The RIP Famous Person Thread

[harrybarracuda]

Inspiration behind Robin Williams' DJ in 'Good Morning Vietnam' dies at 79

• By STEVE IERVOLINO
  
• MICHAEL ROTHMAN

Jul 19, 2018, 11:02 AM ET







Adrian Cronauer, the American disc jockey whose military stint became the inspiration for Robin Williams in "Good Morning Vietnam," has died. He was 79 years old.


Jeff Hunt, who hired Cronauer at Roanoke FM station WPVR, confirmed the DJ's Wednesday passing to the Roanoke Times. Hunt explained that Cronauer had been living in a nursing home in Troutville, Virginia.

Oakey's Funeral Service in Roanoke also confirmed the death to ABC News.

"Goooooooood morning, Vietnam!" was Cronauer's signature sign-on for his morning show "Dawn Buster," which he hosted from Saigon from 1965 to 1966.


Williams portrayal of the real-life DJ earned him an Oscar nomination in 1988 and a Golden Globe win.

According to USA Today, the real Cronauer insisted that the hit 1987 Barry Levinson-directed movie took some real liberties with his life story.


Still, Cronauer was happy with the movie, especially its respectful portrayal of Americans who were sent overseas. He and Williams became friends after the film was completed, and he was reportedly "gobsmacked" by Williams' death by suicide in 2014, according to the Military Times.

But Cronauer was a Renaissance man and in addition to his radio work, he ran a law practice, "owned his own advertising agency, managed a radio station, was program director of a television station, and was a TV news anchorman."

His official obituary on Legacy.com added that he later "served as a confidential advisor to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense from 2001 through 2009," where "He represented the POW/MIA Office at meetings within the Office of the Secretary of Defense and at various outside functions including liaison with the leadership of veteran's service organizations as well as family and activist groups."

He also earned the Secretary of Defense Medal for Exceptional Public Service.

https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment...ry?id=56688732

[harrybarracuda]

Bernard Hepton dead: Colditz and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy actor dies aged 92

BERNARD HEPTON, who was known for his parts in Colditz and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, has died at the age of 92.

By MINNIE WRIGHT
PUBLISHED: 09:14, Tue, Jul 31, 2018 | UPDATED: 09:50, Tue, Jul 31, 2018




The star of stage and screen passed away on Friday according to The Guardian.


The actor famously played the German Commandant in Colditz and was beloved for his portrayal of Toby Esterhase in 1979 TV series Tinker Tailor Solider Spy.
Bernard, born Francis Bernard Heptonstall, boasted many small screen appearances during his incredible seven-decade career.

His movie roles were fewer, playing a gangster in 1971 film Get Carter and another small part in Voyage of the Damned five years later.

The British star was born in Bradford in 1925 to his father Bernard Heptonstall, an electrician, and mother Hilda, whose family were mill workers.


He started his career on stage at the Bradford Civic Playhouse.

Bernard later moved into fight directing for the theatre, even arranging sequences for Richard Burton’s Hamlet at the Old Vic in 1953.

In 1957, he married Nancie Jackson and the couple made their home in London.

Nancie died in 1977 and Bernard tied the knot with his second wife Hilary Lidell two years later.

After news broke of his death, fans took to social media to pay their respects, with one tweeting: “Bernard Hepton was the epitome of a great British actor.


“Could turn his hand to any part and give an excellent performance. Sinister, sleaze, silliness and sombre with equal perfection.

“Watched most of his work but have special fond memory of The Squirrels.”

“Farewell Bernard Hepton. Great actor,” another said, while a third added: “Rest in Peace Bernard Hepton, great actor. Time to watch Colditz again in his honour.”

https://www.express.co.uk/celebrity-...ary-news-cause

[toslti]

Joel Robuchon, the most Michelin Starred chef dies.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...y-dies-aged-73

[tomcat]

...VS Naipaul...https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-45159149... although not as highly praised as his fiction, I've always felt his travelogues, particularly Among the Believers, are among the best in the category...

[raycarey]

^ of course he was incredibly talented, but the racism woven throughout his work (including his travelogues) is off-putting.

[tomcat]

but the racism woven throughout his work (including his travelogues) is off-putting

...only to the overly sensitive: I enjoyed his opinionated observations...even if I didn't agree with them or his world view...

[harrybarracuda]

Bui Tin, Colonel Who Accepted South Vietnam’s Surrender, Dies at 90




HONG KONG — Bui Tin, a North Vietnamese colonel who starred in the Vietnam War’s final moments but later fled the country and became an unlikely critic of its ruling Communist Party, died on Saturday in France. He was 90.

Colonel Tin’s death, in the Parisian suburb of Montreuil, went unacknowledged by Vietnam’s state-run news media but was confirmed on Monday by his longtime friend Nguyen Van Huy, a fellow Vietnamese dissident who lives in France.

Mr. Huy said in a telephone interview that the exact cause of death was unknown but that Colonel Tin had been in a coma and had previously received kidney dialysis.

Colonel Tin personally accepted the surrender of South Vietnam on the day the war ended in 1975. He was also present at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, when Vietnamese revolutionaries defeated French troops to secure their country’s independence.

Though Colonel Tin was a high-ranking army officer and a onetime disciple of founding President Ho Chi Minh, he went into exile in France in 1990. For years afterward, he urged his former party comrades to embrace democracy and abandon what he saw as their moribund economic and political ideology.

“His exile embodies the tragedy of Vietnam, and Vietnamese intellectuals in particular, as they found themselves in the stranglehold of a corrupt and violent regime that at one point appeared to represent their aspirations,” said Tuong Vu, the author of “Vietnam’s Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology.”

When Colonel Tin awoke on April 30, 1975, he probably did not expect to play a direct role in a pivotal moment in Vietnamese history.

Later that morning, he rode aboard a North Vietnamese tank to the presidential palace in Saigon. There, he walked inside to find Gen. Duong Van Minh, the last president of South Vietnam, sitting in a conference room.

Colonel Tin was not a commander but the deputy editor of an army newspaper, Quan Doi Nhan Dan. As the highest-ranking North Vietnamese officer in the room, however, it made sense for him to formally represent the winning side.

“I have been waiting since early this morning to transfer power to you,” General Minh told Colonel Tin, according to a description of the scene in the 2002 book “Our Vietnam: The War 1954-1975” by A. J. Langguth.

“There is no question of your transferring power,” was the colonel’s tart reply. “Your power has crumbled. You cannot give up what you do not have.”

Colonel Tin then reassured General Minh that he had nothing to fear; it was only the Americans who had been beaten.

“If you are a patriot, consider this a moment of joy,” he said, before making small talk about the general’s tennis game and orchid collection. “The war for our country is over,” he added.

April 30 is now celebrated as Reunification Day in Vietnam, and commemorates the end of the war. The day also commemorates the change of Saigon’s name to Ho Chi Minh City.

Many South Vietnamese officials would be imprisoned for years after the war in what the Communist Party called “re-education camps.” Nevertheless, debates within the Party would rage for decades over the role that Marxist-Leninist dogma should play in the country’s postwar development.

During a trip to France in 1990 — just as Vietnam’s main patron, the Soviet Union, was crumbling — Colonel Tin declared himself a political dissident and complained that his country was troubled by “bureaucracy, irresponsibility, egoism, corruption and fraud.”


But Mr. Vu, the historian, said that if Colonel Tin had hoped that his defection would bring broad political change in Vietnam, he miscalculated.

“He underestimated the resilience of Vietnamese Communism and the regime’s tight control over its officials through a combination of fear and rewards for compliance,” Mr. Vu said.

Bui Tin was born on Dec. 29, 1927, in Nam Dinh, a northern Vietnamese city about 50 miles south of Hanoi.

Colonel Tin, whose father had been a mandarin in Vietnam’s last royal court, later became one of a small number of educated Vietnamese who rallied to Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary cause, Mr. Vu said.

Many of those intellectuals later turned against the Communist Party, which dragged a unified Vietnam through disastrous postwar experiments in collectivized agriculture.

Colonel Tin saw the Soviet bloc’s disintegration as the right moment for his own political about-face. The Communist Party’s leadership “failed to bring liberty and prosperity to Vietnam,” he wrote in the Washington Post in October 1991. “Rather than improve the abysmal condition of the population, they have blindly pursued sectarian policies designed to maintain their power,” he added.

Even before his defection, Colonel Tin was known as something of a maverick. Notably, he discovered and published Ho Chi Minh’s last will and testament, proving that Ho had wanted his ashes scattered around Vietnam. The discovery exposed what Colonel Tin said was the fraud behind the Party’s decision to build a mausoleum in Hanoi for the country’s founder.

Colonel Tin might someday have become chief of the Communist Party “if he had only thought about himself,” said Vo Van Tao, a Vietnamese political activist in the southern city of Nha Trang. “But he was an independent thinker with a democratic outlook who disagreed strongly with the regime.”

Mr. Huy, the colonel’s friend, said that he is survived by his wife, Le Thi Kim Chung; a daughter, Bui Bach Lien; a son, Bui Xuan Vinh; four siblings; and five grandchildren.

Today, Vietnam is a haven for foreign investors seeking a place with cheap labor and a relatively stable political environment. And despite steady waves of online dissent from the Vietnamese public, the Party has maintained a firm grasp on power.

It apparently never forgave Colonel Tin, who forged a friendly relationship with the United States soon after going into exile.

In 1991, Colonel Tin traveled to Washington and testified before a Senate committee that dealt with American prisoners of war. He also met with Senator John McCain of Arizona, a former prisoner of war in Hanoi, to discuss what the senator later described as their “mutual interest in promoting democracy in Vietnam.”

After Colonel Tin spoke to the committee, Mr. McCain approached him and stretched out his palm for a handshake. He got a hug instead.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/13/o...tnam-dead.html

[HuangLao]

...only to the overly sensitive: I enjoyed his opinionated observations...even if I didn't agree with them or his world view...

Overt and manufactured sensitivity seems to be the commonplace standard among the least enlightened.
Over thinking most everything might be a closeted metaphor for the cognitive uninspired and intuitive vacant.

Naturally, consider the source.

[Neverna]

^ Classic Jeff.

[raycarey]

only to the overly sensitive

The literary critic Edward Said described Naipaul as “a purveyor of stereotypes and disgust for the world that produced him”, and called out in particular his depiction of Islam as a rage-filled, imperialistic faith.


Naipaul did little to comfort his critics. “Africans need to be kicked,” he once said, “that’s the only thing they understand.” When critic and writer Elizabeth Hardwick asked him in 1979 why some Indian women wear a red dot on their forehead, referring to the bindi, Naipaul said it signified that “my head is empty”.

again, not saying he wasn't a talented writer because that would be ridiculous, but he was a flat out racist and islamophobe.

Over thinking most everything might be a closeted metaphor for the cognitive uninspired and intuitive vacant.

errr....how about in english this time?

oh yeah, almost forgot....

FOJ.

[parryhandy]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-45169609

Aretha Franklin, 'Queen of Soul', dies aged 76

Aretha Franklin, the "queen of soul" known for hits like Respect and Think, has died in Detroit at the age of 76.
The legendary singer was diagnosed with cancer in 2010 and announced last year she was retiring from music.
Franklin had more than 20 US number ones over a career spanning seven decades.
She gave her final performance last November at a gala in New York held in aid of the Elton John Aids Foundation.
In a statement, her family said: "In one of the darkest moments of our lives, we are not able to find the appropriate words to express the pain in our heart.
"We have lost the matriarch and rock of our family. The love she had for her children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews and cousins knew no bounds."
The family also confirmed her death was due to advanced pancreatic cancer of the neuroendocrine type.

[harrybarracuda]

I fucking hate cancer. Cunty thing.

RIP Your Majesty.

[klong toey]

[klong toey]

Amen. RIP Aretha.

[Chittychangchang]

The Queen of soul!

RIP
May her music and memory last forever.

[misskit]

Goodbye, Aretha. There will never be another one like you.

[Humbert]

RIP sweet soul Aretha

[Eliminator]

Fantastic singer that will truly be missed but never forgotten.

[Norton]

The Queen of soul and so much more. Pavarotti gets sick, can't perform at Grammy's. Queen says no prob. I can do it.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tsYKhGu--U

[tomcat]

^...oddly, her Italian reminds me of a Thai waitress explaining the menu at Pala...

[Loy Toy]

Kofi Annan dead at 80.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/work...8d81dd9aacb442

[Klondyke]

^One (almost the only one) decent UN leader who hadn't bowed to superpowers...

[Klondyke]

Kofi Annan: tributes pour in for ‘an outstanding human being’
World leaders honour the former UN secretary-general, who has died aged 80, as a rare breed of diplomat



Tributes poured in from around the world for Kofi Annan, the first sub-Saharan African to lead the United Nations, whose work revitalising the organisation and putting human rights at the core of its mission was recognised with a Nobel peace prize.

In a rare moment of unity, leaders around the globe and across the spectrum, from Tony Blair to Vladimir Putin, remembered his charisma, commitment and diplomatic gifts.

Read more
https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...ng-human-being

[Klondyke]

^
Strange?

Others paying tribute included Tony Blair, once an adversary over the Iraq war. Annan declared the US and UK-led attack illegal and described the UN’s inability to stop that conflict as his “darkest moment”.

The former British prime minister said: “He was a good friend whom I saw only weeks ago. Kofi Annan was a great diplomat, a true statesman and a wonderful colleague.”

[OhOh]

I enjoyed his opinionated observations

A trait useful in all relationships, real or imagined.