Jean Lodge, a British actress who appeared with Alan Ladd in the 1954 medieval adventure film The Black Knight, has died. She was 99.

Lodge died Wednesday, one day after her birthday, her granddaughter Amy Shaughnessy announced.

Survivors include her sons, Charles Shaughnessy, known for his turns as Maxwell Sheffield on The Nanny and Shane Donovan on Days of Our Lives, and David Shaughnessy, a producer on The Young and the Restless and a director on The Bold and The Beautiful.

Her husband was two-time Emmy-nominated screenwriter Alfred Shaughnessy, who developed and served as head writer and producer on the acclaimed 1971-75 ITV series Upstairs, Downstairs. They were married from 1948 until his death in 2005.

Jean Margaret Lodge was born on Aug. 4, 1927, in Hull, Yorkshire, England. She started out on the stage at the Windsor Repertory Company and in 1949 appeared in her first two films, Dick Barton Strikes Back and Dr. Morelle: The Case of the Missing Heiress.

She played Queen Guinevere, wife of King Arthur, in The Black Knight, also featuring Peter Cushing. Earlier, she co-starred with Kenneth More in the comedy Brandy for the Parson (1952).

Her credits included the films White Corridors (1951), Final Appointment (1954), Accidental Death (1963), The Eyes of Annie Jones (1963) and Invasion (1966).

“My grandmother was a beautiful, talented, complicated, passionate, emotional, energetic woman who was always on the move and full of life,” Amy Shaughnessy wrote.

“The perfect hostess, Jean enjoyed parties, friends, socializing, the theatre, feeding the ducks, museums, gardening, music, culture, long walks in nature, animals, painting (she was amazing!), cooking, art, traveling … the list goes on.”

She also is survived by granddaughters Jenny, Katie, Maddy and Josie and great-grandsons Julian and Noa.

The FCC removed a key constraint on broadcasters’ ability to consolidate stations, voting to repeal an ownership cap put in place to try to limit to power of any one media company.

The FCC’s 2-1 vote on Thursday was to repeal a restriction that limits companies from owning stations reaching more than 39% of TV households. But it faces a potential court challenge, amid warnings that only Congress has the authority to remove the restriction.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said that the move was long overdue given the dramatic changes to the competitive landscape, warning that inaction risked seeing local stations “going the way of newspapers.”

“It is time to restore balance to the broadcast airwaves,” Carr said. “Repealing the national cap will provide essential relief for local broadcasters by restoring a healthy counterbalance to the growing leverage of national programmers.”

He predicted that allowing broadcasters to increase scale will allow them to attract capital and boost advertising to produce news and other local programming.

Removal of the cap — which limits any company from collecting stations that reach more than 39% of the country — has long been a goal of broadcasters, who have complained that they have been unable to scale up to compete with unregulated tech giants as they have siphoned off local television advertising revenue.

Nexstar Media Group has been among the companies championing the repeal of the cap, having already obtained a waiver from the FCC’s media bureau to merge with Tegna, a transaction creating a broadcast giant with around 260 stations covering 80% of the country. The merger closed, but Nexstar has been ordered by a judge to keep the assets and operations separate amid an antitrust lawsuit brought by state attorneys general and DirecTV.

Anna Gomez, the sole Democrat on the FCC, said in a statement, “The large station groups positioned to grow even larger under this decision are not local broadcasters, they are national companies that own local stations and increasingly dictate what airs on them. Trading a squeeze from Big Tech for a squeeze from Big Media does nothing to protect the communities this cap was designed to serve.” She warned of shrinking newsrooms, as large station groups seek efficiencies in local operations.

Skepticism of the FCC’s action crosses party lines. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has said that he has doubts that the FCC can repeal the cap on its own, and Michael O’Rielly, a former Republican commissioner, has said that the authority lies with Congress as it was a statute. Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, in a recent op ed, wrote of how he negotiated the 39% figure in a 2004 appropriations bill. “Regulatory agencies cannot defy or modify laws enacted by Congress,” DeLay wrote for The Daily Wire.

Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy told a congressional hearing earlier this year that he was “prepared to litigate” over the FCC’s action, arguing that the TV industry “is too important to be handed over to a small number of conglomerates.”

The FCC under Carr has argued that while Congress “has at times directed the Commission to change our rules, it has never withdrawn our authority under the Communications Act to regulate or change ownership limits.” In its order, the FCC claimed that Congress’ 2004 action was a directive only for the commission to “modify its rules.” The agency also cited a 2002 appellate court decision that characterized a specified percentage for the cap as a “starting point from which the Commission was to assess the need for further change.”

Major station groups were praising the FCC’s action even before the vote. Chris Ripley, the CEO of Sinclair Broadcast Group, said on an earnings call on Wednesday, “We fully expect people to challenge this order, and we think the FCC is on solid legal ground here in terms of their authority to change this rule and the rationale behind changing it. The FCC’s mandate is to deregulate over time. That was the mandate from Congress, as conditions change, and that’s what’s happening here.”

With the cap repealed, the FCC will shift to a case-by-case review of merger transactions that otherwise would exceed the 39% threshold. Carr has said that a rationale behind removing the cap was to bolster local TV station groups in the leverage against major broadcast networks. That raises the prospect that some companies will get the greenlight and others, like networks with a national footprint, will not.

“Congress never envisioned that local broadcast TV stations would become nothing more than undifferentiated passthroughs of national programming produced in Hollywood and New York,” Carr said on Thursday. “But if the FCC does not change course, this could become the reality in many towns and cities and counties.”

In announcing the plans, the FCC stated, “There may be transactions that would have exceeded the limits of
the 39% national cap that do not promote the public interest and those will be denied. On the other
hand, there may be transactions that would have exceeded the cap that do promote the public interest
and could gain Commission approval.”

Supergirl? What’s that?

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav was asked if he’s considered any “change of strategy” at DC during the company’s earnings call with Wall Street analysts Thursday morning.

“You haven’t talked about DC for a while,” the analyst said. “I know with films, sometimes they perform, sometimes they don’t. But is there any change in strategy?”

Zaslav replied that DC co-chief James Gunn is “focused on Man of Tomorrow. I saw some pictures yesterday that looked amazing. Actually, yesterday was James’ birthday, and he’s out working. He’s working 16, 18 hours a day. It looks fantastic. We’re super excited about it.”

The executive also gave some thoughts about other DC projects.

“[The Batman Part II director] Matt Reeves, I spoke to over the weekend, and he’s working very hard on Batman, and we have Clayface coming up soon, which looks terrific,” Zaslav said. “We got Lanterns launching in the next few weeks on HBO, which Casey [Bloys] and Sarah [Aubrey] are super excited about, and so DC feels very good, and we have a robust pipeline, and Peter [Safran] and James are hard at work.”

Naturally, any top executive is going to do their best to downplay any failures and pump up whatever comes next. On Wednesday, Disney admitted to shareholders that Moana and The Mandalorian and Grogu underperformed at the box office but spun both as titles that helped boost revenue in other parts of the company.

Zaslav has a bit of a reputation for overhyping superhero titles, as the executive famously called The Flash :the best superhero movie I’ve ever seen” at CinemaCon in 2023

Supergirl only made $126 million globally at the box office, a rather weak number for a major superhero title, particularly since it was a spin-off of last year’s Superman, which made $618 million globally.

Coming up next is Clayface, which is considered a bit of a risk as it’s a blend of comic-book spectacle and body horror. But the film’s trailers have been really well received by fans. The project is directed by James Watkins and has a script by horror hitmaker Mike Flanagan along with Hossein Amini. Clayface hits theaters Oct. 23.