “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them.”

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“Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” will be an original story and will mark Rowling’s screenwriting debut. It is planned as the first picture in a new film series. “Harry Potter” is the highest grossing film series of all time having earned more than $7.7 billion worldwide, so the appeal of returning to the scene of the spell is obvious.

In place of a certain bespectacled boy wizard, the series will center on the textbook’s fictitious author, Newt Scamander. The film is neither a prequel nor a sequel to the “Harry Potter” series, but an extension of the wizarding world, said Rowling. In place of Hogwarts, there will also be noticeable differences in geography.

“The laws and customs of the hidden magical society will be familiar to anyone who has read the ‘Harry Potter’ books or seen the films, but Newt’s story will start in New York, seventy years before Harry’s gets underway,” Rowling said in a statement.

Along with the film series, “Fantastic Beasts” will also be developed across the studios video game, consumer products and digital initiatives businesses, providing ample opportunities for the kinds of ancillary revenue streams that make Blockbuster film series like “Harry Potter” so widely coveted in Hollywood.

In addition, Warner Bros. will serve as the worldwide TV distributor of J.K. Rowling’s upcoming television adaptation for the BBC of “The Casual Vacancy,” her best-selling, very adult look at contemporary English society. Production on the miniseries begins in 2014.

Warner Bros. said it will try to find new ways to expand the Potter brand through digital content, video games and these park attractions in the spirit of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, currently queuing up crowds at Universal Parks and Resorts.

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Saul Landau, a prolific, award-winning documentary filmmaker who traveled the world profiling political leaders like Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Chile’s Salvador Allende and used his camera to draw attention to war, poverty and racism, has died. He was 77.

Landau, who had been battling bladder cancer for two years, died Monday night at home in Alameda, Calif., with his children and grandchildren, said colleague John Cavanagh, director of the Institute for Policy Studies.

The director, producer and writer of more than 40 documentaries had continued to work almost until his death. He regularly submitted essays to The Huffington Post and elsewhere, sometimes writing from his hospital bed, according to his son, Greg. He was also working on a documentary on homophobia in Cuba.

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Landau authored 14 books. While most covered issues like radical politics, consumer culture and globalization, one of them, “My Dad Was Not Hamlet,” was a collection of poetry.

His documentaries tackled a variety of issues, but each contained one underlying theme: reporting on a subject that was otherwise going largely unnoticed at the time, whether it was American ghetto life, the destruction of an indigenous Mexican culture or the inner workings of the CIA.

“We tried to take on themes that nobody else was taking on and that were important,” Landau told The Associated Press in July.

His most acclaimed documentary was likely 1979’s “Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang,” which examined the effects of radiation exposure to people living downwind from Nevada’s above-ground nuclear bomb tests in the 1950s. The film received a George Polk Award for investigative reporting and other honors.

It took its name from Landau’s friend Paul Jacobs, who contracted cancer that he believed was caused by radiation exposure. He died before the film was completed.

Landau told the AP that one of the documentaries he was most proud of was “The Sixth Sun: Mayan Uprising in Chiapas,” which looked at the 1994 rebellion by the impoverished indigenous people of southern Mexico. Landau traveled to Chiapas to interview, among others, the masked revolutionary leader known as Subcomandante Marcos.

His 1968 documentary “Fidel” gave U.S. audiences one of their earliest close-ups of the revolutionary leader who installed Communism in Cuba. It came about after a brief meeting with Castro, who told Landau he had seen a news report he had done on Cuba the year before.

In Memoriam: Remembering stars we lost in 2013

“He said he liked the film very much and asked me what my next film was going to be,” Landau recalled. “I said, ‘I’d like to do one on you.'”

In 1971, Landau and fellow filmmaker Haskell Wexler traveled to Chile for a rare U.S. interview with Allende, who had just been elected his country’s president and who would die two years later in a military coup.

Although he made more than three dozen films, Landau said he never set out to be a filmmaker.

“I didn’t set out to be anything,” he said in July. “I just fell into it.”

Landau graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and after moving to San Francisco he was at various times a film distributor, an author, a playwright and a member of the San Francisco Mime Troupe.

Two of his earliest books, “The New Radicals” and “To Serve the Devil” (both co-written with Jacobs), led to his being approached by a San Francisco public television station that wanted a report on ghetto conditions in Oakland. The result was his first documentary, 1966’s “Losing Just the Same.”

A frequent commentator on radio and television in later years, Landau was also a professor emeritus at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, where he taught history and digital media.

It is time for us to make up some new legends that we can carry into the future with us, instead of wallowing in worn out fantasies with used-up icons.  We are stuttering culturally, our mumblings becoming less revealing, less intelligible, and staler with every retelling.  When a society runs out of ideas and can only repeat the same old stories over and over again until they have become meaningless, then we have become prisoners to our own lack of imagination and stifled creativity. We are like bored inmates who return to the same old slop bucket everyday to suck on tasteless familiarity because we know of nothing else.  But we are neither nourished nor sustained.  

We have worn out James Dean and Marilyn Monroe… we have worn out rock, hip-hop, reality TV, and broadcast news… we have worn out fast food, cars, manufactured celebrities, and Kardashians.  We have worn out flying saucers and space aliens.  We can think of nothing new.  Unless we snap out of it, we will enter the cultural “death-zone”… but not on the peak of a summit: rather, in a pit filled with worn-out garbage.

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A spokesperson for a U.K. movie company has denied reports suggesting Naomi Watts walked out of a radio interview while promoting her new movie “Diana” last week.

The actress was said to have been chatting about the biopic, in which she plays Diana, Princess Of Wales, with DJ Simon Mayo, who claimed the star abruptly left their chat with no explanation.

Bing: New ‘Diana’ film slammed by critics

After the alleged incident, Mayo tweeted, “A first for me… as Naomi Watts walked out of an interview! She seemed a tad uncomfortable with the questions. Shame.”

However, a representative for film company Entertainment One insists Mayo’s account is false. “Simon Mayo acted unprofessionally following an interview last week with Naomi Watts, star of the film ‘Diana,’ the rep says. “After completing the interview Simon Mayo tweeted that Naomi walked out on his interview. This was factually incorrect as she did not walk out and Simon Mayo was not even in the same room whilst interviewing Naomi.”

Mayo maintains he and his team at the BBC’s Radio 5 Live have now been blacklisted by Entertainment One, but he stands by his story.

He says, “We were not asking any difficult questions as the film is not about Diana’s death. We did not want to talk about Diana’s death … but she obviously felt uncomfortable. As I was asking questions, Naomi turned to her publicist whispered something in her ear and she got up and left. We have now been told that the film company won’t let us interview any stars they have in their movies. I have listened back to the tape of the interview and I can see nothing wrong with it.”

Watts has yet to personally comment on the incident.

LONDON (AP) — A car that transformed into a submarine in the James Bond movie “The Spy Who Loved Me” has been sold at a London auction for 550,000 pounds ($865,000).

The distinctively-shaped white Lotus Esprit, designed for an underwater scene in the 1977 film starring Roger Moore, was sold at RM Auctions on Monday.

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The sale price was below the auction house’s initial estimate price of 650,000 to 950,000 pounds perhaps because the vehicle cannot be driven on the road, although it is said to be a fully operational submarine.

In the film, Moore and Bond girl Barbara Bach escape a helicopter attack by driving the Esprit off a pier into the sea.