Longtime Variety Berlin stringer Ron Holloway passed away in a Berlin hospital on Dec. 16 after a seven-year bout with cancer. His wife, actress Dorothea Moritz, was by his side to the end. He was 76.
Born in Peoria, Illinois in 1933, Holloway took orders as a Catholic priest in Chicago, but later gave up his religious calling and moved first to Paris and then to Hamburg with a two-year grant to obtain his PhD, with particular reference to the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman and Robert Bresson. He and his wife, Dorothea, moved to Berlin in 1976 when the then director of the Berlin Film Festival, Wolf Donner, invited him to become a member of the selection committee, especially for East European cinema. It was also at that time that Holloway became Variety’s stringer in Berlin and in 1979 started up his own film magazine, Kino, which recently celebrated its 30th year of publication. It was due to a conflict of interest between Kino and his work for Variety that he left the sheet, though he continued on good terms with its staff and management and contributed items both to the Simesite and to the Souvenir Album which was published for the 100 Anniversary of Variety in 2005. (See, e.g. his reminiscences of the old Hotel Suisse in Cannes).
Ron also filed for the Hollywood Reporter and Moving Pictures, as well as occasionally contributing articles to the Financial Times and the International Herald Tribune.
Among books written by him are “Z for Zagreb” (1972), “Beyond the Image. Approaches to the Religious Dimension in the Cinema” (1977), “O is for Oberhausen” (1979) and “The Bulgarian Cinema” (1985). He directed two documentaries, “Made In Germany” and “Sundance” which were aired on the German pubcaster ZDF.
Holloway was the co-founder of the Chicago Center for Film Study and the Cleveland Cinematheque.
Funeral arrangements are to be announced next Monday (Dec. 21).