A NEW weekly column of shorter obituaries.

EMMANUELLE Riva, right, who has died aged 89, was a French icon of screen and stage who as the star of Alain Resnais' acclaimed Hiroshima Mon Amour became a key figure of the French New Wave. She also became the oldest Oscar nominee for her role as a stroke victim in Amour in 2012.

Her co-star in Amour was another French movie legend, Jean-Louis Trintignant, and the film won the Academy Award for best foreign-language film.

Amour also won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and Riva won best actress at the British Academy Film Awards for her performance.

In her 60-year career, Riva made an early splash in Hiroshima Mon Amour in 1959, in which she played a French actress who has an affair with a Japanese architect.

She worked into last year, shooting in Iceland for Alma. It is still being filmed and edited and will be the last movie to feature Riva.

Paying tribute, French president Francois Hollande said Riva had deeply marked French cinema and created intense emotion in all the roles she played.

A FORMER secretary of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, Brunhilde Pomsel lived most of her life in relative obscurity until a German newspaper published an interview with her in 2011, prompting a flurry of interest in one of the last surviving members of the Nazi leadership's inner circle.

It led to a documentary, A German Life, in which Pomsel talked about her three years working for the man responsible for spreading Adolf Hitler’s ideology in newspapers and across the airwaves.

She described Goebbels as a vain man, whose hate-filled public speeches were difficult to reconcile with what she said was his considerable charm when not in the spotlight.

Christian Kroenes, the director and producer of A German Life, said what Pomsel recounted in the film was a warning to current and future generations. She was 103 years old when she died.

Barbara Hale, the actress who played steadfast secretary Della Street on the long-running Perry Mason TV series, has also died, aged 94.

Hale appeared in Perry Mason on CBS from 1957 to 1966 and won an Emmy as best actress in 1959. When the show was revived in 1985 as an occasional TV movie, she again appeared in court at the side of the ever-victorious lawyer, played by Raymond Burr.

She continued her role after Burr died in 1993 and was replaced by Hal Holbrook, for the movies that continued into 1995.

"I guess I was just meant to be a secretary who doesn't take shorthand," she once quipped. "I'm a lousy typist, too - 33 words a minute."

Hale was born in DeKalb, Illinois, daughter of a landscape gardener and a home-maker.

Hale's ambitions had to be a nurse or a journalist, but her occasional work as a modelled to her being offered a contract at the RKO studio in Hollywood.

When she reported to the casting director, he was speaking on the phone to someone who needed an immediate replacement for an actress who was sick. The movie was a quickie, Gildersleeve's Bad Day, but she went on to appear with Pat O'Brien in The Iron Major, Frank Sinatra in Higher And Higher and Robert Young in Lady Luck.

After her RKO contract ended, Hale worked at other studios, usually as the adoring wife of the leading man.

In 1957, she joined the memorable cast of Perry Mason. "When we started, it was the beginning of women not working at home," Hale said. "I liked that she was not married. My husband Bill didn't have to see me married to another man and our children didn't have to see me mothering other children."

Fellow actor Mike Connors, who has died aged 91, played a hard-hitting private eye on the long-running TV series Mannix.

Viewers were intrigued by the smartly dressed, well-spoken Los Angeles detective who could still mix it up with thugs - episodes normally climaxed with a brawl. Connors once said that until Mannix, TV private investigators were hard-nosed and cynical, while Mannix "got emotionally involved" in his cases.

His film roles included Sudden Fear with Joan Crawford, Island In The Sky, The Ten Commandments, and a remake of Stagecoach.

Connors, born Krekor Ohanian, was from an Armenian community in Fresno, California.

He served in the US Air Force during the Second World War and played basketball at the University of California, Los Angeles.

After graduation he studied law for two years but his good looks and imposing presence led him to acting.

Connors and his wife Mary Lou were married in 1949 and had two children, a son, Matthew, and a daughter, Dana. Matthew, beset by hallucinations starting in his teens, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and before his death lived in a small residential care home. Connors and his wife later championed efforts to erase the stigma of mental illness.