Blake Edwards, best known for** Breakfast at Tiffanys **or the Pink Panther movies or 10 and for being married to Julie Andrews for the last 41 years, has died at 88.
Bummer. I’ll have to watch S.O.B. tonight in tribute.
*Dr. Irving Finegarten: He’d be less conspicuous if he had his eyes open.
Ben Coogan: He’d be less conspicuous if he was back in his box! *
Keep his coffin under close watch, and don’t let his poker-playing, hard drinkin’ S.O.B. friends near the body.
RIP, Blake.
Your wife had great tits: thanks for sharing. 
Edwards was portrayed by John Lithgow in the Geoffrey Rush Peter Sellars movie. I’ve no idea how accurate that depiction was but if it was at all accurate he was a likable person and one of the few who could control Sellars’ lunacy or short circuit one of Sellars’ temper tantrums.
The CNN obit includes one of my favorite Hollywood anecdotes:
IIRC, the note read, “I picked these just for you.”
I’ll bet Julie was a tigress tween the sheets in her day.
We should have a Best Blake Edwards movie poll. I am a big fan of Victor Victoria.
I loved that and 10. The “best of Inspector Clousseau” reels are funny but in general I wasn’t a big fan of Pink Panther; I’ve never seen S.O.B..
I’ll have more to say later, but for now I’m glad I’m not too late to share this.
One of my favorite directors; I will miss him. I also feel for his wife, as it was obvious to anyone who ever saw the two of them together that they were deeply in love with one another.
S.O.B. remains one of the best, if not the best, movies about Hollywood ever made.
On my screen, that looks more like the Fuchsia Panther.
We just watched Breakfast at Tiffany’s not too long ago. RIP, Blake. 
Was George Costanza sitting on your couch?
RIP Mr Edwards, I enjoyed your movies.
I always thought he said lilacs, not violets.
I hope this doesn’t seem too harsh at a time like this but I always found his movies like “10”, “S.O.B”, “The Americanization of Emily”, “Micki and Maude” to be somewhat disappointing…better in concept but kind of flat as movies. They should have been better but I’m not sure how he could have.
On a related note, how many defensive lineman, especially in the early 1980s, would have been willing to be cast as a homosexual as Alex Karras was in “Victor/Victoria”?
When Edwards was making “Darling Lili” with Julie Andrews and Rock Hudson, Andrews was quoted as having said on the set, “Mr. Hudson needs to be informed that there is only one leading lady in this film.”
I haven’t seen Americanization or S.O.B., but of the other two I thought 10 was great (though I’ll admit it hasn’t aged well) and Micki and Maude, which I saw in the theater, was just truly awful. His reputation was actually that of a major hit and miss director who sometimes lost money but when he scored (Pink Panter, 10) he made mints for the studios. He made so much on Pink Panther that when he was tired of the series and even more tired of dealing with Peter Sellers (who he himself said he had a love-hate relationship with when they weren’t shooting and love-hate minus-the-love when they were shooting [Sellers was infamously difficult to work with and especially so with Edwards who wouldn’t put up with his crap]) the studio actually offered him the best deal ever made for a director: a fat fee plus 10% of the gross (not points in the profits, but off the top), which of course he couldn’t refuse. Sellers was in a particular rage at the time since he desperately needed the fat payday of Panther due to all of his ex-wives and a series of flops.
I was reading some old newspaper articles online with him yesterday; I knew that he produced Victor/Victoria on Broadway in the 1990s but had no idea he wrote the stage version and planned to produce it almost immediately after the movie. He and Julie evidently had a falling out with Robert Preston who agreed at a dinner party to do the Broadway version but then thought better of it and said he had no interest in it. Since I’m guessing Garner and Karras never considered doing Broadway I’m not sure why Preston reneging (if you can call it that when nothing was signed) was such a dealbreaker they shelved the Broadway version for more than a decade.
You really should watch S.O.B. A truly hilarious and subversive movie. Dated, but hilarious. You could tell Edwards was getting a lot of his frustrations out with that movie.
I didn’t realize until a little while ago that Edwards got a big start in radio, when I heard one of his Richard Diamond* mysteries. The same quirky, oddball humor was there. I understand it became a TV series in the 50s, but haven’t seen any of those.
*Pretty clearly a play on the name “Sam Spade”, just like the character Peter Falk played in Neil Simon’s Murder by Death and The Cheap Detective. In fact, now that I think about it, Neil Simon might’ve been paying homage to Blake Edwards’ character with those names.