Sad week for movie fans

It’s been a tough week for movie fans, with three prominent talents passing away in the last few days.

Paul Scofield, the powerful stage and screen actor who won an Oscar playing Sir Thomas More in “A Man for All Seasons,” died Wednesday in a hospital near his home in southern England. He was 86 and suffered from leukemia.

He is survived by his wife and children.

Prolific writer Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey” simultaneously as a novel and screenplay with director Stanley Kubrick, died Wednesday in Sri Lanka, where he lived since 1956. He was 90 and had battled post-polio syndrome for many years.

He wrote more than 100 books on space, science and the future, some fiction and some nonfiction. He also is credited with coming up with the concept of using satellites to communicate; he came up with the idea in 1954, decades before they actually became reality.