The RIP Famous Person Thread

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• Francoise Bornet, Icon of the Timeless Parisian Kiss, Dies at 93

Françoise Bornet, the woman immortalized in Robert Doisneau's iconic Parisian kiss photograph, has passed away at 93. Her spontaneous embrace captured in 1950 became a symbol of romance and one of the most celebrated images of Paris.

At the age of 93, Françoise Bornet, known for her role in one of Paris's most iconic photographs, The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville by Robert Doisneau, has passed away. Despite not being widely recognized by name, Bornet's depiction in a romantic embrace with her boyfriend at the time in 1950 became a symbol of the city's charm.

As a 20-year-old drama student, Françoise Bornet, then Françoise Delbart, and her boyfriend Jacques Carteaud, also an acting student, caught the attention of Doisneau in a Paris café. Doisneau, on assignment for Life magazine, was captivated by their affection and requested to photograph them, resulting in a series of images across Paris.

The photograph initially appeared in Life magazine but gained significant popularity in the 1980s, becoming a nostalgic symbol of youthful romance in Paris. The image, featured on various merchandise, sparked legal disputes when multiple French couples claimed to be the photographed pair, though these claims were ultimately dismissed.

Bornet, who pursued an acting career and later married someone other than Carteaud, sold an original copy of the photo in 2005, which fetched over €150,000 at auction. The story of the photo, its subjects, and Doisneau's broader work, including his photography in Paris and Palm Springs, is featured in an ongoing exhibition in Nice titled "Robert Doisneau: The Marvelous Everyday."

Shangri-Las Lead Singer Mary Weiss Dies at 75

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Mary Weiss, the lead singer and focal point of the Shangri-Las — one of the truly legendary girl groups of the early 1960s with hits like “Leader of the Pack,” “Great Big Kiss,” “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” and “Heaven Only Knows” — has died. Her death was confirmed to Rolling Stone by Miriam Linna of Norton Records, who released Weiss’ only solo album in 2007. No cause of death was cited; Weiss was 75.
Along with the Ronettes, the Shangri-Las epitomize the girl group era more than any other. Weiss was at the center of their sound and look, with a tart, youthful voice that burst out of transistor and car radios and long blonde hair that made her the object of countless crushes during the era.
With a battery of killer pop songs written by George “Shadow” Morton, Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry and produced by Morton, their heyday was brief — just 1964 and ’65 — but their impact was indelible. They pioneered the teen-death epic with “Leader of the Pack” — which spawned countless imitations and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — and their songs harbored a nuanced but torrid sexuality: During the call-and-answer segment of “Great Big Kiss,” Weiss’ bandmates are asking questions about her squeeze: “Is he tall?,” they inquire; “I have to look up,” she replies. While the entire girl group sound was crushed by the British Invasion and the ’60s rock movement, the Shangri-Las cast a long shadow: Within just a few years, the New York Dolls — arguably the most influential group on punk rock — were covering “Great Big Kiss” and singing the Shangri-Las’ praises.
The group’s tough-but-vulnerable New York City girls image was genuine. Growing up in Queens, Weiss and her sister Betty Weiss attended the same high school as their future bandmates, twins Margie Ganser and Mary-Ann Ganser. They began performing at local nightclubs in 1963 where they caught the attention of producer Artie Ripp. He arranged the group’s first record deal with Kama Sutra, leading to their first recording in December 1963, “Simon Says.” Later, Phil Spector associate “Shadow” Morton tapped the girls to perform and record his song “Remember (Walking in the Sand),” which proved to be fruitful for the group when Red Bird label hired Morton.
After signing the Shangri-Las to a recording contract, Red Bird released “Remember (Walking in the Sand)” to high acclaim in the summer of 1964. That same year, the Shangri-Las’ dropped “Leader of the Pack,” which topped the charts and became a defining anthem for the band. Not too soon after, Betty left the band, and the Shangri-Las continued as a trio, touring throughout 1965 and 1966.
Some years after Red Bird closed its doors in 1966, the Shangri-Las disbanded. Weiss launched her solo career decades later in 2007 with her first and last solo album “Dangerous Game,” a Norton Records release.

Mary Weiss, Shangri-Las Lead Singer, Dies at 75

Tisa Farrow Dead: Actor and Mia Farrow's Sister Was 72

Tisa Farrow, an actor and sister of Mia Farrow, died in her sleep on Jan. 10 in Rutland, Vermont. She was 72.

Her sister Mia shared the news in a post on Instagram, writing: “If there is a Heaven, undoubtedly my beautiful sister Tisa is being welcomed there. She was the best of us – I have never met a more generous and loving person. She loved life and never complained. Ever. She was a nurse for 27 years, a wonderful sister to Steffi, Prudence and me, a devoted mother to Jason, who died in Iraq, Bridget and little grandson Kylor – the lights of her life.”

Farrow was born Theresa Magdalena Farrow in Los Angeles to actor Maureen O’Sullivan and film director John Farrow and was the youngest of seven siblings. She was the subject of a New York Times profile in 1970, in which she discussed her family connections in the entertainment industry.

“None of the girls are alike—but we all like each other,” she told the Times. “Mia is the strongest. She has a very strong character and is unsinkable.”

As for herself, Farrow was keen to proclaim that being the youngest informed her identity. “Oh, I’m the baby,” she said. “Even when mom introduces me to people, she calls, ‘Baby, come here baby.’

Farrow got her acting start in the 1970 drama film “Homer,” in which she played Laurie Grainger, the girlfriend of high school graduate Homer (Don Scardino). She secured the role after the producer, Steve North, said that he wanted an actor who looked like her. When getting into acting, Farrow was adamant that she had “no advantages,” even given her family status. In fact, she said, it was more of an impediment.

“I spent a long time going around town trying out for commercials, and I didn’t get one. I would always run into some career woman who disliked me right away because she didn’t like my sister Mia,” she said to the Times.

After her role in “Homer,” Farrow went on to star in crime drama film “And Hope to Die” in 1972 and romantic drama “Some Call It Loving” in 1972. She later made appearances in a slew of other films around the 1970s such as 1976’s “Strange Shadows in an Empty Room,” 1978’s “Fingers” and 1979’s “Search and Destroy.” She also made a cameo appearance in Woody Allen’s “Manhattan” in 1979 as a party guest.

She is survived by her daughter, Bridget; her grandson, Kylor; and her siblings Mia, Prudence, Stephanie and John.

Long-time Wimbledon tournament referee Alan Mills has died at the age of 88

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Long-time Wimbledon tournament referee Alan Mills has died at the age of 88, the ATP Tour has announced.
Mills served as the All-England Club's referee from 1983 to 2005, earning the nickname of 'Rain Man' given it was his call as to whether or not to suspend play during inclement weather.
In a statement confirming Mills died on Thursday, the ATP described him as having "an impeccable character and integrity" while another former Wimbledon referee, Gerry Armstrong, said: "Alan was a great influence on myself and many officials around the world.

"He was always helpful and encouraging during the years we worked together at Wimbledon and on the ATP Tour. It was a great honour to work alongside him in professional tennis for many decades."
Former Wimbledon referee Gerry Armstrong said: "Alan was a great influence on myself and many officials around the world. He was always helpful and encouraging during the years we worked together at Wimbledon and on the ATP Tour. It was a great honour to work alongside him in professional tennis for many decades."
Prior to his off-court role, Mills had been a player and coach himself, reaching Wimbledon's fourth round on two occasions, while he also made the third round of the French Open twice.

Long-time Wimbledon tournament referee Alan Mills has died at the age of 88 | Tennis News | Sky Sports

• Pioneering transplant surgeon Sir Roy Calne dies aged 93

Professor Sir Roy Calne, the pioneering transplant surgeon who carried out the first liver transplant in the UK during his time at Cambridge, has died aged 93.

Professor Calne pursued a career as a transplant surgeon after his experience as a medical student at Guy’s Hospital in the 1950s, when he was told there was nothing that could be done for a man dying of kidney failure.

He was appointed to the position of Professor of Surgery at the University of Cambridge in 1965, where he remained until 1998. He established the kidney transplant programme at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, now part of Cambridge University Hospitals (CUH) NHS Foundation Trust.

On 2 May 1968, Professor Calne performed the first successful liver transplant in Europe. Almost two decades later, in 1986, he would go on to carry out the world’s first liver, heart and lung transplant together with Professor John Wallwork at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge. Professor Wallwork described Professor Calne as "a giant in the transplant world and an innovative surgeon".

Professor Calne was a pioneer in immunosuppression – the use of drugs to dampen the response of the immune system in order to prevent the body from rejecting transplanted organs, a potentially fatal complication. This would go on to revolutionise transplantation. He was among the first to introduce the immunosuppressant drug cyclosporin into routine clinical care, for which he shared the prestigious Lasker Award in 2012.

Despite retiring from the Chair of Surgery at the University of Cambridge in 1998, he continued to perform kidney transplants until well into his seventies, and remained active in research into his eighties.

Professor Deborah Prentice, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, said: “Professor Calne was a true pioneer, driven by the desire to help his patients. His work here in Cambridge as a scientist and clinician has saved many thousands of lives and continues to have a major impact worldwide. We are saddened by his loss and pay tribute to his extraordinary achievements.”

Patrick Maxwell, Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge, added: “Sir Roy was a brilliant man who made a series of major breakthroughs in transplant surgery. His work has transformed the lives of countless patients around the world.”

Professor Calne was a Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, from 1965-1998. Following his retirement, he was made an Honorary Fellow. In 2018, he attended celebrations at the College to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his pioneering liver transplant surgery, where he was able to meet patients and colleagues from a career spanning six decades. To mark the anniversary, he helped launch a £250,000 appeal by Addenbrooke’s Charitable Trust to trial and run a new perfusion machine, which would allow more donated organs to be rendered suitable for transplantation. In 2021, the Addenbrooke’s Transplant Unit was named after him.

Dr Mike More, Chair of CUH, said: “Sir Roy leaves behind a truly amazing legacy and many of our staff will remember him with fondness for his vision and genuine kindness. We will all miss him very much.”

Strange case this one, I remember a Netflix documentary on the murder a while back.

He was convicted of her murder in France in absentia but the Irish always refused to extradite him, and it wasn't a jury trial.

There was also some murkiness afoot about the Gardai pressuring a witness to identify him as having been at the scene.

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Man convicted of French woman's murder dies aged 66

Sophie Toscan du Plantier murder: Court convicts Ian Bailey - BBC News

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Peter Crombie, a Menacing Presence on ‘Seinfeld,’ Dies at 71

Peter Crombie, the actor who was probably best known for playing the role of “Crazy” Joe Davola on five episodes of the hit television sitcom “Seinfeld,” died on Wednesday in a health care facility in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 71.

He had been recovering from unspecified surgery, said his ex-wife, Nadine Kijner, who confirmed his death.

In his role as Joe Davola, Mr. Crombie played a temperamental character who stalks Jerry — a semi-fictionalized version of the comedian Jerry Seinfeld — and develops a deep hatred of him.

Tall and lanky, Mr. Crombie’s character had a flat, borderline menacing affect and an unblinking 1,000-yard stare. In the series, he also stalked the tough New Yorker Elaine, in one case plastering a wall of his apartment with black-and-white surveillance photos of her.

Aside from his part in “Seinfeld,” Mr. Crombie also had roles in the movies “Seven” (1995), “Rising Sun” (1993) and “Born on the Fourth of July” (1989), among other acting television and movie credits.

Mr. Crombie was born on June 26, 1952, and grew up in a neighborhood outside of Chicago.

His father was an art teacher, and his mother taught home economics, Ms. Kijner said. Mr. Crombie trained at the Yale School of Drama before moving to New York.

Mr. Crombie and Ms. Kijner met in Boston in the late 1980s before marrying in 1991. Though they divorced after about six years of marriage, the two remained friends.

“He was like a rock,” she said. “He was someone you could always call and lean on.”

Ms. Kijner said Mr. Crombie is survived by a brother, Jim. She said Mr. Crombie stepped back from acting around 2000, and worked on his other passions, one of which was writing.

In a post on social media, the comedian Lewis Black called Mr. Crombie a “wonderful actor” and an “immensely talented writer.”

“More importantly he was as sweet as he was intelligent and I am a better person for knowing him,” Mr. Black wrote.

Larry Charles, a “Seinfeld” writer, also offered praise for Mr. Crombie.

“His portrayal of Joe Davola managed to feel real and grounded and psychopathic and absurd and hilarious all at the same time,” Mr. Charles wrote on social media. “This was a juxtaposition I was always seeking on my Seinfeld episodes and reached a climax of sorts with ‘The Opera.’ Seinfeld was a sitcom that could make you uncomfortable and no guest actor walked that line better than Peter.”

Norman Jewison, Director of Jesus Christ Superstar and Fiddler on the Roof Films, Dies at 97

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Norman Jewison, the genre-spanning director of the movie adaptations of Fiddler on the Roof and Jesus Christ Superstar, as well as a number of non-musical stage-to-screen adaptations, died on January 20 at his home in Los Angeles. The death was confirmed by his publicist Jeff Sanderson. Jewison was 97.
The recipient of seven Oscar nominations, Jewison never won a competitive Oscar, though his film In the Heat of the Night won the Award for Best Picture in 1967.
Jewison was born on July 21, 1926 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He started his career in television, directing and producing musical and variety programs through the ’50s in Canada and then New York. His work in television caught the attention of actor Tony Curtis, Jewison recalled in his autobiography. “You do nice work, kid,” Curtis told Jewison. “When are you gonna make a movie?” Curtis starred in Jewison’s feature film directing debut, the comedy 40 Pounds of Trouble (1962).
With the Cold War comedy The Russians Are Coming, Jewison proved his adeptness at handling politically charged material. ("I’ve always been a supporter of protest," Jewison told the Hollywood Reporter in 2011.) For his next film, In the Heat of the Night (1967), he drew on his experiences hitchhiking through the American south. The film starred Sidney Poitier as a detective solving a murder and confronting racism in a small Mississippi town, winning five Academy Awards and earning Jewison his first nomination for Best Director. He followed The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) with two movie musicals adapted from recent Broadway productions, Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and Jesus Christ Superstar (1973), earning another Best Director nod for the former.
In a wide-ranging resume encompassing everything from the dystopian sci-fi of Rollerball (1975) to the fictionalized Jimmy Hoffa biopic F.I.S.T. (1977) and the legal drama ...And Justice for All (1979), Jewison also developed a taste and predilection for adapting stage works for the screen: A Soldier’s Story (1984), Agnes of God (1985), Other People’s Money (1991) and Dinner with Friends (2001). He also directed Moonstruck, written by playwright John Patrick Shanley and co-starring Cher and Nicolas Cage. Another triumph, it earned Jewison his third Best Director nod.
“Farewell sweet prince,” Cher wrote in a tribute on X, crediting Jewison with “one of the greatest, happiest, most fun experiences of my life.”

Norman Jewison, Director of Jesus Christ Superstar and Fiddler on the Roof Films, Dies at 97 | Broadway Buzz | Broadway.com

• Dexter Scott King, son of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., dies of cancer at 62

Dexter Scott King, the younger son of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, died Monday after battling prostate cancer.

The King Center in Atlanta, which Dexter King served as chairman, said the 62-year-old son of the civil rights icon died at his home in Malibu, California. His wife, Leah Weber King, said in a statement that he died “peacefully in his sleep.”

The third of the Kings’ four children, Dexter King was named for the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where his father first served as a pastor. He was just 7 years old when his father was assassinated in 1968.

As an adult, Dexter King became an attorney and focused on shepherding his father’s legacy and protecting the King family’s intellectual property. In addition to serving as chairman of the King Center, he was also president of the King estate.

Coretta Scott King died in 2006, followed by the Kings’ oldest child Yolanda King in 2007.

“Words cannot express the heart break I feel from losing another sibling,” the Rev. Bernice A. King, Dexter King’s youngest sibling, said in a statement.

His older brother, Martin Luther King III, said: “The sudden shock is devastating. It is hard to have the right words at a moment like this. We ask for your prayers at this time for the entire King family.”

Roger Rogerson: the ‘icon of the force’ who became the ‘best policeman money could buy’


If power corrupts, then Roger Caleb Rogerson – who died on Sunday aged 83 – proved that absolute power corrupts absolutely. The former New South Wales detective had a high IQ, epic courage, brilliant instincts for policing and a preternatural talent for manipulating people. Yet he came to embody evil at its most enigmatic for many, that most despicable figure in any civilised society: the officer sworn to serve and protect the public but who lies, cheats and murders.


“You could say I ruled by fear but that was just the reputation I acquired,” he once told me. “Truth is, I did better tricking crims into thinking that I was their mate. That was my edge. The fear fell away after a while and I ran on adrenaline. Battle and bloodshed became part and parcel of the job. For me it was never about civic duty, that ‘serve and protect’ shit. I was a cop and my job was to mix with dangerous offenders and solve underworld crime.”
Why Rogerson went from “icon of the force” to “best policeman money could buy”, few knew. But I came to know The Dodger a little in his later years when as a journalist I’d visit his home in Padstow, south-west of Sydney, chasing the truth of why a good cop went so rotten.


Born in Paddington in 1941, the first son of a Yorkshire boilermaker and Welsh soprano mother, Rogerson was raised on an acre lot in Sydney’s west with a brother and sister, three cows, six goats and an old mare named Bessie that he rode to Bankstown primary school. In the Bible, Caleb was a spy for Moses, but Rogerson was named for his grandfather, a bare-knuckle boxer. “He always told me: ‘Treat people properly. And don’t make a [at][at][at][at] of yourself.’”


As a boy, he built things – billy carts, soapbox racers, tandem bikes – then he took them apart. In 1958, age 17, that agile mind and industrious spirit took Rogerson to the police academy. His animal aptitude for the job was apparent from the get-go. Before he became “The Dodger” he was “The Boy Detective”, a prodigy. “If I knocked on your door, you had a problem. If you hit me, I hit back. Hard. If you shot at me, I shot back. Straight.”


By the time Rogerson won the Peter Mitchell award as most outstanding officer in 1980, after single-handedly arresting a gang for a series of bank hold-ups, he was at a crossroads. He had already shot three men in the line of duty by then. But in June 1981, he gunned down drug dealer Warren Lanfranchi in an inner-city laneway, stealing $15,000 in cash and loading him up with a defective pistol from 1900. All while 18 of his cop mates looked on.


One day I showed him a photo of that day, Rogerson standing over the body of his victim. “Victim?” he snarled. “He didn’t get shot because he was a victim. He got shot because he was a fucking scumbag druggie. His father was a gun dealer, his girlfriend was a drug addict. He got shot because he was wanted for five bank robberies and he’d tried to shoot a cop.” He later wrote on the photo: “Angus, don’t fuck up or this could happen to you. Roger.”
True, he was acquitted. But it was the point everyone knew Rogerson had gone truly rogue. Afternoon tabloids splashed with headlines such as “Man shot like dog, Rogerson at scene” and the nightly news was a dizzying maelstrom of foul deeds and accusations against him. For me, a kid, his name hit like a one-two punch from the fables. He was the white knight who wore black, a Jedi seduced to the dark side, a one-man wrecking ball for rough justice.


About the time I became a reporter and a decade after Rogerson was acquitted of conspiring to murder fellow detective Michael Drury, Blue Murder broke big. The 1995 ABC TV series written by Ian David and directed by Michael Jenkins told the machiavellian rise-and-fall stories of Rogerson, Drury and Neddy Smith, the career criminal and informant to whom Rogerson had granted a “green light” to break the law with his assistance to their mutual profit.


In 1999, I profiled actor Richard Roxburgh, whose gimlet gaze and cardigans had taken Roger global, and naively called Blue Murder a “love story”. Rogerson found me and rang, fuming. “We both played subterfuge but there was never a friendship,” he growled. I offered an olive branch in his preferred currencies – cold beer, free food, company and mild flattery.


Like an old gunslinger, Rogerson walked into the bar bow-legged. He was 63, his shooting shoulder was slumped after a fall from a ladder and the fists that had thumped phone books into crims to extract bruise-free confessions were so racked with arthritis, I had to help him cut up his steak. Afterwards, when I gave him a water pistol for a photoshoot, he calmly pointed it at me. Bang. Bang. Bang. All head shots. Even with a toy gun, he shot to kill.
“Roger was a good friend and a bad enemy,” Neddy Smith reckoned. “He was loyal, as long as it didn’t involve discomfort to him. I trusted him more than most would but I kept my guard up. But I never underestimated him for a second. He was a man who could turn on you in a flash. Our friendship was one of convenience. He used me to suit his own purposes.”


In time I realised he was using me – and the mastheads I represented – in much the same way. Last time we spoke he was heading back to jail and had sobbed into his hanky, scared. But regret or remorse? That really wasn’t Roger Rogerson’s style. He turned those ice blue eyes on me and my marrow ran cold. “I’ve got more commendations than most – sure, more convictions too – but when all is said and done, I look back and think: I wasn’t that bad.”

Richard Roxburgh stared as Roger Rogerson in both TV series "Blue Murder" in 1995 and "Blue Murder: Killer Cop" in 2017

Star Trek Star Gary Graham Dies At 74

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Gary Graham, who was known for playing Soval on "Star Trek: Enterprise," has died at the age of 73. Graham's ex-wife Susan Lavelle broke the news on January 23. "It is with deep profound sadness to say that Gary Graham, my ex husband, amazing actor and father of our beautiful only child together, Haylee Graham, has passed away today. We are completely devastated especially our daughter Haley. His wife, Becky was by his side," Lavelle's statement on Facebook read. The actor's death was sudden, but its cause hasn't been disclosed.


Graham started his screen acting career in 1975, and went on to appear in some of the biggest shows of the 1970s and 1980s, from "Starsky & Hutch" to "Dukes of Hazzard." From 1989 to 1990, he starred as human Detective Matthew Sikes in "Alien Nation" — the TV series based on the 1988 movie of the same name — taking over the role from James Caan. After the show ended, Graham reprised the role in several 1990s TV movies.


After "Alien Nation," Graham continued working in numerous movies and TV shows. His arguably most prominent role is the recurring "Star Trek: Enterprise" character Soval, a highly decorated Vulcan ambassador to Earth. As dedicated "Star Trek" fans know, though, this wasn't his only role in the franchise. Graham also portrayed Tanis on "Star Trek: Voyager" Season 2, Episode 10 — Cold Fire. He also played Ragnar in the unofficial fan film "Star Trek: of Gods and Men" and its follow-up project, "Star Trek: Renegades."



Star Trek Star Gary Graham Dies At 74

His 1964 discovery with Robert W. Wilson settled a debate over the origin and evolution of the universe.

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• Arno A. Penzias, 90, Dies; Nobel Physicist Confirmed Big Bang Theory

Arno A. Penzias, whose astronomical probes yielded incontrovertible evidence of a dynamic, evolving universe with a clear point of origin, confirming what became known as the Big Bang theory, died on Monday in San Francisco. He was 90.

His death, in an assisted living facility, was caused by complications of Alzheimer’s disease, his son, David, said.

Dr. Penzias (pronounced PEN-zee-as) shared one-half of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics with Robert Woodrow Wilson for their discovery in 1964 of cosmic microwave background radiation, remnants of an explosion that gave birth to the universe some 14 billion years ago. That explosion, known as the Big Bang, is now the widely accepted explanation for the origin and evolution of the universe. (A third physicist, Pyotr Kapitsa of Russia, received the other half of the prize, for unrelated advances in developing liquid helium.)

Until Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson published their observations, the Big Bang theory competed with the steady-state theory, which envisioned a more static, timeless expanse growing into infinite space, with new matter formed to fill the gaps.

Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson’s discovery finally settled the debate. Yet it was the serendipitous product of a different investigation altogether.

In 1961, Dr. Penzias joined AT&T’s Bell Laboratories in Holmdel, N.J., with the intention of using a radio antenna, which was being developed for satellite communications, as a radio telescope to make cosmological measurements.

“The first thing I thought of was — study the galaxy in a way that no one else had been able to do,” he said in a 2004 interview with the Nobel Foundation.

In 1964, while preparing the antenna to measure the properties of the Milky Way galaxy, Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson, another young radio astronomer who was new to Bell Labs, encountered a persistent, unexplained hiss of radio waves that seemed to come from everywhere in the sky, detected no matter which way the antenna was pointed. Perplexed, they considered various sources of the noise. They thought they might be picking up radar, or noise from New York City, or radiation from a nuclear explosion. Or might pigeon droppings be the culprit?

Examining the antenna, Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson “subjected its electric circuits to scrutiny comparable to that used in preparing a manned spacecraft,” Walter Sullivan wrote in The New York Times in 1965. Yet the mysterious hiss remained.

The cosmological underpinnings of the noise were finally explained with help from physicists at Princeton University, who had predicted that there might be radiation coming from all directions left over from the Big Bang. The buzzing, it turned out, was just that: a cosmic echo. It confirmed that the universe wasn’t infinitely old and static but rather had begun as a primordial fireball that left the universe bathed in background radiation.

The discovery, Dr. Penzias said years later, intensified his interest in astronomy. He and Dr. Wilson went on to detect dozens of types of molecules in interstellar clouds where new stars are formed.

“Their discovery marked a transition between a period in which cosmology was more philosophical, with very few observations, and a golden age of observational cosmology,” Paul Halpern, a physicist at St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and the author of “Flashes of Creation: George Gamow, Fred Hoyle, and the Great Big Bang Debate,” said in a phone interview.

The discovery not only helped cement the cosmos’s grand narrative; it also opened a window through which to investigate the nature of reality — all as a result of that vexing hiss first heard 60 years ago by a couple of junior physicists looking for something else.

Arno Allan Penzias was born on April 26, 1933, in Munich to Jewish parents, Karl and Justine (Eisenreich) Penzias. Dr. Penzias would later point out, to just about anyone he met, that his birth coincided to the day and place with the establishment of the Gestapo, the German secret police.

His father was a leather wholesaler; his mother, who managed the home, had converted to Judaism from Roman Catholicism in 1932.

In the fall of 1938, the Penzias family was arrested and put on a train for deportation to Poland.

“Fortunately for us, the Poles stopped accepting Jews just before our train reached the border,” Dr. Penzias said in a eulogy at his mother’s funeral in 1991. The train returned to Munich. In late spring 1939, 6-year-old Arno and his brother, Gunter, 5, were put on a train as part of the Kindertransport, the British rescue effort that brought some 10,000 children to England.

His mother instructed Arno to take care of his brother. “I only realized much later that she didn’t know if she would ever see either one of us again,” he said in his eulogy.

Gunter Penzias recalled over the phone: “Each of us was given a large box of chocolates. I fell asleep on the train, and mine was stolen. So Arno shared his with me.”

The boys’ parents managed to leave Germany for England, and the family arrived in New York City in 1940. Karl and Justine found work as superintendents in a series of apartment buildings in the Bronx, giving the family places to live.

Dr. Penzias attended Brooklyn Technical High School and “sort of drifted into chemistry,” he told The New Yorker in 1984. He entered the City College of New York in 1951 intending to study chemistry, but he found that he had already learned much of the material. After one of his professors assured him that he could make a living as a physicist, he switched majors, graduating in 1954. That year, he married Anne Barras, a student at Hunter College. They divorced in 1995.

After two years as a radar officer in the Army Signal Corps, he entered graduate school at Columbia University, where he earned both his master’s and doctoral degrees in physics, the latter in 1962.

But Dr. Penzias’s path to stumbling onto the answer to one of humanity’s most central questions started a year earlier, when he joined Bell Laboratories as a member of its radio research group in Holmdel.

There, he saw the potential of AT&T’s new satellite communications antenna, a giant radio telescope known as the Holmdel Horn, as a tool for cosmological observation. In teaming up with Dr. Wilson in 1964 to use the antenna, Dr. Wilson said in a recent interview, one of their goals was to advance the nascent field of radio astronomy by accurately measuring several bright celestial sources.

Soon after they started their measurements, however, they heard the hiss. They spent months ruling out possible causes, including pigeons.

“The pigeons would go and roost at the small end of the horn, and they deposited what Arno called a white dielectric material,” Dr. Wilson said. “And we didn’t know if the pigeon poop might have produced some radiation.” So the men climbed up and cleaned it out. The noise persisted.

It was finally Dr. Penzias’s fondness for chatting on the telephone that led to a fortuitous breakthrough. (“It was a good thing he worked for the phone company, because he liked to use their instrument,” Dr. Wilson said. “He talked to a lot of people.”)

In January 1965, Dr. Penzias dialed Bernard Burke, a fellow radio astronomer, and in the course of their conversation he mentioned the puzzling hiss. Dr. Burke suggested that Dr. Penzias call a physicist at Princeton who had been trying to prove that the Big Bang had left traces of cosmological radiation. He did.

Intrigued, scientists from Princeton visited Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson, and together they made the connection to the Big Bang. Theory and observation were then brought together in a pair of papers published in 1965.

Dr. Penzias stayed at Bell Labs for nearly four decades, with 14 years as vice president of research. His interests reached well beyond science, into business, art, technology and politics. After his 1978 Nobel Prize acceptance speech in Stockholm, he flew directly to Moscow to give a lecture about his findings to a group of refusenik scientists. He later helped several of them leave the Soviet Union.

In 1992, Dr. Penzias arranged for the donation of the Holmdel Horn’s receiver and calibration equipment to the Deutsches Museum in Munich, where it remains as part of a permanent exhibition.

“It was very important to my father to remind them what they lost,” his daughter, Rabbi L. Shifra Weiss-Penzias, said in an interview. “He wanted his work to be a living reminder of the refugees who left and the people who died.”

Dr. Penzias married Sherry Levit, a Silicon Valley executive, in 1996. In addition to his daughter; his son, David; and his brother, Gunter, Dr. Penzias is survived by his wife; another daughter, Mindy Dirks; a stepson, Carson Levit; a stepdaughter, Victoria Zaroff; 12 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

Soon after the announcement of the Nobel Prize, President Jimmy Carter sent a congratulatory telegram to Dr. Penzias. He replied, “I came to the United States 39 years ago as a penniless refugee from Nazi Germany,” adding that for him and his family, “America has meant a haven of safety as well as a land of freedom and opportunity.”

Not sure he'll be missed...

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Frank Farian, Creator of Milli Vanilli and Boney M, Dies at 82

Frank Farian, Creator of Milli Vanilli and Boney M, Dies at 82

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Ewa Podleś - Les Tringles Des Sistres Tintaient (Chanson Boheme) - YouTube

• Ewa Podles, a Rare Contralto With Sweeping Range, Dies at 71

Ewa Podles, the Polish contralto whose darkly molten, three-octave-plus voice and commanding presence made her a favorite of opera connoisseurs, died on Friday in Warsaw. She was 71.

Her death, in a hospice center, was confirmed by her stepdaughter, Ania Marchwinska, who said the cause was lung cancer.

Aficionados embraced Ms. Podles (whose full name was pronounced AE-vuh PODE-lesh) not just for her exciting performances, but also for how unusual she was: True contraltos — the lowest-lying female voice type, deeper than a mezzo-soprano — are hardly common.

Developing the low chest register as much as the rest of the voice, a contralto is “like an alto in the lower range, like a soprano on top,” Ms. Podles told The New York Times in 1998. And she fit that bill: Though her tone was melancholically hooded and brooding, with a cavernous chest register, she also had the high notes and agility to excel at Handel and Rossini’s most demandingly florid roles.

“It’s a very rare voice,” Ms. Podles said of her instrument.

And she wielded it with utter authority. “Never, for even one moment of one recitative in any opera, was she anything but riveting in her conviction,” the conductor Will Crutchfield, who collaborated with her several times, said in a phone interview. “She had something to say.”

Ewa Maria Podles was born on April 26, 1952, in Warsaw to Walery and Teresa (Sawicka) Podles, a member of the chorus of the Polish National Opera.

“My mother was an extraordinary singer,” Ms. Podles told The Times. “She had a very, very deep voice, like a man. She recorded a bit on the radio, but everyone who heard her asked: ‘Is it really a woman singing?’”

Ms. Podles didn’t have to fight for her low notes, either. “It’s the most natural register in my voice,” she said. “I was born with this chest voice. Some people hate the chest voice, and some people say: ‘Oh, it’s magnificent. I adore you.’”

She studied in Warsaw at the conservatory that is now the Chopin University of Music, and she was a prizewinner at the 1978 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1984, taking over for the great mezzo-soprano Marilyn Horne, another singer with both earthy power and dazzling coloratura, in the title role of Handel’s “Rinaldo.” (That part, like many of Ms. Podles’s Baroque specialties, was originally written for a male castrato and is typically sung today by a lower-register female singer or a male countertenor.)

While Ms. Podles was hardly unknown in American opera circles, the repertoire in which she specialized wasn’t standard fare at U.S. opera houses, and her only Met appearance after “Rinaldo” was a 2008 run in the small but crucial role of La Cieca in Ponchielli’s “La Gioconda.” Ms. Podles became something of a cult figure, one of the singers that fans make a point of traveling to hear.

And, like many cult artists, she was not to all tastes. Her acting was unabashedly old-fashioned — a sometimes wide-eyed, arms-outstretched embodiment of opera’s stylized, semi-mythic side.

Well-groomed modern singers aim for a smooth, unobtrusive flow between the different parts of their voices; Ms. Podles reveled in the breaks between them. As she told The Times, gutsily relishing the chest register, as she did, is off-putting to some listeners. She said that while the top and bottom extremes of her voice came easily, the rest needed to be diligently built, and her middle register could be a bit breathy.

But for many, she was unforgettable. “The sheer, round, sensuous beauty of her voice was staggering,” the eminent pianist Garrick Ohlsson, who toured and recorded with her, said in an interview. “I don’t want to make comparisons, but when I worked with Jessye Norman” — the American soprano who died in 2019 — “you had the same sense of this huge, engulfing but not piercing sound, a wide sound.”

And when elemental intensity was called for, as in Mussorgsky’s cycle “Songs and Dances of Death,” Ms. Podles was ideal.

“She had this mournful quality,” Mr. Crutchfield said. “She could draw you into states of sadness and lament and pain that were overwhelming in their sincerity and beauty, so you liked feeling bad with her.”

Ms. Podles’s husband, Jerzy Marchwinski, a prominent pianist who curtailed his performing career because of back problems and who was a close adviser to his wife, died in November. In addition to her stepdaughter, Ms. Marchwinska, she is survived by her and her husband’s daughter, Maria Madej, and four grandchildren.

Among a wide-ranging repertoire, Ms. Podles sang songs by Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff and works with orchestra by Mahler, Brahms, Prokofiev and Penderecki. Her operatic characters extended to Verdi’s Azucena and Eboli, Adalgisa in Bellini’s “Norma,” Erda in Wagner’s “Ring” and Klytämnestra in Strauss’s “Elektra.” (She even played the bearded lady Baba the Turk in Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress.”)

Ms. Podles appeared onstage for the last time in Barcelona in 2017, as the comically highhanded Marquise de Berkenfield in Donizetti’s “La Fille du Régiment.”

“She had that unmistakable great-singer quality,” Mr. Crutchfield said, “of holding the audience absolutely in the palm of her hand.”

Brand New Key singer Melanie dies aged 76

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American singer Melanie Safka has died, her family have announced.

The folk musician, known for her song Brand New Key and her rendition of the Rolling Stones song, Ruby Tuesday, died “peacefully” on Tuesday.
Her death was also confirmed to the PA news agency by her label, Cleopatra Records, through Glass Onyon PR.
Also known for playing the famous Woodstock festival in 1969, she had announced a new, live performance album, One Night Only – The Eagle Mountain House on Tuesday.


“Our world is much dimmer, the colours of a dreary, rainy Tennessee pale with her absence today, but we know that she is still here, smiling down on all of us, on all of you, from the stars.”
They also asked for her fans to light a candle for Melanie to “Illuminate the darkness, and let us all be connected in remembrance of the extraordinary woman who was wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and friend to so very many people”.
Born in Astoria, New York, on February 3 1947, Melanie’s mother Polly was a jazz singer and she followed in her showbiz footsteps to study at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
She played at Greenwich Village coffee houses, also known to be frequented by Bob Dylan, before meeting her manager and subsequent husband, Peter Schekeryk, while auditioning for a drama based on the folk song, Barbara Allen.
Melanie made her recording debut as a backing vocalist on her composition, Love In My Mind, for 1960s girl group Mommy.
In the 1967, she released the singles Beautiful People and Garden In The City with Columbia Records before leaving a year later to join Buddah Records.
Her debut album, Born To Be, was released in 1968 but it was her Woodstock appearance that turned her into a big name.


Melanie then released her 1970 hit Lay Down (Candles in The Rain), with the gospel group Edwin Hawkins Singers, before also putting out Peace Will Come What Have They Done To My Song Ma and The Nickel Song along with a cover of The Rolling Stones’ hit Ruby Tuesday.
She then formed her own label Neighbourhood Records – one of the first female-owned independent record makers – and released Brand New Key which was on her Gather Me album.
In 1972, she briefly left music to become a spokesperson for Unicef after becoming a follower of Indian spiritual master Meher Baba and also raised her daughter.
Melanie also released the albums Ballroom Streets (1978), Arabesque (1982), Am I Real Or What (1985), Precious Cargo (1991), Old Bitch Warrior (1995) and Ever Since You Never Heard Of Me (2010).
She performed at the Isle of Wight festival in 1970 and returned for a 2010 appearance along with her guitarist son, Beau Jarred Schekeryk. Melanie also played Glastonbury in 1971.
Her husband died in 2010.
Melanie’s final tour was in late 2022.

Brand New Key singer Melanie dies aged 76 | BelfastTelegraph.co.uk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5Bwz0idx7s

• Luis Vasquez Dies: The Soft Moon Creative One Of Three Found Dead In L.A. Home At 44

Luis Vasquez, the driving force behind post-punk/darkwave project the Soft Moon, died in Los Angeles early Friday at age 44, according to the L.A. County coroner.

A post on the Soft Moon’s official social media accounts confirmed the death, but no cause was given in the statement.

Vasquez’s death is related to two other deaths at the Los Angeles private residence. Those two individuals were identified by the coroner as 46-year-old John “Juan” Mendez — a noted Los Angeles techno DJ also who recorded under the name Silent Servant, whose death was confirmed by his management, according to reports — and 43-year-old Simone Ling, who was reportedly Mendez’s partner. The coroner did not confirm the cause of death for any of the individuals.

“It is with great sadness that we announce our dear friend, Luis Vasquez has passed away,” read a statement on the Soft Moon’s Facebook page. “Our hearts and thoughts are with his family, friends and extended music family. We ask to respect their privacy during this difficult time…This is a huge loss and our hearts are broken.”

Vasquez started the Soft Moon as a home-recording project that evolved into a popular post-punk/darkwave project. The music, originally intended only for Vasquez and a few friends, instead saw its hypnotic sounds establish a worldwide fan base.

The Soft Moon toured with such acts as Depeche Mode, Interpol, and Mogwai, and released five albums.

Last year, the Soft Moon played the Cruel World Festival in Pasadena.

The man who invented NTP - The Internet's "clock".

David Mills, the internet's Father Time, dies at 85 • The Register

https://variety.com/wp-content/uploa...ning.jpg?w=800

• Charles Osgood, Lyrical Newscaster on Radio and TV, Dies at 91

Charles Osgood, a newscaster who told unconventional stories on the radio in unconventional ways — sometimes with rhyme, sometimes with humor, often with both — died on Tuesday at his home in Saddle River, N.J. He was 91.

The cause was dementia, CBS News reported, quoting his family.

Mr. Osgood became a familiar face on television as the host of “CBS Sunday Morning” from 1994 to 2016. But his passion was the medium he had grown up listening to in the 1930s and ’40s, so much so that he closed his TV broadcasts by saying, “See you on the radio” — an oxymoron, to be sure, but one masked by the cleverness that his audiences had come to expect. He also used the phrase as the title of a book.

On television, he was known for his trademark bow ties; on the radio, it was for his distinctive voice, most familiar from his short “Osgood File” segments on CBS Radio. It was not booming like Paul Harvey’s, deeply authoritative like Edward R. Murrow’s or telegraph-staccato like Walter Winchell’s. Some listeners compared the way Mr. Osgood sounded to the jerky rhythms of Rod Serling, the host and creator of “The Twilight Zone.”

“I never took a journalism course or worked for a newspaper or news department of a broadcast operation,” he told Broadcasting magazine in 1985. “Whatever is unique or different in my style would probably have been drummed out of me in journalism school on the first day.”

His style did not include regular rhyming until he was in his 40s. “One day, in a particular story, I incorporated a little rhyme just as a way of doing something different,” he told The New York Times in 1994. “I immediately heard from a management type in the news division: ‘Very nice, Charlie, very clever. Don’t do it again.’”

“Needless to say, I did,” he said.

“See you on the radio” … I say that every week,
A peculiar phrase, some people think, for anyone to speak.
I’ve got a piece of mail or two, up on my office shelf,
Complaining that the sentence seems to contradict itself.
“Dear Mr. Osgood,” someone wrote, “that signoff is absurd,
Radio is for the ear … the song or spoken word.”

Some listeners heard a latter-day Ogden Nash in Mr. Osgood’s segments, though he told People magazine, “My stuff isn’t poetry — it’s just rampant doggerel.” Like Nash, Mr. Osgood was not afraid to make words fit his rhyme schemes. In the late 1970s, when Census Bureau data showed that more unmarried couples were living together, the agency created the category “Person(s) of Opposite Sex Sharing Living Quarters,” with the acronym POSSLQ.

For years Mr. Osgood went to bed around 9 p.m. and got up by 3 a.m. to prepare radio segments that would be heard when most listeners were staring bleary-eyed at their bathroom mirrors or at the taillights of bumper-to-bumper traffic. He was accustomed to his schedule, though he once acknowledged, “It does mean you’re not quite in sync with everybody else.” (In later years he recorded his commentaries the evening before they were broadcast.)

“Dear sir,” I then wrote back to him, and this was my reply:
“I do believe that you are wrong, and let me tell you why.”

He liked quirky stories that he noticed on the news wires, often ones that were counterintuitive. He once spotted an item about a man whose arm had been broken in a tussle with store clerks who had caught him shoplifting. The man sued the store and was awarded $13,000 in damages. Mr. Osgood delivered a yarn about how crime can pay.

He was born Charles Osgood Wood III in Manhattan on Jan. 8, 1933. His father, Charles Osgood II, was a textile salesman who moved the family to Baltimore when young Charles was 6 and took a second job, as an expediter for a copper company, during World War II. His mother, Mary (Wilson) Wood, was known as Violet.

Mr. Osgood went to Fordham University, where, he later said, he spent more time at the campus radio station than in class. His first job after he graduated in 1954, with a degree in economics, was as a radio announcer at a classical-music station, WGMS in Washington, D.C. (the call letters stood for “Washington’s good music station”). Realizing that he might be drafted, he applied to be the announcer for the U.S. Army Band at Fort Myer, in Arlington, Va., and got the job, which he held from 1955 to 1958.

He also moonlighted under assumed names at several radio stations in the Washington area. Top 40 listeners knew him as Chuck Forest and, with a wink at Henry David Thoreau, Carl Walden. The pseudonyms were plays on his real name, which he had used on WGMS.

He briefly broadcast to an audience of one. After President Dwight D. Eisenhower had a heart attack in 1955, Mr. Osgood was recruited to be the president’s personal disc jockey. “I was put into a studio with a stack of records that had all been chosen as his favorites,” he said in 2016, “and I spent most of the day playing records for Eisenhower.”

When his Army service ended, he returned to WGMS, where he became the program director. RKO General, the network that owned WGMS at the time, later transferred him to a pay television station it operated in Hartford, Conn. “We lost money at an alarming rate,” he said, and RKO let him go in 1963.

ABC hired him in 1963, but that network already had a newscaster with a similar name, Charles Woods. “Since he got there first, it was clear that I was the one who was going to have to do the changing,” Mr. Osgood wrote in 1989, explaining why he started signing off with his middle name.

No television set that’s made, no screen that you can find,

But the afternoon before the all-news format made its debut, a single-engine airplane lost in a storm smashed into the transmission tower, not far from La Guardia Airport in Queens, and knocked the station off the air. When Mr. Osgood went on the next morning, the all-news programming was carried only on WCBS-FM, which suspended its usual music format until a temporary AM transmitter could be hooked up.

Mr. Osgood joined CBS News four years later, anchoring hourly radio newscasts in the morning. He also appeared on television, covering, among other things, the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach in 1972.

His first marriage, to Theresa Audette, ended in divorce in 1972. The next year he married a colleague from CBS News, Jean Crafton. She survives him, along with their five children, Kathleen Wood Griffis, Kenneth Winston Wood, Anne E. Wood, Emily J. Wood and Jamie Wood, and three grandchildren. He is also survived by a sister, Mary Ann Mangum, and a brother, Ken Wood.

Mr. Osgood was named the anchor of the “CBS Sunday Night News” in 1981 and did brief “Newsbreak” segments during prime-time programs. He was an anchor of the “CBS Morning News” from 1987 to 1992 and became the host of “CBS Sunday Morning” when Charles Kuralt retired in 1994. He won three Emmys for his reporting and a lifetime achievement Emmy in 2017. In addition, “CBS Sunday Morning” won three daytime Emmys while he was the host.

To give Mr. Osgood the job on “CBS Sunday Morning,” the network made an exception to a policy that barred CBS News correspondents from doing commercials. Like other syndicated hosts on radio, notably Paul Harvey and, later, Rush Limbaugh, Mr. Osgood had long done radio commercials on “The Osgood File.” He said he did not believe the audience would be disconcerted if he appeared as a newsman on television on Sundays and a pitchman on the radio during the week.

He continued “The Osgood File” through the end of 2017, when he announced that he was retiring. “Although I was very much looking forward to continuing to see you on the radio,” he said, “unfortunately my health and doctors will now not allow it.”

Mr. Osgood was also an accomplished pianist, and while he maintained that he was not good enough to have played professionally, for some stories on CBS he played the organ and banjo. He performed with the Boston Pops and the New York Pops, as well as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he wrote a setting of the Pledge of Allegiance; the sheet music was published in 2002.

He also had a writing credit, as Charles Wood, on a 45 r.p.m. single that rose as high as No. 29 on the Billboard Top 100 in 1966 — “Gallant Men,” a patriotic ode. A friend from his Army band days, John Cacavas, wrote the music. Senator Everett M. Dirksen, a Republican from Illinois who was the Senate minority leader, recited the lines Mr. Osgood had written.

As on the radio, Mr. Osgood was heard but not seen as the narrator in “Horton Hears a Who!,” a 2008 film adaptation of the Dr. Seuss children’s book.

And that may be the ultimate and quintessential test
That proves beyond the slightest doubt that radio is best.
A friend will always stick with you … though your poems may not scan.
I’ll see you on the radio … I can, you see, I can.


CBS News to Honor Charles Osgood With Special Edition

Jesse Jane, Pornographic Film Star, Dies at 43

Ms. Jane starred in the highest-budget film series in pornographic film history.

Jesse Jane at the Adult Video News Awards in Las Vegas in 2016.Credit...Gabe Ginsberg/FilmMagic


https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024...isable=upscale









Jesse Jane, a onetime Hooters waitress and beauty pageant contestant who went on to star in the highest-budget film series in pornographic film history, was found dead on Wednesday at a home in Oklahoma. She was 43.


The cause was believed to be a drug overdose, said Lt. Francisco Franco of the Moore Police Department in Moore, Okla. He said that officers responded on Wednesday morning for a welfare check at a house where Ms. Jane and her boyfriend, Brett Hasenmueller, had been staying. They were both found dead, Lieutenant Franco said, adding that the deaths remained under investigation.


Ms. Jane, with her sweeping blond hair, high-arched eyebrows and vivacious personality, was a defining star of early 2000s pornography as the internet transformed the industry. She then crossed over into some mainstream productions.


“She was a performer during an era where adult films were seen all over the world, and the promotions were massive,” Brian Gross, a publicist for the porn industry, said in a text message to The New York Times. “She made sure that she gave her all, not only in performing, but in promotion as well.”






Ms. Jane was born Cynthia Ann Howell on July 16, 1980, in Fort Worth, according to public records. Her family settled in the Oklahoma City area when her parents worked at Tinker Air Force Base, according to a 2006 interview Ms. Jane gave The Oklahoma Gazette. She graduated with honors from Moore High School in 1998.


Ms. Jane modeled for retailers like 5-7-9 and David’s Bridal before landing a job with Hooters, the restaurant chain, for a commercial. The Gazette wrote. She worked her way up in the organization to regional training coordinator before deciding to become a full-time Hawaiian Tropic bikini model.



By 2003, she had signed with Digital Playground, a porn studio, debuting in the porn film “Beat the Devil.” She also hosted two shows for the Playboy Channel, “Naughty Amateurs Home Videos” and “Night Calls,” earning awards and acclaim from various industry publications.


Ms. Jane was best known for work in the “Pirates” series of movies, in which she plays the first officer on a ragtag ship of sailors who go after a band of evil pirates. Digital Playground spent $1 million on the first film in 2005 and $8 million on the 2007 sequel, “Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge,” notable sums compared with the lower-budget movie costs in the industry.
As the industry transformed, Ms. Jane transformed with it.


The introduction of high-definition cameras prompted her to redo her breast implants because the cameras made them bulge oddly onscreen. She shunned the “shock value” approach that pornography took in the mid-2000s and retired from the industry in 2007, then pivoted to creating her own line of sex toys.






“I got into porn right at the perfect time, when porn stars mattered,” Ms. Jane told GQ in 2018. “They were big, glamorous. You walked into a room, you turned heads. Everybody knew who you were because they actually had to buy your product or DVDs, everything. Porn was so naughty, but everybody watched it.”


But she said, “the internet killed the business.”


“Now the only people that get noticed are the people who go for shock value,” she said.


Ms. Jane’s work was not limited to porn. She was among the rare porn stars who made the jump to mainstream Hollywood, including the 2004 reboot of “Starsky and Hutch” and the HBO series “Entourage.”


After retiring, she returned to Oklahoma, according to GQ. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available on Thursday.


Ms. Jane told CNBC in 2009 that she saw performing as a job: “You have to treat it like a job. I’m a mom. I have a family. You know, I bought a house. It’s the way you pay your bills.”
Still, she said that she loved it and would go out of her way to meet her fans.


“I always had fun performing on camera,” Ms. Jane told GQ. “It’s great sex with great people, and it always turned me on that people watched me.”

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They were both found dead

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Suicide or shit gear?

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Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Suicide or shit gear?

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It would likely be gear that was too good if that's what it was.

Clint Eastwood foil William O’Connell dies aged 94


Attachment 111374


Actor William O’Connell, known for his roles in Star Trek, The Twilight Zone and Batman (1966), has died, aged 94.


The actor died at his home in Sherman Oaks, California on January 15, and his death was announced to Deadline by a friend. A cause of death has not yet been given.


O’Connell’s acting credits were mainly from the 1960s and 1970s, and he is known for his regular collaborations with Clint Eastwood.


The two first appeared in the 1969 musical, Paint Your Wagon, before working together on a number of movies directed by Eastwood, including Western films, High Plains Drifter and The Outlaw Josey Wales.


O’Connell was born in 1929 in Los Angeles, California. He became well known for his memorable television role in season two of Star Trek. He starred in the episode Journey To Babel as Thelev, an Orion agent disguised as an Andorian ambassador.


The character of Thelev’s mission was to destroy the USS Enterprise, which was at the time responsible for moving delegates to the Babel Conference. Although Thelev ultimately failed, he did manage to stab Captain Kirk (William Shatner). His character eventually poisoned himself before his ship self-destructed.


O’Connell had an impressive acting career in both film and television, starring in titles such as Every Which Way But Loose, an episode of Charlie’s Angels and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. His last role was in the 1991 horror movie, The Haunted, in which he played Father Kearney.


Clint Eastwood foil William O'Connell dies aged 94

• Respironics Founder Gerald McGinnis Dies at 89

Gerald E. McGinnis, founder of Respironics and creator of the first CPAP machine to treat sleep apnea, died on Jan 25 at age 89 from Parkinson’s disease complications.

Respironics, established in 1976, gained recognition as an industry leader in sleep apnea therapy. Forbes Magazine recognized the company as the 5th Best Private Company shortly before Respironics’ public debut on the Nasdaq Exchange in 1987, as noted in McGinnis’ obituary.

In 2004, McGinnis was honored with two awards recognizing his entrepreneurial commitment and spirit. He received the Entrepreneur of the Year award from Washington & Jefferson College in Washington, Pa, and the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh presented him with the Entrepreneur Award as part of its Awards for Excellence.

In 2007, Respironics was acquired by Royal Philips Electronics, subsequently rebranding as Philips Respironics.

“As an entrepreneur, Jerry had learned firsthand the need to find the right problem to solve, and the emerging awareness of sleep apnea disorder provided him with his ultimate arena,” his obituary reads.

Raised in Ottawa, Ill, McGinnis started his mechanical engineering studies at Illinois Valley Community College, notes his obituary. He served in the Army during the Korean War, which enabled him to use the GI Bill to continue his education. He earned a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from the University of Illinois and a Master’s from the University of Pittsburgh, while in a work-study program at Westinghouse.

His career began in the research and development department at Westinghouse. In 1963, he took on the role of manager of the bioengineering department, shifting his focus to medical product development. In 1969, he joined Allegheny General Hospital as head of the surgical research department, working in artificial heart research. In 1971, he started his first company, Lanz Medical Products, in his home, where he developed his first two medical devices—a ceramic anesthesia mask and a tracheotomy tube—using his kitchen stove as a makeshift kiln.

McGinnis’ impact on the sleep and respiratory field extended beyond his inventions, leaving a lasting impression on his peers and colleagues for his patient-centric approach, dedication to science, and unwavering character. “He is a legendary inventor, engineer, and entrepreneur, but unlike some, he was focused on patients, science, and most importantly character,” says sleep specialist William Noah, MD, a longtime friend of McGinnis’. “The respiratory and sleep field owes him so much. He was also such an encourager. In fact, last month, his last words to me were, ‘Go for it!’”

A celebration of life will be held at Oakmont Country Club in Pennsylvania on McGinnis’ 90th birthday, Sunday, March 17, at 4 pm.

The family suggests donations be made in his memory to the Parkinson’s Foundation instead of flowers. Contributions can be sent to Parkinson’s Foundation, Attn: Donor Services, 200 SE 1st Street, Suite 800, Miami, Fla, 33131, or made online at www.parkinson.org.

• Harry Connick Sr., Longtime New Orleans District Attorney and Singer’s Dad, Dies at 97

Harry Connick Sr., who was New Orleans’ district attorney for three decades and later faced allegations that his staff sometimes held back evidence that could have helped defendants, died Thursday at age 97.

Connick died peacefully at his home in New Orleans with his wife, Londa, and children — Suzanna and musician and actor Harry Connick Jr. — by his side, according to an obituary distributed by Harry Connick Jr.’s publicist. A cause of death was not provided.

Connick dethroned an incumbent prosecutor, Jim Garrison, in a 1973 election. He won reelection four times, and successfully built biracial support as the city’s political power base shifted to African Americans.

Connick remained undefeated, and retired in 2003. But he was later dogged by questions about whether his office withheld evidence that favored defendants. The issue came to the forefront with a 2011 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a lawsuit filed by John Thompson, who was exonerated after 14 years on Louisiana’s death row for a killing he didn’t commit.

In a 5-4 decision, the high court overturned a $14 million award for Thompson, ruling that the New Orleans district attorney’s office shouldn’t be punished for not specifically training prosecutors on their obligations to share evidence that could prove a defendant’s innocence. In a scathing dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg decried “Connick’s deliberately indifferent attitude.”

The issue was revived in 2014 when a murder conviction against Reginald Adams, imprisoned for 34 years, was reversed. Attorneys for the Innocence Project New Orleans presented evidence that detectives and prosecutors in the case had withheld critical information before Adams’ 1990 conviction.

Adams later received $1.25 million in a court settlement.

Connick repeatedly declined to comment on the cases. However, in 2012 he defended his legacy in an interview with The Times-Picayune tinged with sports references.

My reputation is based on something other than a case, or two cases or five cases, or one interception or 20 interceptions. Look at the rest of my record. I have more yards than anybody, Connick told the newspaper.

He added: “I have to look at myself and say this is who I am. This is what I’ve done. Perfect? No. But I’ve done nothing to go to confession about in that office. At all.”

New Orleans’ current district attorney, Jason Williams, expressed condolences to Connick’s family.

Mr. Connick remains the longest tenured District Attorney, serving from 1973-2003. Such a longstanding public servant gives an enormous amount of themselves to their community — as do their families. Our thoughts are with the Connick family during this difficult time, he said in a statement.

Connick, a Navy veteran who served in the South Pacific during World War II, nurtured his son into becoming a jazz piano prodigy, partly by arranging for the boy to sit in with New Orleans Dixieland players and legends such as pianist Eubie Blake and drummer Buddy Rich.

Connick was born March 27, 1926, in Mobile, Alabama, and moved to New Orleans with his family at age 2. By the 1970s, he had become a part of the city’s political fabric.

In 1973, Connick was a little-known federal prosecutor when he took on Garrison, a three-term district attorney whose fame stretched far outside New Orleans.

I worked as a legal aid attorney for over three years, and I learned firsthand about the operation of Garrison’s office, Connick said in a 2001 interview. “I decided I could do a better job than Jim Garrison.”

Known as “Big Jim,” the 6-foot-7 (201-cm) Garrison gained worldwide publicity when he unsuccessfully prosecuted a New Orleans businessman in connection with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and insisted that a massive cover-up was taking place regarding the assassination.

After Garrison lost his big case, Connick challenged him. Connick ran as a reformer and won by just over 2,000 votes.

In the 1970s and ’80s, Connick led crackdowns on prostitutes and used 19th century morality laws to shut down adult book shops in the French Quarter.

In the ’90s, anti-capital punishment groups attacked Connick for his insistence that prosecutors seek the death penalty in most first-degree murder cases.

And Connick learned firsthand about being a defendant: Federal prosecutors charged him in 1990 with racketeering and aiding a sports-betting operation. The indictment alleged that Connick returned betting records to a convicted bookmaker who wanted the records to collect gambling debts.

Connick was acquitted, then won his fourth election the same year.

For years, the elder Connick performed at weekly gigs in French Quarter nightclubs.

Connick sang standards made famous by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Louis Prima. His voice sometimes wavered, but even in his later years Connick was spry and enthusiastic on stage, dancing and waving to the crowd.

His music was also politically useful. Through his gigs, Connick developed close friendships with Black musicians — and Black voters. That was crucial for a white candidate in a city where, at the time, nearly 70% of voters were African Americans.

Support from powerful Black politicians was also key to his political survival. In 1996, Connick defeated a Black challenger and gave credit to Mayor Marc Morial, whose supporters campaigned heavily for Connick.

Connick did not seek reelection in 2002 and was succeeded by Eddie Jordan, a former U.S. attorney who oversaw the successful prosecution of former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards. Edwards was convicted in 2000 of taking payoffs from interests seeking riverboat casino licenses during his final term in the 1990s.

Funeral arrangements for Connick are pending.

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Harry Connick Sr., New Orleans D.A. Criticized for Overreach, Dies at 97

The city’s top prosecutor from 1973 to 2003, he led an office that sent hundreds of Black men to prison and became known for its record of wrongful convictions.

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