We must not lose sight of the potential deadly threat of the H5N1 strain of bird flu It has killed 50 per cent of those who have become infected. There is no evidence, as yet, that this is the deadly strain of bird flu that can be caught by humans, although the all-clear is contingent on test results to be released later this week. The culling is to stop the infection spreading within and between flocks. An outbreak has been detected among farm birds in Turkey and another possible case is being analysed in Romania Tens of thousands of birds are being slaughtered At this stage, the operation is an animal health issue. Rosina died 10 years later; McCabe married his third wife, Karen, in 2003.Glenn Mitchell. What health experts had long predicted - and feared - appears to have happened: the bird flu virus has reached the borders of Europe.

Although he sent me a copy of the typescript in the mid-1990s, the novel remains unpublished.McCabe's first marriage, in 1958, was to Vija Valda Zarina, a Latvian ballet teacher, and they had three children. A year after Vija's death in 1983, while in Britain for an international convention of the Sons of the Desert (the first to be held outside America), McCabe became acquainted with a fellow guest, Rosina Lawrence, who in the 1930s had appeared in films at the Roach studio (notably as the heroine of Laurel and Hardy's Way Out West), and they were married in 1987. Among his many other books, several of them academic studies, was a novel, Unperfect Actor - its title drawn from Shakespeare's 23rd sonnet - blending autobiographical elements with fiction. The same might be said of his description of Stan Laurel as a kind, generous man who was none the less capable, when justified, of "what the Old Testament calls righteous anger".During his retirement, on Mackinac Island in Michigan, McCabe continued his interests in theatre by giving annual Shakespeare readings and through the staging of revivals. His exceptional vocabulary and sense of fun were combined into a group he co-founded at Lake Superior State University, the "Unicorn Hunters," among whose activities was the compilation of an annual list of "banned words", their selection governed by fashionable over-use.In examining the parallels between Oliver Hardy and the producer Hal Roach - they were born only four days apart - McCabe once wrote that "both were big men; both had a zesty, Falstaffian respect for life". In these respects McCabe could just as easily have been describing himself.

He was also a member of several theatrical clubs - the Players, the Lambs, the Shakespeare Association of America, Actors Equity Association and the Catholic Actors Guild. It was perhaps for this reason that he formed so many long-term friendships with people from varying walks of life. He was brought in to ghost-write the memoirs of James Cagney (published in 1976 as Cagney by Cagney), who had portrayed Cohan in the 1942 film Yankee Doodle Dandy. The society in time became international and continues to thrive.McCabe went on to write individual biographies of the two men, The Comedy World of Stan Laurel (1974) and Babe: the life of Oliver Hardy (1989), in addition to a 1975 volume called simply Laurel & Hardy, detailing their films together.He was asked to write Charlie Chaplin (1978) on the strength of the extensive notes he had taken of Stan Laurel's comments on Chaplin, whom Laurel had understudied while in Fred Karno's music-hall troupe Another of McCabe's biographical works was George M Cohan: the man who owned Broadway (1973). McCabe's own biography of the actor, Cagney, was published in 1997.Jack McCabe wore his vast erudition lightly and applied it without pomposity. The book was important in establishing belated critical appreciation of their work and, perhaps of equal value, drawing sufficient fan mail to suggest a need to provide a central focus for the team's admirers.Following the pattern of the Sherlock Holmes society "The Baker Street Irregulars", of which he was also a member, McCabe established a group with "scholarly overtones" called the Sons of the Desert, after a fictitious lodge in the 1933 Laurel & Hardy film of that name (which also yielded a Laurel malapropism, bestowing upon McCabe the title "Exhausted Ruler"). McCabe drew up a tongue-in-cheek constitution, to which Laurel provided what the ever-meticulous McCabe insisted should be called "emendations".