The RIP Famous Person Thread

[beachbound]

dead for some time

9 days. That must’ve been a horrible scene.

Gene Hackman Was Likely Dead for 9 Days Before His Body Was Found: Sheriff

[pickel]

Sounds more like carbon monoxide poisoning to me. The gas company has been assisting the police.

[harrybarracuda]

Sounds more like carbon monoxide poisoning to me. The gas company has been assisting the police.

Could be, but CSI:TD needs to get on the case. Why would you put your dog in the closet?

A prescription bottle and scattered pills were on the bathroom countertop close to her body. The couple's German Shepherd dog was found dead in a bathroom closet near to Ms Arakawa.

Hackman was discovered wearing grey tracksuit bottoms, a blue long-sleeve T-shirt and brown slippers. Sunglasses and a walking cane were next to the body.

The detective suspected that the actor had fallen suddenly.

The circumstances of their death were "suspicious enough in nature to require a thorough search and investigation", said the search warrant, because the person who called emergency services found the front door of the property open.

Added:

The local utility company tested gas lines in and around the home after the bodies were found and did not find any sign of problems, the warrant said.

[Happy As Larry]

Going For Gold presenter Henry Kelly dies at 78

Journalist and TV presenter Henry Kelly has died aged 78, his family has announced.

Kelly was a journalist who later pivoted to light entertainment, hosting TV gameshow Game For A Laugh and Going For Gold in the 1980s and 90s.
He also presented programmes on BBC Radio 4, LBC and Classic FM.

In a statement, Kelly's family said he "died peacefully" on Tuesday "after a period of ill health".
"Henry will be sorely missed by his friends and family," it continued, "including his partner Karolyn Shindler, their son Alexander, Henry's daughter Siobhan and her mother Marjorie".

Born in Dublin on 17 April 1946, Kelly started his journalistic career in newspapers.
He worked for The Irish Times in the 1970s during civil unrest and the Troubles in Northern Ireland.

He left the newspaper and moved to London to join the BBC in 1976, working as a reporter and presenter for Radio 4's The World Tonight.
But in 1980, aged 34, he left journalism to become a light entertainment presenter.

He went on to front ITV's Game For A Laugh, and the first iteration of Good Morning Britain on TV-am, alongside Toni Arthur.
Game For A Laugh largely involved practical jokes and elaborate set-ups, often on members of the studio audience or filmed on location on unsuspecting members of the public.

Kelly also fronted lunchtime quiz show Going For Gold for 10 seasons from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s.
The theme tune for Going For Gold was composed by Hans Zimmer, who went on to become a hugely successful film and TV composer.

The show saw contestants from different European countries compete against each other to answer questions to win prizes.
Going For Gold was briefly revived in the late 2000s by Channel 5, presented by John Suchet.

Kelly later became one of the launch presenters of Classic FM and also hosted shows on speech station LBC, BBC Radio London.
He hosted a show on BBC Radio Berkshire for 10 years from 2005.

Speaking to Challenge TV about his memories of Going for Gold, Kelly – who almost missed the hosting audition as he was planning to play golf – noted how "the whole point" of the show "was that it was Pan-European".
"We were the only people in this country at the time, and probably since, who were really European, and so we had contestants from all over Europe," he said.

Recalling one example of comedic cross cultural confusion on episode one of the new show, he added: "The question for all the contestants was, what is the name of the piece of least value on a chessboard?
"Bang, goes [Swedish contestant] Ida-Britt, and looked at me and said: 'the farmer'.

"'Right, I think not' [he replied]. But we checked, only to discover that in Sweden, a pawn is in the shape of a little Swedish farmer. So she was right!"

Kelly also appeared in Victoria Wood's comedy show Dinnerladies, and hosted journalistic talk show After Dark.
In 1994 he was voted national broadcaster of the year in the Sony Radio Awards

TV presenter and journalist Henry Kelly dies

[MarilynMonroe]

One would assume a suicide pact or murder suicide.

Very sad.

One of the greats.

Add to the list Mississippi Burning.

I loved that movie, also in Enemy of the State and Crimson Tide. He was such a great actor. I hope they find out what happened.
It is very sad, but I found this online, and it is very funny. Great tribute to him.

[misskit]

^ Good one. I don’t remember that episode of Laugh In.

This is the clip from The Royal Tenenbaums, when Royal takes his over-protected grand children out for an exciting afternoon.

[harrybarracuda]

MOSCOW (AP) - Boris Spassky, a Soviet-era world chess champion who lost his title to American Bobby Fischer in a legendary 1972 match that became a proxy for Cold War rivalries, died Thursday in Moscow. He was 88.

The death of the one-time chess prodigy was announced by the International Chess Federation, the game's governing body. No cause was given.
Spassky was "one of the greatest players of all time," the group said on the social platform X. He "left an indelible mark on the game."

The televised 1972 match with Fischer, at the height of the Cold War, became an international sensation and was known as the "Match of the Century."

When Fischer won the international chess crown in Reykjavik, Iceland, the then-29-year-old chess genius from Brooklyn, New York, brought the U.S. its first world chess title.
Fischer, known to be testy and difficult, died in 2008. After his victory of Spassky, he later forfeited the title by refusing to defend it.

Boris Spassky, Soviet chess champion who lost famed... | Daily Mail Online

[pickel]

Why would you put your dog in the closet?

It doesn't say the closet door was closed. Perhaps the dog ate some of the pills. And they haven't ruled out carbon monoxide yet.

[harrybarracuda]

It doesn't say the closet door was closed. Perhaps the dog ate some of the pills. And they haven't ruled out carbon monoxide yet.

Big house with the door open...

Not some Bt3000 room with a charcoal heater in it.

[MarilynMonroe]

^ Good one. I don’t remember that episode of Laugh In.

This is the clip from The Royal Tenenbaums, when Royal takes his over-protected grand children out for an exciting afternoon.

Haha, you know, I don't think I have seen this movie. I will have to look for it. It doesn't look familiar to me, so I will have to watch it.

[Happy As Larry]

David Johansen has died at the age of 75

David Johansen, the wiry, gravelly-voiced singer and last surviving member of 1970s glam and protopunk band the New York Dolls who later performed as his campy, pompadoured alter ego, Buster Poindexter, has died. He was 75.
Johansen died Friday at his home in New York City, according to Rolling Stone, citing a family spokesperson, the Associated Press reported on Saturday. It was revealed in early 2025 that he had stage 4 cancer and a brain tumor.

The New York Dolls were forerunners of punk and the band’s style – teased hair, women’s clothes and lots of makeup – inspired the glam movement that took up residence in heavy metal a decade later in bands like Faster Pussycat and Mötley Crüe.
“When you’re an artist, the main thing you want to do is inspire people, so if you succeed in doing that, it’s pretty gratifying,” Johansen told The Knoxville News-Sentinel in 2011.

Rolling Stone once called the Dolls “the mutant children of the hydrogen age” and Vogue called them the “darlings of downtown style, tarted-up toughs in boas and heels.”
“The New York Dolls were more than musicians; they were a phenomenon. They drew on old rock ‘n’ roll, big-city blues, show tunes, the Rolling Stones and girl groups, and that was just for starters,” Bill Bentley wrote in “Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen.”

The band never found commercial success and was torn by internal strife and drug addictions, breaking up after two albums by the middle of the ’70s. In 2004, former Smiths frontman and Dolls admirer Morrissey convinced Johansen and other surviving members to regroup for the Meltdown Festival in England, leading to three more studio albums.


Buster Poindexter, and acting
In the ’80s, Johansen assumed the persona of Buster Poindexter, a pompadour-styled lounge lizard who had a hit with the kitschy party single “Hot, Hot, Hot” in 1987. He also appeared in such movies as “Candy Mountain,” “Let It Ride,” “Married to the Mob” and had a memorable turn as the Ghost of Christmas Past in the Bill Murray-led hit “Scrooged.”

Johansen was in 2023 the subject of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s documentary “Personality Crisis: One Night Only,” which mixed footage of his two-night stand at the Café Carlyle in January 2020 with flashbacks through his wildly varied career and intimate interviews.

“I used to think about my voice like: ‘What’s it gonna sound like? What’s it going to be when I do this song?’ And I’d get myself into a knot about it,” Johansen told the Associated Press in 2023. “At some point in my life, I decided: ‘Just sing the (expletive) song. With whatever you got.’ To me, I go on stage and whatever mood I’m in, I just claw my way out of it, essentially.”

Beginnings
David Roger Johansen was born to a large, working class Catholic family on Staten Island, his father an insurance salesman. He filled notebooks with poems and lyrics as a young man and liked a lot of different music – R&B, Cuban, Janis Joplin and Otis Redding.

The Dolls – the final original lineup included guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan – rubbed shoulders with Lou Reed and Andy Warhol in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early 1970s.
They took their name from a toy hospital in Manhattan and were expected to take over the throne vacated by the Velvet Underground in the early 1970s. But neither of their first two albums – 1973’s “New York Dolls,” produced by Todd Rundgren, nor “Too Much Too Soon” a year later produced by Shadow Morton – charted.

“They’re definitely a band to keep both eyes and ears on,” read the review of their debut album in Rolling Stone, complementary of their “strange combination of high pop-star drag and ruthless street arrogance.”

Their songs included “Personality Crisis” (“You got it while it was hot/But now frustration and heartache is what you got”), “Looking for a Kiss” (“I need a fix and a kiss”) and “Frankenstein” (“Is it a crime/For you to fall in love with Frankenstein?”)

Their glammed look was meant to embrace fans with a nonjudgmental, noncategorical space. “I just wanted to be very welcoming,” Johansen said in the documentary, “’cause the way this society is, it was set up very strict – straight, gay, vegetarian, whatever… I just kind of wanted to kind of like bring those walls down, have a party kind of thing.”

Rolling Stone, reviewing their second album, called them “the best hard-rock band in America right now” and called Johansen a “talented showman, with an amazing ability to bring characters to life as a lyricist.”
Belated praise for the Dolls

Decades later, the Dolls’ influence would be cherished. Rolling Stone would list their self-titled debut album at No. 301 of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, writing “it’s hard to imagine the Ramones or the Replacements or a thousand other trash-junky bands without them.”

Blondie’s Chris Stein in the Nolan biography “Stranded in the Jungle” wrote that the Dolls were “opening a door for the rest of us to walk through.” Tommy Lee of Mötley Crüe called them early inspirations.

“Johansen is one of those singers, to be a little paradoxical, who is technically better and more versatile than he sounds,” said the Los Angeles Times in 2023. “His voice has always been a bit of a foghorn – higher or lower according to age, habits and the song at hand – but it has a rare emotional urgency.”

The Dolls, representing rock at its most debauched, were divisive. In 1973, they won the Creem magazine poll categories as both the year’s best and worst new group. They were nominated several times for The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame but never got in.
“Dirty angels with painted faces, the Dolls opened the box usually reserved for Pandora and unleashed the infant furies that would grow to become Punk,” wrote Nina Antonia in the book “Too Much, Too Soon.” “As if this legacy wasn’t enough for one band, they also trashed sexual boundaries, savaged glitter and set new standards for rock ‘n’ roll excess.”

By the end of their first run, the Dolls were being managed by legendary promoter Malcolm McLaren, who would later introduce the Sex Pistols to the Dolls’ music. Culture critic Greil Marcus in “Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century” writes the Dolls played him some of their music and he couldn’t believe how bad they were.

“The fact that they were so bad suddenly hit me with such force that I began to realize, ’’I’m laughing, I’m talking to these guys, I’m looking at them, and I’m laughing with them; and I was suddenly impressed by the fact that I was no longer concerned with whether you could play well,” McLaren said. “The Dolls really impressed upon me that there was something else. There was something wonderful. I thought how brilliant they were to be this bad.”

After the first demise of the Dolls, Johansen started his own group, the David Johansen band, before reinventing himself yet again in the 1980s as Buster Poindexter.

Inspired by his passion for the blues and arcane American folk music, Johansen also formed the group The Harry Smiths, and toured the world performing the songs of Howlin’ Wolf with Hubert Sumlin and Levon Helm. He also hosted the weekly radio show “The Mansion of Fun” on Sirius XM and painted.
He is survived by his wife, Mara Hennessey, and a stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey.

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/david-joha...l?guccounter=1

[Happy As Larry]

[Happy As Larry]

[KWAN]

Jack Vettriano. Scottish painter.
Jack Vettriano: a life in pictures | Art and design | The Guardian

[Happy As Larry]

[Happy As Larry]

Roy Ayers, jazz-funk pioneer behind Everybody Loves the Sunshine, dies aged 84

Family announces on Facebook that the musician died in New York City after a long illness

Roy Ayers, the jazz-funk pioneer whose hit Everybody Loves the Sunshine has become a summer staple across the globe, has died aged 84.

A post on the musician’s official Facebook page said: “It is with great sadness that the family of legendary vibraphonist, composer and producer Roy Ayers announce his passing which occurred on March 4th, 2025 in New York City after a long illness.
“He lived a beautiful 84 years and will be sorely missed. His family ask that you respect their privacy at this time, a celebration of Roy’s life will be forthcoming.”

Ayers was born in Los Angeles on 10 September 1940. His mother, Ruby, was a schoolteacher and local piano instructor while his father, Roy Sr, worked as a parking attendant and a trombonist. Ayers began learning the piano from an early age, and went on to be taught by the jazz musician Bobby Hutcherson who lived nearby. He studied advanced music theory at Los Angeles city college before releasing his debut album, West Coast Vibes, in 1963, which led to a string of solo records.

He then formed his band Roy Ayers Ubiquity and developed his signature jazz-funk sound that featured him on vibraphone, an instrument he was inspired to learn after meeting the jazz musician Lionel Hampton, who gave him a pair of mallets when he was five years old.
After the release of his debut album in 1963, Ayers’ output was prolific. By the time Everybody Loves the Sunshine was released, Ayers had already put out more than a dozen albums, earning himself the title of Godfather of Neo Soul. In the early part of his career, Ayers collaborated with Herbie Mann, with the pair working together for four years and playing at Newport jazz festival.

When asked about his genre-hopping approach to music, Ayres said: “I don’t think I’m really so unique. What we call ‘soul’ has been around a long time. It comes out of a particular culture that is African in origin, but influenced by 250 years of slavery, as well as other forms of racial oppression.”
Ayers had several hits in the UK. Get on Up, Get on Down; Heat of the Beat, and Don’t Stop the Feeling all reached the top 50, and in 1973 Ayres composed the score for the Blaxploitation film Coffy. The film starred Pam Grier, who would go on to become a mainstay of the genre, but Ayres soundtrack was critically acclaimed in its own right, and featured vocalist Dee Dee Bridgewater and Harry Whitaker on piano.


In 1976 he released his most famous track, Everybody Loves the Sunshine, a mellow song about lazy summer days. In 2017, Ayers told the Guardian about the process behind the hit.
He recorded it at Electric Lady studios in New York on a hot summer day. “I just got this phrase in my head,” he said. “‘Everybody loves the sunshine.’ I started singing: ‘Feel what I feel, when I feel what I feel, what I’m feeling.’ Then I started thinking about summer imagery … It was so spontaneous. It felt wonderful.”

The song became one of the most sampled jazz records ever. Mary J Blige’s My Life, Common’s Book of Life and Mos Def’s Life Is Real all feature elements of the track, and its popularity ensured Ayers was a regular feature at festivals around the world, including London’s Maiden Voyage, which he headlined in 2019.

“The song changed everything for me,” Ayers said. “It’s still the last song of my show. People always join in and it’s been sampled over 100 times, by everyone from Dr Dre to Pharrell Williams. It seems to capture every generation. Everybody loves the sunshine – except Dracula.”

Roy Ayers, jazz-funk pioneer behind Everybody Loves the Sunshine, dies aged 84 | Music | The Guardian

[harrybarracuda]

He was a bit saucy too oo er missus.

[beachbound]

New Mexico officials have announced the cause of death for actor Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa, a week after they were found dead at their home in Santa Fe. Hackman died of heart disease, with Alzheimer's disease as a contributing factor, and Arakawa died several days before him of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome, Chief Medical Investigator Dr. Heather Jarrell announced Friday.Gene Hackman's cause of death was heart disease, wife died of hantavirus days earlier, officials say - CBS News

[harrybarracuda]

How incredibly sad.

The doctor said Arakawa likely died on 11 February, the date she was last known to have communicated with people via email.
She said Hackman had advanced Alzheimer's and died from heart disease, with data from his pacemaker last registering on 18 February.
Due to his Alzheimer's, "it's quite possible he was not aware that [his wife] was deceased," Dr Jarrell added.

They mentioned earlier that the dog probably died due to dehydration as it couldn't get of its cage.

[beachbound]

^
Sad way to go, for all three of them. It’s a shame, there was no one in their lives to check on them.

[TizMe]

^
Sad way to go, for all three of them. It’s a shame, there was no one in their lives to check on them.

Would have thought someone with his wealth and health would have employed a full time carer.

No children even were checking up on him

[harrybarracuda]

Tributes have been paid to a 'secret hero' who tackled a would-be suicide bomber at Glasgow Airport. Stephen Clarkson, who has died aged 59, did not seek recognition for his part in foiling terrorist Kafeel Ahmed in June 2007. He was awarded the Queen's Commendation for Bravery after taking Ahmed down with a "wee forearm smash". He passed away just five months after being diagnosed with a rare type of cancer.

<snip>

Recalling the incident on the 10 year anniversary, Stephen told the Daily Record: "I'm no hero. I only did what thousands of Scots would have done when hundreds of lives were at risk. I hope other would-be terrorists get the message that Scotland will not stand for terrorism.

"I took two steps towards him and he never flinched so I just ran at him and basically mowed him down. I knew I had to do it. My gut instinct was that he was a terrorist and had to be stopped."


'Secret hero' of terror attack on Glasgow Airport dies aged 59 as family pays tribute - Scottish Daily Express

[harrybarracuda]

John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, the last surviving pilot that served in the Battle of Britain, has passed away at the age of 105.

Last surviving Battle of Britain pilot John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway dies aged 105 - LBC

[klong toey]

Former Formula 1 team owner and broadcaster Eddie Jordan dies aged 76 | UK News | Sky News

[harrybarracuda]

Shame to see Eddie go. He was an affable chap, and popular in the Middle East for his musical skills.

It seems prostate cancer took him.

Eddie Jordan obituary: Formula 1'&#39;'s flamboyant deal-maker - BBC Sport