The RIP Famous Person Thread

Shannen Doherty, Heathers and Beverly Hills 90210 star, dies at 53

Shannen Doherty, star of Beverly Hills 90210 and Heathers, has died at the age of 53.

A statement from her publicist Leslie Sloane, cited by People magazine, said: “It is with a heavy heart that I confirm the passing of actress Shannen Doherty. On Saturday, July 13, she lost her battle with cancer after many years of fighting the disease.”
The actor had been first diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015 and underwent a mastectomy. In 2020, she said that her diagnosis was then terminal, calling it “a bitter pill to swallow” in a Good Morning America interview.
In June 2023, Doherty shared an Instagram post that revealed news that cancer had spread to her brain alongside a video of her receiving treatment. “My fear is obvious,” she wrote.
Doherty started working at a young age with small-screen roles in Father Murphy and Little House on the Prairie and big-screen roles in The Secret of NIMH and Girls Just Want to Have Fun all before the age of 15.

In 1988, Doherty starred in the dark comedy Heathers alongside Winona Ryder. While it wasn’t a financial success at the time, it since became a cult favourite, widely seen as one of the best high school films ever. She later made a cameo appearance in the pilot of a TV adaptation.

Two years later, Doherty found success as Brenda Walsh in hit teen drama Beverly Hills 90210, which averaged over 21 million viewers by its fourth season. “We get accosted in malls,” said Doherty of the show’s success in 1992. “Basically, it takes over your life.”

Doherty left before season five but later returned for the 2008 reboot and 2019’s meta BH90210, where she played herself.
She also found major success in witchcraft drama Charmed, which she starred in for three seasons. She also directed a number of episodes. Her film roles included Mallrats and Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back for the film-maker Kevin Smith.
When Doherty shared her latest update in June 2023, Smith wrote: “You have been such a fearless fighter your whole life, so it’s understandable to be a little scared from time to time. But when those moments pass, let that indomitable Doherty spirit take over anew. I love you so much, my Mallrat.”

Doherty was often positioned as a troublemaker in the press, with People magazine once referring to her the “iconic Hollywood bad girl of the 90s”. Addressing her reputation in 1992, Doherty pushed back on being difficult.
“If you consider ‘difficult’ being a strong woman who sticks up for herself, yeah, I admit to it,” she says. “I’m open to different ideas, but if you get on my bad side and don’t listen to me and you don’t treat me with as much respect as you treat a man, you’ve got a problem.”
In 2010, Doherty addressed it again: “I have a rep. Did I earn it? Yeah, I did. But, after a while you sort of try to shed that rep because you’re kind of a different person. You’ve evolved and all of the bad things you’ve done in your life have brought you to a much better place.”
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-r...90210-heathers

Bob Newhart, famed comedian and sitcom actor, dies at 94

Bob Newhart, the revered US comedian and star of two classic sitcoms known for his deadpan delivery, died on Thursday at the age of 94.

The Chicago native and titular star of game-changing sitcoms The Bob Newhart Show and Newhart in the 1970s and 80s, died at his home in Los Angeles after a period of short illnesses, his publicist Jerry Digney confirmed in a statement.

A former accountant who began moonlighting in comedy venues, Newhart first rose to fame in the 1960s for his observational humor and droll delivery. His breakthrough album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, recorded over several days in Houston before Newhart had any stand-up experience, netted him Grammys for best new artist and album of the year in 1961.

“In 1959, I gave myself a year to make it in comedy; it was back to accounting if comedy didn’t work out,” he once said, according to Digney’s statement. Newhart was 30 years old and years into a career as a Chicago accountant when the album went No 1 on the sales charts, the first comedy album to do so.

The comic went on to dominate the sitcom landscape for nearly two decades with two beloved TV shows, first with The Bob Newhart Show, which aired on CBS from 1972 until 1978. The show, in which Newhart starred as a befuddled psychologist in Chicago, became one of the most popular sitcoms of all time.

The follow-up, Newhart, starred Newhart and Mary Frann as an author and his wife who open a rural inn in Vermont. It ran from 1982 until 1990 and featured one of the more admired finales in TV history, in which Newhart’s character wakes up next to his wife from the Bob Newhart Show, played by Suzanne Pleshette, suggesting the entire second series was a dream.

Newhart was nominated for several Emmys for his TV work, though he didn’t win one until 2013, for guest-starring as Arthur Jeffries on CBS’s The Big Bang Theory. He is also famous to younger audiences as Papa Elf, the adoptive father to Will Ferrell’s Buddy, in the 2003 holiday comedy Elf.

Born on 5 September 1929 in Oak Park, Illinois, George Robert Newhart ushered in a new style of comedy in the 1960s, breaking from the mold of vaudeville and Borscht Belt routines for bits based in observation and psychology. His performance style incorporated stammering, deadpan delivery and quietly subversive material that appealed widely; his debut was the first comedy album to top the Billboard charts, and his first two albums held the top two spots simultaneously, a feat not accomplished again until Guns N’ Roses in 1991.

In his later years, Newhart took on a number of feature film roles, including In & Out and Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde. He also continued performing standup into his 70s, giving about 30 shows a year as of 2006.
“Comedy has given me a wonderful life,” he said. “When I first started out in standup, I just remember the sound of laughter. It’s one of the great sounds of the world.”

Among those paying tribute to Newhart were Judd Apatow, Jamie Lee Curtis and Bill Prady. Apatow, who co-directed Bob and Don: A Love Story about the lifelong friendship of Newhart and Don Rickles, posted on social media: “I was so lucky to get to spend that time with my hero. His brilliant comedy and gentle spirit made everyone he encountered so happy.”

Prady reflected on his importance to comedy: “Hard to explain how important Bob Newhart was to every comedian and comedy writer who came after him.”

Curtis wrote in a tribute on her Instagram, “They will be laughing wherever people go when they leave us. God, he was funny! Bob Newhart. You will be missed!”

Bob Newhart, famed comedian and sitcom actor, dies at 94 | TV comedy | The Guardian

Bob Newhart, Emmy-Winning Comedy Icon, Dies at 94

Bob Newhart, the iconic comedian known for his deadpan delivery, two eponymous sitcoms and his role as Papa Elf in the holiday classic “Elf,” has died at age 94, his longtime publicist Jerry Digney announced on Thursday.


The Emmy winner died after “a series of short illnesses,” Digney said in a press release. He called Newhart’s passing the “end of an era in comedy.”


The press release highlighted a Newhart quote that reflected his typically modest approach to his long career: “In 1959, I gave myself a year to make it in comedy; it was back to accounting if comedy didn’t work out.”

Clearly, comedy was the right calling for the former accountant. He was known for his one-side telephone conversations in his routines, something he even managed to work into the 1962 Steve McQueen war drama “Hell Is for Heroes.”


In 1972, he landed his first sitcom, “The Bob Newhart Show,” in which he played a Chicago psychologist with kooky clients, a not-too-bright pilot neighbor (Bill Daily) and his lovely and smart wife, Emily (Suzanne Pleshette).

MORE Bob Newhart, Emmy-Winning Comedy Icon, Dies at 94

Funny man, he was. Hate to see him go.

Lou Dobbs, renowned conservative cable news anchor, dies aged 78

Lou Dobbs, a longtime cable news anchor known in recent years for supporting Donald Trump and for spreading misinformation, has died at age 78, according to statements posted on his social media accounts.
Trump paid tribute to Dobbs as “a friend, and truly incredible Journalist, Reporter, and Talent” in a post on his social media site, writing: “He understood the World, and what was ‘happening,’ better than others.”

Dobbs, a nightly presence on Fox Business Network for more than a decade, was also praised by Fox News Media in a statement as “an incredible business mind with a gift for broadcasting” and someone who “helped pioneer cable news into a successful and influential industry”.

Fox News cancelled Dobbs’ popular show, Lou Dobbs Tonight, in 2021, after Dobbs became a major contributor to the false narrative that the 2024 election had been stolen, and continued airing those ideas on his program even after admitting that they lacked actual proof.

Dobbs was named in a lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems over lies told on the network about the 2020 presidential election. A mediator in 2023 pushed the two sides toward a $787m settlement, averting a trial. A mountain of evidence – some damning, some merely embarrassing – showed many Fox executives and on-air talent didn’t believe allegations aired mostly on shows hosted by Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro. At the time, they feared angering Trump fans in the audience with the truth.

Dobbs had previously made headlines as a CNN host in 2009 for repeatedly raising questions about whether Barack Obama was a US citizen, and continuing with those questions despite the documented evidence of Obama’s birth in Hawaii. Trump would also become a major figure in the “birther” conspiracy, which was widely condemned as racist.

Dobbs’s death was announced on Thursday in a post on his official Twitter/X account, which called him a “fighter till the very end – fighting for what mattered to him the most, God, his family and the country”.
“Lou’s legacy will forever live on as a patriot and a great American. We ask for your prayers for Lou’s wonderful wife Debi, children and grandchildren,” the post said.

Dobbs had joined CNN at its inception in 1980 and worked at the network for more than two decades, CNN reported, eventually anchoring the program Moneyline.
“Lou was one of the CNN originals, who helped launch and shape the network,” a CNN spokesperson said.

Once the most visible television business journalist with his Moneyline show in the 1990s, Dobbs made CNN management uneasy as he grew more opinionated and drew angry protests from Latinos for his emphasis on curbing illegal immigration. He left CNN in 2009.

When he joined Fox Business, Dobbs said he considered himself the underdog. A few years later his show was highly rated and he was a key figure on the right-leaning network.
Dobbs said he always wanted to be straight with his viewers about his own views on issues.

“My audience has always expected me to tell them where I’m coming from, and I don’t see any reason to disappoint them,” he said in 2011.

Lou Dobbs, renowned conservative cable news anchor, dies aged 78 | Fox News | The Guardian

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Originally Posted by misskit

Funny man, he was. Hate to see him go.

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Indeed, a fine humorist and human being. When Americans were not so fucked up.

You could have just left it as a compliment. :rolleyes:

American comedian and actor Bob Newhart dies at 94

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LOS ANGELES – Bob Newhart, who burst onto the comedy scene in 1960 working a stammering everyman character not unlike himself, then rode essentially that same character through a long, busy career that included two of television’s most memorable sitcoms, died on July 18 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.


His publicist, Jerry Digney, confirmed the death.


Newhart was not merely unknown a few months before his emergence as a full-fledged star; he was barely in the business, though he had aspirations.




In 1959, some comic tapes he had made to amuse himself while working as an accountant in Chicago caught the ear of an executive at Warner Bros. Records, which in 1960 released the comedy album The Button-Down Mind Of Bob Newhart.


The record shot to No. 1 on the charts and at the 1961 Grammy Awards, it improbably captured the top prize – album of the year.


He won two other Grammys that year, for best new artist and best spoken-word comedy performance, an honour that was given not to his first album but to his second, a hastily made follow-up titled The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back! (1960). For a while, his first two albums occupied the top two spots on the Billboard album chart.




“Playboy magazine hailed me ‘the best new comedian of the decade,’” Newhart wrote in his autobiography, I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This: And Other Things That Strike Me As Funny (2006), describing this period. “Of course, there were still nine more years left in the decade.”


He transitioned quickly and easily into television, landing a short-lived variety show, numerous guest appearances on the shows of Dean Martin and Ed Sullivan, regular work guest-hosting for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show and, ultimately, The Bob Newhart Show, a celebrated sitcom in which he played a somewhat befuddled psychologist.


That series ran from 1972 to 1978, and he followed it up with Newhart (1982 to 1990), another successful sitcom, in which he played a Vermont innkeeper. Newhart ran for eight seasons and ended with what is still viewed as one of the greatest finales in television history.


He remained busy in television and films into his 80s. He won an Emmy in 2013 for a guest appearance as the beloved former host of a TV science show on The Big Bang Theory (2007 to 2019).


That Emmy was, surprisingly, his first.


American comedian and actor Bob Newhart dies at 94 | The Straits Times

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Originally Posted by Happy As Larry

Lou Dobbs, renowned conservative cable news anchor, dies aged 78

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In recent years, renowned for being a barking trumpanzee with a terrible syrup.

A reminder of just how bad some disco was.

Yet somehow seven million people were convinced to buy this dross

"Whooo-aaa Hooo!"

:)

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Evelyn Thomas, influential disco singer, has died aged 70

https://youtu.be/c6uVXJ3x2Sk

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^ Wow. That was pretty bad. Somehow I missed Evelyn back in the day. :)

Abdul ‘Duke’ Fakir, last surviving member of Four Tops, dies aged 88

Abdul “Duke” Fakir, the last surviving original member of the Four Tops, the beloved Motown group, died Monday at his home in Detroit. He was 88 years old.

According to a family spokesperson, Fakir died of heart failure with his family and friends by his side. The family announced his death Monday afternoon, saying, “our hearts are heavy as we mourn the loss of a trailblazer, icon and music legend who, through his 70-year music career, touched the lives of so many”.

Fakir, who co-founded Four Tops in 1953, had been struggling with bladder cancer and had retired from touring late last year. An associate told Billboard that on Sunday he was “happy, talking and interacting, and when they turned to do something and turned back around, he had slipped away”.

The Four Tops were among Motown’s most popular and enduring acts, peaking in the 1960s. Between 1964 and 1967, they had 11 Top 20 hits and two No 1s: I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch) and the operatic classic Reach Out I’ll Be There. Other songs, often sagas of romantic pain and bereavement, included Baby I Need Your Loving, Standing in the Shadows of Love, Bernadette and Ask the Lonely.

Many of Motown’s greatest stars, from the Supremes to Stevie Wonder, came of age at the Detroit-based company founded by Berry Gordy in the late 1950s. But Fakir, lead singer Levi Stubbs, Renaldo “Obie” Benson and Lawrence Payton had been together for a decade when Gordy signed them up in 1963 and already had a polished stage act and versatile vocal style that enabled them to perform anything from country songs to pop standards like Paper Doll.

They called themselves the Four Aims when they started out, but soon renamed themselves Four Tops to avoid confusion with the white harmony quartet the Ames Brothers.
The Four Tops had recorded for several labels, including the famed Chess Records in Chicago, with little commercial success. But Gordy and A&R man Mickey Stevenson paired them with the songwriting-production team of Eddie Holland, Lamont Dozier and Brian Holland and they quickly caught on, blending tight, haunting harmonies (with Fakir as lead tenor) behind Stubbs’ urgent, sometimes desperate baritone.

After Holland-Dozier-Holland left Motown in 1967, the Four Tops had more sporadic success, with hits over the next few years including Still Water (Love), and a pair of top 10 songs in the early 1970s for ABC/Dunhill Records, Keeper of the Castle and Ain’t No Woman (Like the One I’ve Got). They reached the Top 20 for the last time in the early 1980s, with the sentimental ballad When She Was My Girl.


Throughout, they remained a busy concert act and at times toured with latter day members of the Temptations, a friendly rivalry launched when the groups performed together at the all-star 1983 television concert marking Motown’s 25th anniversary. While the Temptations and other peers suffered from drug problems, internal dissension and personnel changes, the Four Tops remained united and intact until Payton died in 1997. Benson died in 2005 and Stubbs in 2008.

“The things I love about them the most – they are very professional, they have fun with what they do, they are very loving, they have always been gentlemen,” Wonder said of them when he helped induct them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1990.
Fakir later toured as the Four Tops with lead vocalist Alexander Morris, Ronnie McNeir and Lawrence ‘Roquel’ Payton Jr, the son of Lawrence Payton.

“As each one of them (the original members) passed a little bit of me left with them,” Fakir told UK Music Reviews in 2021. “When Levi left us, I found myself in a quandary as to what I was going to do from that moment on, but after a while I realized that the name together with the legacy that they had left us simply had to carry on, and judging by the audience reaction it soon became pretty evident that I did the right thing and I really do feel good about that.”

Besides the Rock Hall of Fame, their honors included being voted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998 and receiving the Grammy for lifetime achievement in 2009. More recently, Fakir was working on a planned Broadway musical based on their lives and completed the memoir I’ll Be There, published in 2022.

Fakir was married twice, for the last 50 years to Piper Gibson, and had seven children. Six survive him. In the mid-1960s, he was briefly engaged to Mary Wilson of the Supremes.
A lifelong Detroit resident who stayed home even after Gordy moved the label to Los Angeles in early 1970s, Fakir was of Ethiopian and Bangladeshi descent and grew up in a rough neighborhood where rival Black and white gangs fought often. He had early dreams of being a professional athlete, but was also a talented singer whose tenor brought him attention as a performer in his church choir. He was in his teens when he befriended Stubbs, and the two first sang with Benson and Payton at a birthday party thrown by a local “girl” group whom Fakir remembered as “high-class, very fine young ladies”.

“We told Levi to just pick a song and sing the lead. We’d just back him up. Well, when he started, we all fell in like we’d been rehearsing the song for months! Our blend was incredible. We were just looking at each other as we were singing, and right after we said, ‘Man, this is a group! This is a group!’”
Abdul ‘Duke’ Fakir, last surviving member of Four Tops, dies aged 88 | US news | The Guardian

One of the great Motown sounds, RIP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EaflX0MWRo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Jtokmp8zoE

^^^ Last surviving member of the ORIGINAL Four Tops as they're still going. You can even see them in Cardiff in September. It's like Trigger's broom.

:)


However today is a bad day.

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British blues pioneer John Mayall dies aged 90


John Mayall: Pioneer of British blues dies aged 90

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4KH5qV501E

A great and so influential RIP

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwc7ZEYfWYc

Jerry Miller, Moby Grape Lead Guitarist and Co-Founder, Dies at 81

Jerry Miller, greatly admired lead guitarist of the 1960s group Moby Grape and one of the architects of that era’s San Francisco sound, died Sunday at 81 in his hometown of Tacoma, Wash. News of the death was shared by friends and family on social media. No cause was given.

A text from Miller’s wife, Jo, was shared to the Moby Group fan page on Facebook Sunday: “Everybody flood the ether with Jerry Miller’s music. Play it all day long for me and him. And thank you all so much.”
Miller’s guitar skills were such that Rolling Stone included him at No. 68 on a ranking of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time.

Moby Grape’s tenure as a quintessential part of the west coast counterculture rock scene was a relatively short but influential one. Formed in 1966, the band broke up three years later, managing to release four albums for Columbia during that window, including a self-titled debut in 1967 (reaching a chart peak of No. 24) and 1968’s “Wow/Grape Jam” (No. 20). A fifth album was recorded for Reprise during a fleeting reunion in 1971. Further reunion albums appeared in the 1980s, but the group’s impact was never best measured on the charts, or in the number of years it endured.

Miller’s admirers included Eric Clapton, Stephen Stills, David Crosby and Taj Mahal. Both Jimmy Page and Robert Plant extolled him, as Led Zeppelin was said to have covered Moby Grape songs at their first rehearsal.

In 1999, Rolling Stone’s David Fricke wrote a five-star reassessment of Moby Grape’s debut album, three decades on from the group’s heyday. “They had the looks, the songs, the guitars (three of ’em) and the singing (five drop-dead, blues-angel voices) — everything they needed to be America’s Beatles and Rolling Stones combined,” Fricke wrote. “Everything except the luck.” Possibly commercially cursed or not, the group merited a place in the pantheon, per Fricke, especially with such a remarkable entry. “Cut in three weeks for $11,000, ‘Moby Grape’ is one of rock’s truly perfect debut albums and a pivotal document of ’60s rock in radiant mid-mutation. Funky country, folk rock, acid punk, frat-band R&B: They’re all here, whipped into a 13-song fireball of wide-screen vocals and meticulous guitar sizzle. … Moby Grape never became stars, but… their legend is secure.”

The Washington-bred musician was born in 1943 and participated in local Tacoma bands like the Elegants, the Incredible Kingsmen and the Frantics, the last of which located to San Jose. Several members of that band regrouped as Moby Grape in 1966.

Miller loved the band’s three-guitar approach. “When we first started rehearsing, we just sounded so good,” he said in a video interview with Saint Bryan in 2016, calling the multiply-pronged approacy “more different than anything i’d ever experienced. Three guitars — i’d barely ever layed with more than me! it was great, and right then, we knew we had something. We laughed al the way home. We said, ‘This is gonna be good.’ And it was, until some things went haywire. … We all sang, we all wrote, and we thought, ‘Hell, there’s no end to the possibilities here.’ We were all young and handsome.”

Despite the run of albums on a major label, Moby Grape ran into unusual obstacles. Skip Spence, who was the most visible of the group members — even though it unusually had several lead singer-songwriters — developed serious drug issues and ended up being institutionalized. Its lineup reduced to four, the band was offered a booking at Woodstock, but bassist Bob Mosley shocked the others by joining the Marines before they could play the festival. Even then, Moby Grape soldiered on as a trio for a time.

Miller was profiled by a local newspaper, the Inlander, in 2014, in a story that reported on his constant gigs in the area. “He never rehearses, and says most of his practice comes from teaching guitar two to three times a week for $50 a lesson,” the paper wrote. “The local gigs and lessons — combined with Social Security, a few royalties and occasional tours with aging members from ’60s supergroups like Quicksilver Messenger Service or Jefferson Airplane — all enable Miller to ‘get by,’ as he puts it.” At a local diner bar where Miller’s band played, the owner said, “A lot of people, when they find out … they come back and they’re like, ‘Are you kidding me? What’s he doing here?'”

Photos were posted on social media of Miller cheerfully being joined by friends and family in an 81st birthday party less than two weeks before his death.

After Miller’s passing, his daughter, Sarah Kabbani, also posted a message on Facebook, describing what it was like “to live with a legend…..and be the first-born kid in a wild time of some epic partying and revolutionary music.

“Late night jam sessions, getting to sneak into a gig here and there,” she continued. “Jerry (Garcia) letting me stay up after Michan (her mother) went to sleep, hiding me under pillows on the couch if she woke up, so I could stay up late with him and listen to him play. Afternoons of mowing and fluffing the lawn together. Building a giant train set in the barn. And buffing our bicycles to ride to the store for snacks. At one point I thought he was making me do too many chores. At another point I finally realized he just wanted me to do everything with him. We just saw him in SF and I’m so thankful now. He gave me a big smooch and told me I was da mos buutiful girl.”
Jerry Miller Dead: Moby Grape Guitarist Was 81

Martin Phillipps, founder of New Zealand rock band the Chills, dies at 61

Martin Phillipps, the founder of the New Zealand rock band the Chills, has died at the age of 61.

Phillipps’ death was announced on Sunday on the band’s’ social media channels.
“It is with broken hearts the family and friends of Martin Phillipps wish to advise Martin has died unexpectedly,” the post read. “The family ask for privacy at this time. Funeral arrangements will be advised in due course.”

The guitarist and lead singer founded the Chills in 1980 with his sister Rachel Phillipps on keyboards, Jane Dodd on bass, guitarist Peter Gutteridge and drummer Alan Haig.
The band soon built a devoted fanbase in New Zealand before garnering a cult following in Europe and the US. They released a number of hits, including Pink Frost, Heavenly Pop Hit, I Love My Leather Jacket and Kaleidoscope World.

Their 1990 album Submarine Bells was a commercial success, with the British music weekly Melody Maker calling it “a magical experience”. The band’s success stalled later in the decade and their US label folded.
Speaking to RNZ in 2019, Phillipps said: “No one foresaw the impact of the digital revolution, of massive changes in music, with Nirvana, with hip-hop, and all sorts of things, that we could so quickly become redundant and old-fashioned.”

During this period, Phillipps battled with drug addiction, alcoholism and hepatitis C. “It was after that, retreating to Dunedin, tail between my legs, everyone saying, ‘Oh you gave it a good go, time to get a real job,’ all sorts of things conspired, but there was some sort of breakdown, mental breakdown involved there,” he added.

The musician told the Guardian in 2014 that having hepatitis C meant he had to have a closer relationship to mortality. “I’m on the list for some of the new trial drugs, but in the meantime I’m up to stage four of the disease. Stage five is cancer. So it’s already cirrhosis of the liver, and that means I really don’t know long I’ve got,” he said.

The Chills released Silver Bullets, their first studio album in 19 years, in 2015. It was followed by their sixth studio album, Snow Bound, in 2018, and Scatterbrain, the last studio album, in 2021.

A documentary about the band, The Chills: The Triumph & Tragedy of Martin Phillipps, in 2019 shone a light on Philipps’ life, including being told he may only have months to live due to the hepatitis C he contracted in the 1990s. He had said the film forced him to look at himself closely, and open up old wounds.

The Chills’ remaining members are Callum Hampton, Todd Knudson, Erica Scally and Oli Wilson.
The band’s official website referred to Philllips as having a “single-minded determination to take quality, original NZ-sounding, melodic rock music global”.
Martin Phillipps, founder of New Zealand rock band the Chills, dies at 61 | Music | The Guardian

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jx6w2gGchoY

Irish author Edna O’Brien dies aged 93

The Irish writer Edna O’Brien, who explored the complications and contradictions of women’s lives in a literary career lasting more than half a century, has died aged 93 after a long illness, her agent has announced.

In a series of novels beginning with The Country Girls that were at first banned in Ireland but feted abroad, O’Brien gave voice to women struggling with the oppressive and hypocritical expectations of rural life. Her focus widened in later works such as House of Splendid Isolation and The Little Red Chairs, but always maintained the keen intelligence and daring that made Philip Roth once hail her as “the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English”.

Paying tribute to the author, her publisher, Faber, said she was “one of the greatest writers of our age”. “She revolutionised Irish literature, capturing the lives of women and the complexities of the human condition in prose that was luminous and spare, and which had a profound influence on so many writers who followed her.

“A defiant and courageous spirit, Edna constantly strove to break new artistic ground, to write truthfully, from a place of deep feeling. The vitality of her prose was a mirror of her zest for life: she was the very best company, kind, generous, mischievous, brave.
“Edna was a dear friend to us all, and we will miss her dreadfully. It is Faber’s huge privilege to publish her, and her bold and brilliant body of work lives on.”
Born in a village in County Clare in 1930, O’Brien was the youngest of a large family with a father who was a drinker and a gambler – a childhood she recalled as full of “money troubles, drink troubles, all sorts of troubles”. After qualifying as a pharmacist in 1950, she married the writer Ernest Gébler against her family’s wishes – a hurried decision she described in 2011 as going “from them, to him; from one house of control, to another”.

When the couple moved to London with their two sons in 1959, O’Brien started working as a reader for the publisher Hutchinson, which soon commissioned her to produce a novel.
Written in three weeks, The Country Girls crackles with wit and feeling as it follows Caithleen and Baba from dreaming of romance at their convent boarding school to abandonment in Dublin. When it was published in 1960, Kingsley Amis saluted its “unphony charm and unlaborious originality”, while it was greeted with consternation across the Irish Sea.

Writing in 2008, O’Brien said she had received anonymous letters, “all malicious”, and the “few copies purchased in Limerick were burnt after the rosary, one evening in the parish grounds, at the request of the priest”.
The novel was swiftly banned in Ireland, as were O’Brien’s next six novels, beginning with two sequels that completed The Country Girls’ inevitable trajectory: 1962’s The Lonely Girl, and 1964’s mordantly-titled Girls in Their Married Bliss.

O’Brien’s own marriage came to an end in 1967, but the fiction continued. A young girl is seduced by a priest in 1970’s A Pagan Place, a novel whose narrator addresses herself in the second person, while Time and Tide, published in 1992, offers a bleak portrait of a woman going through an awkward divorce and battling for custody of her two sons. Life as a single mother was hard, she remembered in 2011, “but I was able to do it. I seemed to have endless energy at the time: I could cook and clean, and write.”

House of Splendid Isolation, published months before the 1994 IRA ceasefire, marked a broadening of
O’Brien’s concerns, with its story of an unlikely friendship between a terrorist and an elderly widow. Down By the River tackled controversies over abortion, while Wild Decembers examined the confrontation between modernity and tradition.

A series of prizes including the 2001 Irish PEN lifetime achievement award and the 2006 Ulysses medal revealed shifting attitudes in her homeland. The transformation was complete when the Irish president, Michael D Higgins, gave her the country’s highest literary accolade, the Saoi of Aosdána, in 2015, and called her a “fearless teller of truth” who had continued to write “undaunted, sometimes by culpable incomprehension, authoritarian hostility and sometimes downright
”.
Higgins said on Sunday: “Edna O’Brien has been one of the outstanding writers of modern times, her work has been sought as model all around the world.
“Edna was a fearless teller of truths, a superb writer possessed of the moral courage to confront Irish society with realities long ignored and suppressed.
“Through that deeply insightful work, rich in humanity, Edna O’Brien was one of the first writers to provide a true voice to the experiences of women in Ireland in their different generations and played an important role in transforming the status of women across Irish society.”

Her masterpiece, according to Roth, was published later that year. The Little Red Chairs opens when a wanted Balkan war criminal turns up in “a freezing backwater that passes for a town” on the west coast of Ireland and ends among exploited migrant workers in London. Writing in the Guardian, Julie Myerson called it “utterly original, urgent, beautiful”, declaring it “hard – no, almost impossible – to believe that O’Brien is in her ninth decade, for this is absolutely the work of a writer in her prime and at the very height of her phenomenal powers”.

Speaking in 1999, O’Brien confessed she found writing very hard. “In some ways I suppose a lot of the material of my life has been ripe for literature, but a bit of a handicap for what is laughingly called everyday life,” she said. “But that’s the bargain. Mephistopheles didn’t come, you know. He was already there.”

Irish author Edna O’Brien dies aged 93 | Edna O'Brien | The Guardian

William Calley, Army officer and face of My Lai Massacre, is dead at 80

William L. Calley Jr., a junior Army officer who became the only person convicted in connection with the My Lai Massacre of 1968, when U.S. soldiers slaughtered hundreds of unarmed South Vietnamese men, women and children in one of the darkest chapters in American military history, died April 28 at a hospice center in Gainesville, Fla. He was 80.

The Washington Post obtained a copy of his death certificate from the Florida Department of Health in Alachua County. His son, Laws Calley, did not immediately respond to requests for additional information. Other efforts to reach Mr. Calley’s family were unsuccessful.

The Post was alerted to the death, which was not previously reported, by Zachary Woodward, a recent Harvard Law School graduate who said he noticed Mr. Calley’s death while looking through public records.

Although he was once the country’s most notorious Army officer, a symbol of military misconduct in a war that many considered immoral and unwinnable, Mr. Calley had lived in obscurity for decades, declining interviews while working as a jeweler in Columbus, Ga., not far from the military base where he was court-martialed and convicted in 1971.

A junior-college dropout from South Florida, he had bounced around jobs, unsuccessfully trying to enlist in the Army in 1964, before being called up two years later. As the war escalated in Vietnam, he found a home in a military that was desperately trying to replenish its lower ranks.

Mr. Calley was quickly tapped to become a junior officer, with minimal vetting, and was soon promoted to second lieutenant, commanding a platoon in Charlie Company, a unit of the Army’s Americal Division. The company sustained heavy losses in the early months of 1968, losing men to sniper fire, land mines and booby traps as the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong launched coordinated attacks in the Tet offensive.

On the morning of March 16, 1968, the unit was airlifted by helicopter to Son My, a patchwork village of rice paddies, irrigation ditches and small settlements, including a hamlet known to U.S. soldiers as My Lai 4. Over the next few hours, Mr. Calley and other soldiers in Charlie Company shot and bayoneted women, children and elderly men, destroying the village while searching for Viet Cong guerrillas and sympathizers who were said to have been hiding in the area. Homes were burned, and some women and girls were gang-raped before being killed.

An Army investigation later concluded that 347 men, women and children had been killed, including victims of another American unit, Bravo Company. A Vietnamese estimate placed the death toll at 504.

For more than a year and a half, the details of the atrocity were hidden and covered up from the public. A report to headquarters initially characterized the attack as a significant victory, claiming that 128 “enemy” fighters had been killed. Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the top commander in Vietnam, praised American forces at My Lai for dealing a “heavy blow” to the Viet Cong.

Meanwhile, Ronald Ridenhour, a helicopter gunner who was not at the scene but had heard of the killings weeks later, did his own probing. While on home leave nearly a year after the massacre, he began writing letters to top political and military leaders about the bloodbath at My Lai — providing information that was credited with sparking official investigations.

Backed with photographs and witness testimony, the Army charged Mr. Calley with premeditated murder days before his scheduled discharge.
Although a four-paragraph Associated Press article appeared in September 1969, providing Mr. Calley’s name and reporting that he was being held for allegedly murdering an unspecified number of civilians, a more complete picture of the massacre was not revealed until that November, through articles by investigative reporter Seymour M. Hersh.

Acting on a tip by an antiwar activist, Hersh worked exhaustively to track down Mr. Calley. He finally located him in the unlikeliest of places for a man facing court-martial for what at the time was believed to be 109 murders: at the senior officers’ quarters of Fort Benning, now called Fort Moore, in Georgia.

Hersh’s articles, distributed to newspapers around the country by the independent Dispatch News Service, received the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, shocked a nation that was already divided over the Vietnam War and thrust Mr. Calley into the national spotlight.

Almost from the very beginning, Mr. Calley polarized Americans who variously deemed him a war criminal or a scapegoat, a mass-murderer or an inexperienced officer made to take the fall for the actions of his superiors. Defenders argued that he had been forced into a brutal conflict with an often invisible enemy, then blamed for the horrors of the war.

To some, he seemed like a convenient target for military prosecutors, the lowest link in a chain of command that included Captain Ernest Medina, who was accused of bearing overall responsibility for the attacks, and Maj. Gen. Samuel W. Koster, the highest-ranking officer charged with trying to cover up the massacre.

Mr. Calley was convicted of murdering at least 22 noncombatants and sentenced to life at hard labor, after a military jury rejected his defense that he was just following orders. Amid appeals, he ultimately served about three years, much of it under house arrest.
“My Lai was the absolute low point in the history of the modern U.S. military,” said Pulitzer Prize-winning military correspondent Thomas E. Ricks, whose book “The Generals” traces the evolution of the post-World War II Army.
Beyond the atrocities committed by Mr. Calley, Ricks said it was important to remember “there were 1,000 causes here, bad people doing bad things up and down the chain of command,” including the “second grave sin” of the coverup.
“My Lai forced a reexamination of the U.S. Army,” Ricks noted, referring to its central role in later studies about revamping military professionalism. “It was not just that hundreds of civilians had been murdered, and a score raped, but that the acts of the day were covered up by the Army chain of command … including the destruction of documents, went all the way up to the rank of general, with two generals and three colonels implicated.”


‘Go and get them’
The attack on My Lai came a month and a half after the Tet Offensive. U.S. soldiers had visited the village a few times, interviewing residents while seeking intel about the Viet Cong, or VC. This time, Medina told his men in Charlie Company, the objective was to strike hard against a community believed to be harboring VC.
Destroy anything that is “walking, crawling or growling,” Medina declared in a pre-mission briefing, according to testimony given at Mr. Calley’s court-martial. Asked if that included women and children, he replied that according to military intelligence, ordinary villagers should be at a nearby market. Anyone left behind was either a guerrilla or a sympathizer.

“They’re all VC, now go and get them,” he said, according to trial testimony.
Around 7:30 a.m. the next morning, Mr. Calley and his platoon arrived at the village expecting heavy resistance. Instead they found a quiet community sitting down for breakfast.
Some soldiers thought it was a trap, according to court-martial accounts. Viet Cong explosives and mines had accounted for up 90 percent of American casualties in the previous months. As Mr. Calley’s men fanned out, some shot villagers while searching in vain for suspected fighters. Others used grenades to blow apart homes.

Mr. Calley’s platoon herded women, children and elderly men into groups. Accounts vary on what happened next: According to Mr. Calley, Medina grew irritated by the unit’s slow progress and told Mr. Calley to “get rid of” the civilians. Medina denied giving any order to harm civilians, although other soldiers remembered it differently, recalling that Medina made it clear that it was acceptable to “wipe the place out.” A few minutes later, Mr. Calley and a fellow soldier, Pfc. Paul Meadlo, were said to have opened fire.

At the court-martial, soldiers described a systematic slaughter of defenseless civilians. Entire families were wiped out by the attack. Witnesses said Mr. Calley shot a praying Buddhist monk and, when he saw a young boy crawling out of a ditch, threw the child back in and shot him. Pictures taken at the scene by an Army photographer, Ronald L. Haeberle, provided additional evidence of the massacre and were later published in newspapers and magazines.

The My Lai killings were further exposed in 1969 by Ridenhour. After leaving the service, he wrote to President Richard M. Nixon, Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird and members of Congress with his findings. An Army investigation ensued, leading to the indictment of more than a dozen men, but several of the cases unraveled before trial or ended without convictions.

In the end, only Mr. Calley was held legally responsible for playing a direct role in the massacre. He was convicted on March 29, 1971, after one of the longest court-martials in military history.
“My troops were getting massacred and mauled by an enemy I couldn’t see, I couldn’t feel and I couldn’t touch — that nobody in the military system ever described them as anything other than Communism,” Mr. Calley said in a statement to the court. “They didn’t give it a race, they didn’t give it a sex, they didn’t give it an age. They never let me believe it was just a philosophy in a man’s mind. That was my enemy out there.”

The outpouring of support for Mr. Calley was captured in a spoken-word song, “Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley” — “Sir, I followed all my orders and I did the best I could / It’s hard to judge the enemy and hard to tell the good” — that was performed by Terry Nelson and sold more than 1 million copies.

After his conviction, Mr. Calley was removed from the stockade on Nixon’s orders and confined to his quarters at Fort Benning. His life sentence was quickly reduced to 20 years and, in 1974, the sentence was halved again, to 10 years, after the secretary of the Army found that Mr. Calley “may have sincerely believed that he was acting in accordance with the orders he had received and that he was not aware of his responsibility to refuse an illegal order.”

Later that year, Mr. Calley was freed on bail and paroled. He seldom spoke about My Lai, although in 2009 he delivered what was reportedly his first public apology for the massacre, at a meeting of the Kiwanis Club of Greater Columbus.
“There is not a day that goes by that I do not feel remorse for what happened that day in My Lai,” he said. “I feel remorse for the Vietnamese who were killed, for their families, for the American soldiers involved and their families. I am very sorry.”
During the speech, he also said that he had just been following orders, a declaration that irritated critics who questioned whether he had experienced a change of heart.

An ‘average’ schoolboy
William Laws Calley Jr., the second of four siblings and the only son, was born in Miami on June 8, 1943. His father, a Navy veteran of World War II, sold heavy construction equipment. As the business prospered, the family began vacationing at a cottage in North Carolina, and a teenage Mr. Calley — nicknamed Rusty for his reddish-brown hair — was given his own car.

Mr. Calley was often described by peers and adults who knew him as an “average” American schoolboy: reserved, polite and pleasant but, at 5-foot-3 and 130 pounds, sometimes struggling for attention in school and social settings.
Academically, he was in a downward spiral. He was forced to repeat seventh grade after being caught cheating on an exam. He later spent two years attending military academies in Florida and Georgia before graduating from Miami Edison Senior High School in 1962 in the bottom quarter of his class.

After flunking out of Palm Beach Junior College, he supported himself with jobs as a hotel bellhop and restaurant dishwasher. During a bitter labor strike in 1963, Florida East Coast Railway hired Mr. Calley as a switchman and then promoted him to conductor. Among other incidents, Mr. Calley once let freight cars get loose and smash into a loading ramp.

Around this time, Mr. Calley’s home life grew unstable. His mother was dying of cancer, and his father, who developed diabetes, saw his business fall into bankruptcy. In 1964, William Calley first tried to enlist in the Army but was rejected because of a hearing defect.

He began drifting west and south in search of work. At one point, he was on assignment in Mexico for an American insurance investigator when he walked off the job, saying he was “bored and frustrated” and didn’t understand what he was doing. Mr. Calley left for San Francisco, where his backlog of mail began to catch up with him, including a Selective Service notice saying his earlier rejection was being reconsidered.

On his way back to Florida, his car broke down in Albuquerque. He walked into a local Army induction center, explained his situation and enlisted as a clerk-trainee in July 1966. He was soon selected for officer candidate school by a senior officer who took notice of Mr. Calley’s brief stints at military academies.

Despite the Army’s acute need for junior officers in Vietnam, historian Howard Jones wrote in his 2017 book “My Lai,” “The Citadel, West Point, and the Virginia Military Institute had been unable to fill the growing demand, and the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) had fallen out of favor on many college campuses. The army immediately needed more recruits from OCS — which opened the door to Calley.”

Mr. Calley graduated 120th in his OCS class of 156.
“One thing at OCS was nobody said, ‘Now, there will be innocent civilians there,’” Mr. Calley recalled in his 1970 memoir, “Lieutenant Calley: His Own Story,” written with journalist John Sack. “It was drummed into us, ‘Be sharp! On guard! As soon as you think these people won’t kill you, ZAP! In combat, you haven’t friends! You have enemies!’ Over and over at OCS we heard this and I told myself, I’ll act as if I’m never secure. As if everyone in Vietnam would do me in. As if everyone’s bad.”

After his release from military custody, Mr. Calley moved to Columbus and married Penny Vick, whose family owned a jewelry shop, in 1976. Smithsonian magazine later reported that their wedding guests included U.S. District Judge J. Robert Elliott, who had attempted to get Mr. Calley’s conviction overturned.

Mr. Calley and Vick had a son, Laws, and later divorced. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Calley reportedly carried an umbrella at times to prevent photographers from taking pictures of him. He wished, he said, to “sink into anonymity.”
Curiously, his death certificate matched known details about his life — including information on his birth, career, name and nickname — but featured one notable omission. On a line asking if he had ever served “in U.S. armed forces,” the answer given was “no.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/obitu...-lai-massacre/

^ I remember when all of that came to light. The world is a better place without William Calley.

A tragic chapter , the cover up philosophy is not unique to USA , loss of face and fear of superiors is a recurring thread from Stalin's NKVD ,C Mai immii or the Waffen SS.

The ability to safely challenge authority via the press , courts and similar channels is what distinguishes developed societies which oddly seem to have free medical care for all at point of use and military grade weapons restricted to the well military.

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Originally Posted by misskit

The world is a better place without William Calley.

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Guilty as hell...and a scapegoat.

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Originally Posted by david44

A tragic chapter , the cover up philosophy is not unique to USA.

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But they make a habit of it.

Pat Tillman, his mom and the 20-year torment of a friendly fire death - ESPN

Ex-Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki dies aged 56 after cancer battle

Attachment 117290


Former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki who was one of Google’s first employees has died at the age of 56 after a two year battle with cancer.

In his post sharing the news of his wife’s death, Dennis Troper said Ms Wojcicki was “not just my best friend and partner in life, but a brilliant mind, loving mother, and a dear friend to many”.

“It is with profound sadness that I share the news of Susan Wojcicki passing. My beloved wife of 26 years and mother to our five children left us today after two years of living with non-small cell lung cancer,” Mr Troper wrote in a Facebook post.

“Her impact on our family and the world was immeasurable. We are heartbroken, but grateful for the time we had with her. Please keep our family in your thoughts at this time.”

Sundar Pichai, Google chief executive, said in a blog post: “Over the last two years, even as she dealt with great personal difficulties, Susan devoted herself to making the world better through her philanthropy, including supporting research for the disease that ultimately took her life.”

Mr Pichai, added on X: “Unbelievably saddened by the loss of my dear friend Susan Wojcicki after two years of living with cancer. She is as core to the history of Google as anyone, and it’s hard to imagine the world without her.”

One of the most prominent women in tech, Ms Wojcicki joined Google in 1999 to become one of the first few employees of the web search leader, years before it acquired YouTube. Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65bn.

Before becoming CEO of YouTube in 2014, Ms Wojcicki was senior vice president for ad products at Google.

After nine years at the helm, Ms Wojcicki stepped down from her role at YouTube in 2023 to focus on “family, health, and personal projects”. She was replaced by her deputy, Neal Mohan, a senior advertising and product executive who joined Google in 2008. Ms Wojcicki at that time planned to take on an advisory role at Alphabet, Google’s parent company.

“Twenty-five years ago I made the decision to join a couple of Stanford graduate students who were building a new search engine. Their names were Larry and Sergey …. It would be one of the best decisions of my life,” Wojcicki wrote in a blog post on the day she left YouTube, referring to Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

“Today we at YouTube lost a teammate, mentor, and friend, Susan Wojcicki,” Mohan said in a post on X.

Earlier in her career, Wojcicki was credited with pushing Google executives to buy YouTube. She was named as one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2015.

Ex-Youtube CEO Susan Wojcicki dies aged 56 after cancer battle

Wally Amos, founder of "Famous Amos" cookies, dies at 88

Wallace "Wally" Amos, Jr., founder of the "Famous Amos" cookies known and beloved nationwide, died at 88 on Wednesday, his family said.


The American entrepreneur died peacefully at his home with his wife Carol by his side after a battle with dementia, Amos' children, Sarah, Michael, Gregory and Shawn, said in a statement.


Born in Tallahassee, Florida, Amos built his brand from one bakery in 1975 in Hollywood, California, and a family recipe.


"Our dad inspired a generation of entrepreneurs," his children said, adding, "With his Panama hat, kazoo, and boundless optimism, Famous Amos was a great American success story, and a source of Black pride. It's also part of our family story for which we will forever be grateful and proud."

"Big was in, but Wally Amos dared to go small and perfected the ultimate bite-size chocolate chip cookie," the brand's website says. After that, Amos and his cookies became a Hollywood success story. "Iconic musicians and other Hollywood celebrities began singing the praises of the delicious cookies from a small bakery on Sunset," the website says.


Wally's son Shawn, a blues musician and author, helped create the first shop in Hollywood with his father. Shawn Amos' book, "Cookies and Milk," published in 2022, is based in part on his experiences growing up as the son of the Famous Amos founder.

"It's a book about joy, it's a book about fathers and sons who want to be seen by each other," he said on "CBS Mornings."


Shawn said he worked the front of the store while his father baked cookies in the back.


Amos' children praised their father for teaching them the value of hard work, believing in themselves, and chasing their dreams. "He was a true original Black American hero," they said in their statement.

Wally Amos, founder of "Famous Amos" cookies, dies at 88

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Originally Posted by Happy As Larry

William Calley, Army officer and face of My Lai Massacre, is dead at 80


https://www.washingtonpost.com/obitu...-lai-massacre/

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I was in the 8th grade in a school in Tallahassee Florida when he was being tried. We had a special assembly with one student defending his actions and another saying that he should be tried. Afterwards we all publicly voted as to whether he should be found guilty or innocent. I was the only student in the entire 8th grade who raised his hand when it was time to vote 'guilty'.

I was SOOOO glad to move from the South to California the next year!

:)......


There was too much evidence for him to get off.

And he took the fall

No evidence and it would just have been another day in the paddies.


Perhaps that your class mates took that line of logic.


Terrible man.

Still got his book somewhere, which is a very interesting read

Gena Rowlands, acting powerhouse and star of movies by her director-husband, John Cassavetes, dies at 94

Attachment 117415

Gena Rowlands, hailed as one of the greatest actors to ever practice the craft and a guiding light in independent cinema, has died. She was 94.

Rowlands was a star in groundbreaking movies by her director husband, John Cassavetes, and later charmed audiences in her son's tear-jerker “The Notebook.”

Rowlands' death was confirmed Wednesday by representatives for her son, the filmmaker Nick Cassavetes. He revealed earlier this year that his mother had Alzheimer’s disease. TMZ reported that Rowlands died Wednesday at her home in Indian Wells, California.

Operating outside the studio system, the husband-and-wife team of John Cassavetes and Rowlands created indelible portraits of working-class strivers and small-timers in such films as “A Woman Under the Influence,” “Gloria” and “Faces.”

Rowlands made 10 films across four decades with Cassavetes, including “Minnie and Moskowitz” in 1971, “Opening Night” in 1977 and “Love Streams” in 1984.

She earned two Oscar nods for two of them: 1974's “A Woman Under the Influence,” in which she played a wife and mother cracking under the burden of domestic harmony, and “Gloria” in 1980, about a woman who helps a young boy escape the mob.

“He had a particular sympathetic interest in women and their problems in society, how they were treated and how they solved and overcame what they needed to, so all his movies have some interesting women, and you don’t need many,” she told the AP in 2015.

In addition to the Oscar nominations, Rowlands earned three Primetime Emmy Awards, one Daytime Emmy and two Golden Globes. She was awarded an honorary Academy Award in 2015 in recognition of her work and legacy in Hollywood.

“You know what’s wonderful about being an actress? You don’t just live one life,” she said at the podium. “You live many lives.”

A new generation was introduced to Rowlands in her son's blockbuster “The Notebook,” in which she played a woman whose memory is ravaged, looking back on a romance for the ages. Her younger self was portrayed by Rachel McAdams. She also appeared in Nick Cassavetes' "Unhook the Stars" in 1996.

In her later years, Rowlands made several appearances in films and TV, including in “The Skeleton Key” and the detective series “Monk.” Her last appearance in a movie was in 2014, playing a retiree who befriends her gay dance instructor in “Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks.”

One of her career triumphs was 1974's "Woman Under the Influence," playing a lower middle-class housewife who, the actress said, "was totally vulnerable and giving; she had no sense of her own worth." In "Gloria" (1980) she portrayed a faded showgirl menaced by her ex-boyfriend, a mobster boss. She was Oscar-nominated as best actress for both performances.

She and Cassavetes met at the American School of Dramatic Arts when both their careers were beginning. They married four months later. In 1960 Cassavetes used his earnings from the TV series "Johnny Stacatto" to finance his first film, "Shadows." Partly improvised, shot with natural light on New York locations with a $40,000 budget, it was applauded by critics for its stark realism.

Rowlands became a seasoned actor through live television drama and tours in "The Seven Year Itch" and "Time for Ginger" as well as off-Broadway.

Gena Rowlands, acting powerhouse and movie star, dies at 94

Gloria was a bloody good film

Alain Delon: French movie actor, who starred in Purple Noon and The Leopard, dies at 88

Attachment 117480


French actor Alain Delon has died at the age of 88 after suffering from ill health, his family has announced.


The star was known for his roles in films such as Purple Noon in 1960, The Leopard in 1963, and Le Samourai in 1967.


A family statement said: "Alain Fabien, Anouchka, Anthony, as well as (his dog) Loubo, are deeply saddened to announce the passing of their father.


"He passed away peacefully in his home in Douchy, surrounded by his three children and his family."


He had been in poor health since suffering a stroke in 2019 and rarely left his estate in Douchy, in France's Val de Loire region.


Delon's last major public appearance was to receive an honorary Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival in May 2019.


With his striking blue eyes, the actor was sometimes referred to as the "French Frank Sinatra" for his handsome looks - a comparison Delon disliked.


Directors from Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino to Hong Kong's John Woo have acknowledged a debt to Delon's performance as the silent killer in Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai, which set the template for one of Hollywood's favourite tropes - the mysterious, cerebral hitman.


A huge star in France and Japan, Delon never made it as big in Hollywood, despite starring alongside American cinema giants, including Burt Lancaster when the Frenchman played apprentice-hitman Scorpio in the 1973 film of the same name.


Off screen, he courted controversy with his outspoken views, including when he said he regretted the abolition of the death penalty and spoke disparagingly of gay marriage, which was legalised in France in 2013.


Delon publicly defended the far-right National Front and phoned founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, an old friend, to congratulate her when the party did well in the 2014 local elections.


Towards the end of his life, Delon was at the centre of a family feud over his care, which made headlines in the French media, and in April 2024 a judge placed him under "reinforced curatorship", meaning he no longer had full freedom to manage his assets.


Alain Delon: French movie actor, who starred in Purple Noon and The Leopard, dies at 88

Greg Kihn, he of Jeopardy fame, of Alzheimers aged 75.

Greg Kihn of 80s’ Jeopardy song fame dies aged 75 - LBC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43_GqFW7iYc

First person I remember seeing on US tv.

Phil Donahue is no longer among us

The man who was really responsible for bringing us Springer and Jeremy Kyle.

Probably not the legacy he wanted.

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Talk show icon Phil Donahue dies at 88

Attachment 117535


OHIO - Phil Donahue, who flipped the script for daytime television by tackling controversial issues in front of a live audience, has died following a long illness, his family announced in a statement on Monday. He was 88. “Donahue died Sunday night at home surrounded by his family, including his wife of 44 years, Marlo Thomas, his sister, his children, grandchildren and his beloved golden retriever, Charlie,” his family said in a statement to CNN. The news of his passing was met with surprise and grief by many, including fellow talk show host Oprah Winfrey, who paid tribute to Donahue on social media. “There wouldn’t have been an Oprah Show without Phil Donahue being the first to prove that daytime talk and women watching should be taken seriously,” Winfrey wrote. “He was a pioneer. I’m glad I got to thank him for it. Rest in peace Phil.” The legendary host fronted “The Phil Donahue Show” for nearly three decades, from 1967 to 1996. Even though the show ended 28 years ago, Donahue was in the national spotlight as recently as May, when he and 18 other honorees received the Medal of Freedom from President Joe Biden. The award is the nation’s highest civilian honor. Phillip John Donahue was born on December 21, 1935, in Cleveland, Ohio. He honed his broadcasting skills as a radio and TV news anchor in Ohio. Donahue’s big break came in 1967, when Dayton’s WLWD TV launched “The Phil Donahue Show.” The host came up with the groundbreaking idea of asking the studio audience for questions. The show earned a reputation as a forum for hot-button topics at the time, like equal rights for women. The show moved to Chicago and then New York, while expanding to more stations across the US. National syndication led to higher-profile guests – including his future wife, actress Marlo Thomas. In 1977, audiences watched the couple seem to fall in love live on the show. “You are really fascinating,” Donahue told Thomas on stage, reaching for her hand. “But you are wonderful,” Thomas replied, clutching the host’s hand. “I said it when we are off the air. And I want to say you are loving and generous and you like women and it’s a pleasure. And whoever is the woman in your life is very lucky.”


Talk show icon Phil Donahue dies at 88

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Sven Goran Eriksson dead at 76.

Attachment 117717

Sven-Goran Eriksson: Former England manager dies aged 76 | World News | Sky News

Brazilian Bossa Nova Musician Sergio Mendes Dies at 83

The family of Brazilian Bossa Nova musician Sergio Mendes confirmed with The Guardian on Friday that the pioneering pianist had died of health complications borne out of long Covid. “His wife and musical partner for the past 54 years, Gracinha Leporace Mendes, was by his side, as were his loving children,” the statement read. “Mendes last performed in November 2023 to sold out and wildly enthusiastic houses in Paris, London and Barcelona.” The family added that “his health had been challenged by the effects of long-term Covid.” Bossa Nova legend João Bosco praised Mendes as “thinker of Brazilian music” beyond his instrumental talents. Mendes had worked alongside Herb Alpert, his “brother from another country,” to bring the Bossa Nova sound to mass market in the 1960s. “He was a true friend and extremely gifted musician who brought Brazilian music in all its iterations to the entire world with elegance [and] joy,” Alpert said of Mendes on Instagram.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/brazil...=home?ref=home


https://youtu.be/2GZwbKnjRyE

Or the version without the talentless "rapper" shite...

Honestly misskit :tieme:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrZBiqK0p9E

^ That was from Mendes’ last album! He done it.

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Originally Posted by misskit

^ That was from Mendes’ last album! He done it.

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Had to pay for all that long covid treatment somehow I suppose.