The RIP Famous Person Thread

[harrybarracuda]

"Legendary Crooner" say many reports. Yes indeed.

[S Landreth]

Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being author dies aged 94

Czech writer Milan Kundera, who explored being and betrayal over half a century in poems, plays, essays and novels including The Unbearable Lightness of Being, has died aged 94 after a prolonged illness, Anna Mrazova, spokeswoman for the Milan Kundera Library, has confirmed.

Famously leaving his homeland for France in 1975 after earlier being expelled from the Czechoslovakian Communist party for “anti-communist activities”, Kundera spent 40 years living in exile in Paris after his Czech citizenship was revoked in 1979. There he wrote his most famous works, including Nesnesitelná lehkost bytí (The Unbearable Lightness of Being) and later left behind his mother tongue to write novels in French, beginning with 1995’s La lenteur (Slowness) and his final novel, 2014’s The Festival of Insignificance. He was often cited as a contender for the Nobel prize in literature.

Born on 1 April 1929 in Brno, Kundera studied music with his father, a noted pianist and musicologist, before turning to writing, becoming a lecturer in world literature at Prague’s film academy in 1952. Despite rejecting the socialist realism required of writers in 50s Czechoslovakia, his literary reputation grew with the publication of a series of poems and plays, including an ode to the communist hero Julius Fučík, Poslední máj (The Last May), published in 1955.

He later rejected these early works, saying that he was “working in many different directions – looking for my voice, my style and myself” until finding his signature manner in a story he wrote in 1959. Já, truchlivý Bůh (I, the Mournful God) maps out the bittersweet territory of Kundera’s later work, a twisted version of the Cyrano story where the narrator persuades his friend to play a trick on the empty-headed girl who has rejected him, leaving all three frustrated in love.

An enthusiastic member of the Communist party in his youth, Kundera was expelled from the party twice, once after “anti-communist activities” in 1950, and again in 1970 during the clampdown that followed the 1968 Prague Spring, of which he was one of the leading voices, publicly calling for freedom of speech and equal rights for all. His first novel, 1967’s Žert (The Joke), was inspired by the period and became a great success. A polyphonic examination of fate and rationality set around a joke about Trotsky that a student writes to impress a girl, the novel vanished from bookshops and libraries after Russian tanks arrived in Wenceslas Square. Kundera found himself blacklisted and fired from his teaching job. Working in small-town cabarets as a jazz trumpeter, he found artistic freedom at last – the impossibility of publication had, in a way, lifted the burden of censorship from his shoulders.

After losing hope that Czechoslovakia would ever reform, he moved to France in 1975, lost his Czech nationality in 1979 and became a French citizen in 1981. Championed by his friend Philip Roth, who published Kundera as part of his series Writers from the Other Europe, it was the publication of The Unbearable Lightness of Being in 1984 that confirmed his status as an international star. Set in the heady atmosphere of Prague in 1968, the novel follows two couples as they struggle with politics and infidelity, examining the tension between freedom and responsibility. Philip Kaufman’s 1988 film adaptation, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche, ensured Kundera’s ascension into the literary stratosphere.

However, the author was never satisfied with Kaufman’s simplifications of the novel’s multilayered structure. He became increasingly mistrustful of the media, arguing: “An author, once quoted by a journalist, is no longer master of his word … And this, of course, is unacceptable.”

Speaking to Roth in 1980 in the New York Times, Kundera lamented that he felt “the novel has no place” in the world, saying “the totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions”.

He continued: “It seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than to ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.”

Nesmrtelnost (Immortality), Kundera’s last novel written in Czech, was published in 1988. This philosophical novel of ideas opened the way for three short novels written in French – La Lenteur (1995), L’Identité (1998) and L’Ignorance (2000) – meditating on nostalgia, memory and the possibility of a homecoming.

Accused in 2008 of betraying a Czech airman working for US intelligence more than 50 years earlier, Kundera broke his media silence to issue a furious denial to the Czech news agency CTK, saying he was “totally astonished” and calling the allegations “the assassination of an author”. An open letter signed by Roth, Salman Rushdie, JM Coetzee and other eminent writers noted that despite the claims of the magazine that published the accusation, “a witness statement by an eminent Prague scientist clears [Kundera] of any guilt. Too often, the press has spread this defamatory rumour without taking care to report the evidence refuting it.”

A final brief novel, La festa dell’insignificanza (The Festival of Insignificance), appeared in Italian translation in 2013. It divided reviewers when it appeared in English, some praising its crisply elegant humour and others judging that it marked the end of “a series of retreats into mere cleverness”.

After 40 years away, apart from brief and low-key visits to their homeland, Kundera and his wife Vera’s Czech citizenship was finally restored in 2019, a year after they met with the Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš, who described the meeting as a “great honour”. A year later, Petr Drulàk, the Czech Republic’s ambassador to France, delivered Kundera’s citizenship certificate, describing it as “an important symbolic gesture, a symbolic return of the greatest Czech writer in the Czech Republic.” He said Kundera was “in a good mood, just took the document and said thank you.”

[Bob Mason]

Vince Hill died yesterday.

Vince Hill - Wikipedia

[harrybarracuda]

Ah how my old mum would swoon whenever he was on the telly.

[S Landreth]

Star bodybuilder Gustavo Badell dead at 50

Star bodybuilder Gustavo Badell, known as ‘The Freakin’ Rican,’ dead at 50

Star bodybuilder Gustavo Badell, commonly known as “The Freakin’ Rican,” died, his friend announced on Thursday.

Badell was 50.

The details of Badell’s death are not yet known.

“I woke up this morning to information that Gustavo has passed away,” Eddie Abbew, Badell’s friend and co-competitor, released in a statement. “My heart goes out to his family and friends.

“Gustavo was ten years younger than me. It is always sad when a young person is taken away long before their time. Rest in peace Gustavo and know that you will be missed.”

Badell competed against some of the top bodybuilders of all time, and notably twice — in 2004 and 2005 — finished in third place in the Mr. Olympia competition.

Born in Venezuela, Badell launched his bodybuilding career at 19 and moved to Puerto Rico in his early 20s, according to The Daily Mail.

In addition to the Mr. Olympia competition, Badell also competed in the prestigious Arnold Classic, World Pro Championships, Ironman Pro and the Atlantic City Pro.

He retired in 2012, and had since been active online promoting personal fitness.

MuscleTech, a supplement company Badell had worked with, expressed its condolences.

“Everyone at Team MuscleTech would like to send their condolences to the Badell family and Gustavo Badell fans across the globe,” the company tweeted on Thursday. “Team MuscleTech proudly worked with Gustavo for many years and it was an honor to be represented by a man who was a consummate professional and one of the hardest working bodybuilders of his generation. Today we remember the lives Gustavo touched and the legacy he left.”

Badell was the company’s 2009 magazine cover model.

[dirk diggler]

He had kidney problems but died of a stroke.

Died on the 12th July.

[Bob Mason]

Trevor Francis Engish Footballer Dies Suddenly.

Trevor Francis: Ex-England player and Britain's first £1m footballer dies aged 69 - BBC Sport

[Bob Mason]

Another footballer dead !

Chris Bart-Williams: Former midfielder dies aged 49 - BBC Sport

[helge]

So Sineah O'Connor died

[Bob Mason]

Irish singer Sinead O'''Connor dies aged 56 - BBC News

[misskit]

Her tormented soul will get some rest.

[beachbound]

Her tormented soul will get some rest.

True. Still, far too young.

RIP

[snakeeyes]

[harrybarracuda]

Bo Goldman, Oscar-Winning Screenwriter on ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ and ‘Melvin and Howard,’ Dies at 90



Bo Goldman, the late-blooming guru of screenwriting who received Academy Awards for his work on One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Melvin and Howard, has died. He was 90.

Goldman died Tuesday in Helendale, California, his son-in-law, Tár director Todd Field, told The New York Times.

Goldman’s first screenplay was, years after he wrote it, directed by Alan Parker for Shoot the Moon (1982), which featured Diane Keaton and Albert Finney in a raw, seriocomic drama about a disintegrating marriage.

He also co-wrote the Mark Rydell-directed rock drama The Rose (1979), starring Bette Midler in an Oscar-nominated turn, and Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman (1992), which netted him his third Academy Award nom (and Al Pacino the best actor Oscar, too).

Goldman was one of the handful of screenwriters — Paddy Chayefsky, Francis Ford Coppola, Horton Foote, William Goldman, Billy Wilder and Joel and Ethan Coen among them — to win Academy Awards for both original and adapted screenplay.

Early in his career, the New Yorker wrote lyrics for a Broadway musical produced by Jule Styne and directed by Abe Burrows and served as an associate producer and script editor alongside Fred Coe, his mentor, on the prestigious CBS anthology series Playhouse 90.

His characters, Goldman once said, are “people who have a kind of courage and a kind of aristocracy of the heart,” and he created many of them on a Hermes typewriter that he bought in Malibu for $99.

In 1998, the Writers Guild of America honored him with its Laurel Award for career achievement, and Vulture in 2017 placed him 28th on its list of the best screenwriters of all time.

Bo Goldman Dead: Cuckoo’s Nest, Melvin and Howard Screenwriter Was 90 – The Hollywood Reporter

[S Landreth]

Josephine Chaplin, actress and daughter of Charlie Chaplin, dies aged 74

Josephine Chaplin appeared as a child in 'Limelight' with her legendary father, followed by 'The Canterbury Tales,' 'Escape to the Sun, and 'Hemingway.'

Josephine Chaplin, an actress and the sixth of 11 children fathered by screen legend Charlie Chaplin, died 13 July in Paris, her family announced. She was 74.

A cause of death was not immediately released.

She was born in Santa Monica, California, on 28 March 1949, the third of eight children of Charlie Chaplin and his fourth wife, Oona O’Neill, the British actress and daughter of Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O’Neill.

She first appeared on screen aged three, in Limelight, the 1952 film written, directed by and starring her father. She also appeared in his A Countess from Hong Kong, in 1967. In 1972, she played May in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s X-rated The Canterbury Tales.

Chaplin starred in Menahem Golan’s Escape to the Sun (1972), about a group of people attempting to leave the Soviet Union to escape antisemitism and political repression. She also appeared films like L’odeur des fauves (1972), Daniel Petrie’s The Bay Boy (1984), and with Klaus Kinski in a German-language version of Jack the Ripper (1976).

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Josephine Chaplin was a longtime resident of Paris, Chaplin did most of her acting in French features, among them Nuits rouges (1974) and À l’ombre d’un été (1976).

Josephine managed the Chaplin office in Paris on behalf of her siblings for years. Her father died in December 1977 at age 88. Variety reported at the time that Oona and seven of their children were at his bedside when he died.


Josephine was married to Greek businessman Nikki Sistovaris from 1969 until their 1977 divorce, then lived with French actor Maurice Ronet until his 1983 death. Her second husband was archaeologist Jean-Claude Gardin; they were together from 1989 until his 2013 death.

She is survived by siblings Geraldine, Michael, Victoria, Jane, Annette, Eugene and Christopher, and sons Charly, Julien and Arthur.

[harrybarracuda]

The Eagles announce the death of founding member Randy Meisner at 77



NEW YORK — Randy Meisner, a founding member of the Eagles who added high harmonies to such favorites as “Take It Easy” and “The Best of My Love” and stepped out front for the waltz-time ballad “Take It to the Limit,” has died, the band said Thursday.
Meisner died Wednesday night in Los Angeles of complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, the Eagles said in a statement. He was 77.
The bassist had endured numerous afflictions in recent years and personal tragedy in 2016 when his wife, Lana Rae Meisner, accidentally shot herself and died. Meanwhile, Randy Meisner had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had severe issues with alcohol, according to court records and comments made during a 2015 hearing in which a judge ordered Meisner to receive constant medical care.
Called “the sweetest man in the music business” by former bandmate Don Felder, the baby-faced Meisner joined Don Henley, Glenn Frey and Bernie Leadon in the early 1970s to form a quintessential Los Angeles band and one of the most popular acts in history.
“Randy was an integral part of the Eagles and instrumental in the early success of the band,” the Eagles’ statement said. “His vocal range was astonishing, as is evident on his signature ballad, ‘Take It to the Limit.’”
Evolving from country rock to hard rock, the Eagles turned out a run of hit singles and albums over the next decade, starting with “Take It Easy” and continuing with “Desperado,” “Hotel California” and “Life In the Fast Lane” among others. Although chastised by many critics as slick and superficial, the Eagles released two of the most popular albums of all time, “Hotel California” and “Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975),” which with sales at 38 million the Recording Industry Association of America ranked with Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” as the No. 1 seller.


Led by singer-songwriters Henley and Frey, the Eagles were initially branded as “mellow” and “easy listening.” But by their third album, the 1974 release “On the Border,” they had added a rock guitarist, Felder, and were turning away from country and bluegrass.
Leadon, an old-fashioned bluegrass picker, was unhappy with the new sound and left after the 1975 album “One of These Nights.” (He was replaced by another rock guitarist, Joe Walsh.) Meisner stayed on through the 1976 release of “Hotel California,” the band’s most acclaimed record, but was gone soon after. His departure, ironically, was touched off by the song he cowrote and was best known for, “Take It to the Limit.”
A shy Nebraskan torn between fame and family life, Meisner had been ill and homesick during the “Hotel California” tour (his first marriage was breaking up) and was reluctant to have the spotlight for “Take It to the Limit,” a showcase for his nasally tenor. His objections during a Knoxville, Tennessee, concert in the summer of 1977 so angered Frey that the two argued backstage and Meisner left soon after. His replacement, Timothy B. Schmit, remained with the group over the following decades, along with Henley, Walsh and Frey, who died in 2016.
As a solo artist, Meisner never approached the success of the Eagles, but did have hits with “Hearts On Fire” and “Deep Inside My Heart” and played on records by Walsh, James Taylor and Dan Fogelberg among others. Meanwhile, the Eagles ended a 14-year hiatus in 1994 and toured with Schmit even though Meisner had played on all but one of their earlier studio albums. He did join group members past and present in 1998 when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and performed “Take It Easy” and “Hotel California.” For a decade, he was part of World Classic Rockers, a touring act that at various times included Donovan, Spencer Davis and Denny Laine.

Randy Meisner dies; Eagles co-founder sang 'Take It to the Limit'

[S Landreth]

He had kidney problems but died of a stroke.

Died on the 12th July.

Because the article I posted didn’t mention how he passed away, my first thought was steroids.

Maybe steroids had have something to do with his passing.

[S Landreth]

Pee-wee Herman actor and creator Paul Reubens dies from cancer at 70

[misskit]

Sad. Pee-wee was so cute. Loved his tv show.

[S Landreth]

I enjoyed the character he portrayed in Euphoria.

Euphoria’ actor Angus Cloud dead at 25

Angus Cloud, an actor from hit HBO drama series “Euphoria,” has died at the age of 25.

Multiple media outlets Monday reported the actor’s death. The actor’s representatives told NBC News that Cloud died at his family’s home in Oakland, Calif.

In a statement, Cloud’s family said that the actor struggled “intensely” with the death of his father, who was buried a week ago.

“It is with the heaviest heart that we had to say goodbye to an incredible human today,” Cloud’s family said in a statement to Variety.

“The only comfort we have is knowing Angus is now reunited with his dad, who was his best friend. Angus was open about his battle with mental health and we hope that his passing can be a reminder to others that they are not alone and should not fight this on their own in silence.”

“We hope the world remembers him for his humor, laughter and love for everyone,” the family’s statement added. “We ask for privacy at this time as we are still processing this devastating loss.”

Cloud gained recognition for his portrayal of Fezco, a teenage drug dealer who took care of his ailing grandmother, on “Euphoria,” becoming a fan favorite with viewers of the program.

“We are incredibly saddened to learn of the passing of Angus Cloud. He was immensely talented and a beloved part of the HBO and Euphoria family,” the “Euphoria” account posted Monday on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter.

“We extend our deepest condolences to his friends and family during this difficult time.”

Cloud’s acting credits include 2021’s “North Hollywood” and “The Line,” which premiered this year, Variety reported. The actor also appeared in several music videos, including Noah Cyrus’s “All Three,” Juice WRLD’s “Cigarettes” and Becky G and Karol G’s “MAMIII.”

Stars payed tribute to the late actor, including his Euphoria co-star Javon Walton, who portrayed Fezco’s adopted brother Ashtray in the series.

“[R]est easy brother,” Walton wrote in an Instagram post.

[cyrille]

Pee-wee was so cute.

Interesting description of a guy who was arrested for possessing child pornography and for indecent exposure in a cinema.

'Damn creepy' would be nearer the mark, imho.

[misskit]

For Christ’s sake. He was jerking off in a porn cinema. I would think it a rather common occurrence there.

Read about what happened with the child pornography charge here. Pee-wee Herman Actor Paul Reubens' Life, Career and Controversies Revisited

[harrybarracuda]

For Christ’s sake. He was jerking off in a porn cinema. I would think it a rather common occurrence there.

That is rather creepy for a children's entertainer don't you think?

[S Landreth]

Sad. Pee-wee was so cute. Loved his tv show.

I never watched a full episode (stepdaughter would watch it) and happy my daughter was too young to see it.

Some people did enjoy it.

TV Guide Names the Top Cult Shows Ever

12) Pee-Wee's Playhouse (1986-1991)

a cult show

[helge]

For Christ’s sake. He was jerking off in a porn cinema. I would think it a rather common occurrence there.

For fucks sake, Misskit.

Btw.

Do they play the national anthems in those...theaters ?