The RIP Famous Person Thread

[November Rain]

Is it sick to say that everyone is just waiting around for the passing of a certain S. African politician, wanting to be the first to post it?

[socal]

Good cleanup lately....

[blue]

Is it sick to say that everyone is just waiting around for the passing of a certain S. African politician, wanting to be the first to post it?

I hope oscar petraeus does the decent thing and beats him too it , doubtful though, as he has his blades back on and training on the running track ..

[Bobcock]

Pistorius

[Mr Lick]

Hans Hass

Hans Hass, the marine biologist, oceanographer and zoologist, who has died aged 94, was a pioneer — with his wife Lotte — of spectacular films of the sea depths, and in the mid-1950s shot the first underwater footage for the BBC.




Hass during filming with his second wife Lotte


At a time when diving equipment was bulky and unreliable, Hass managed with just flippers, goggles and lightweight breathing apparatus that allowed him to get close to the undersea action . Many viewers, however, were more spellbound by Hass’s glamorous wife than by the mechanics of braving watery new frontiers . A fan of his since her school days, Lotte Baierl got a job as his secretary, and during a filming expedition to the Red Sea in 1950, the year she and Hass married, worked as both an underwater photographer and model.


Hass himself was not particularly keen on taking women on his expeditions. But his film company insisted that his documentaries would appeal to a wider audience if they featured a pretty female lead. Lotte proved a natural talent on camera, and her picture soon adorned the front pages of international magazines. Film offers from Hollywood followed, but she turned them down, saying she did not want to be a full-time actress.


The Hasses’ first BBC series, Diving To Adventure, largely filmed in the Aegean, was screened in 1956. The programmes proved hugely popular and the couple returned to the screen two years later with another series, The Undersea World of Adventure, shot in the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and the Red Sea.


Hass made the films to pay for scientific expeditions, and had mixed feelings about missing out on academic work. “Much as I enjoyed making the films, they took all my time and I would have liked to have done more of the research,” he explained. He once left his ship in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and flew to Bristol, home of the BBC’s Natural History Unit, with material for six half-hour programmes, before returning with the money he had been paid, which allowed him to continue his undersea studies.


The couple’s exploits beneath the sea, filmed on comparatively primitive cameras and broadcast in black and white, thrilled television audiences throughout the late 1950s and 1960s by opening a window on to a breathtaking and hitherto unseen world. Rivalled only by Jacques Cousteau, Hass and his wife managed — often in perilous circumstances — to capture the habits and activities of a range of deep-sea creatures including dangerous sharks, barracuda and giant manta rays. (Hass carried a spear for protection.)


The pictures he brought back also helped to inject the emerging sport of scuba-diving with some much-needed glamour, as did the television series Sea Hunt, launched in 1958 and starring the actor Lloyd Bridges. Hass believed his underwater series, dubbed with English and German commentaries, were more popular in England than in Germany because they appealed to “the British sense of adventure”. Yet they also served a serious purpose, drawing attention to the need to protect the marine environment.

The son of a lawyer, Hans Hass was born in Vienna on January 23 1919; as a child he learned to swim in a tributary of the Danube. An early boyhood memory was of examining a drop of water under a friend’s microscope. On a holiday on the Cote d’Azur, he met the American journalist Guy Gilpatric, who taught the young Hans the basics of spearfishing and recommended he equip himself with goggles and a harpoon.

In 1936 Hans travelled to England as an exchange student. He later studied Law at the universities of Vienna and Berlin, but yielded to the pull of undersea life and turned to Zoology. An article about his deep-sea exploits off the Riviera earned him enough to buy a camera, sealed in a home-made watertight case, and a pair of swimming fins, the first to be seen in Vienna.

In 1938 he led his first expedition, diving off the coast of Yugoslavia with a group of college friends; as he took photographs, he encountered — and killed — his first shark. The trip furnished him with material for a lecture series which financed his next expedition, to the West Indies.

In the Caribbean, Hass devised his own protocol for filming sharks. “If I wanted to photograph a shark,” he explained in his memoir Diving To Adventure (1952), “I pretended to flee as conspicuously as possible, thus awakening the instinct in every beast of prey to chase what tries to escape. And I actually succeeded thus in luring sharks after me.

“When I saw that they were close enough, I would suddenly spin and swim toward them with camera ready. And before the creatures had recovered from their surprise and turned away in disgust, I already had their image on film.” Hass completed his first short underwater short, Pirsch unter Wasser (Stalking under Water), in 1940. The following year he moved from Vienna to Berlin.

On the proceeds of his films, pictures, lectures and articles, Hass was able to buy his own yacht, Sea Devil, and to finance an expedition to Greece in 1942. On this trip he observed fishermen illegally blasting schools of fish with dynamite, and did likewise to lure sharks to within camera range as they were drawn to the scene by the fall out of the explosions.

In the same year Hass was conscripted into the Wehrmacht, and on account of his diving skills was assigned to the so-called “Fighters of the Sea” (Kampfschwimmer) battalion, the Wehrmacht’s crack frogmen unit and part of the military secret service.

He was dispatched to Italy, where his cache of pictures and specimens from Greece narrowly escaped destruction at Allied hands. Hass had stored them in a railway coach for the homeward trip to Germany, but as fighting threatened to engulf the station at Naples he managed to retrieve them just minutes before the train was blown up in an air raid. He took them to Berlin, where after the war he completed his doctorate in Zoology.

Hass now found himself without the wherewithal to fund and equip another full-scale expedition, so he undertook the first of two solo visits to Africa to explore the coral reefs of the Red Sea. British officials at Port Sudan helped him to get a boat, in which he was able to photograph giant manta rays at close range, as well as sharks. On his second expedition to the area, he filmed Under The Red Sea, which won an award at the 1951 Venice Film Festival.

Later that year, having bought a new research ship, Xarifa, and married Lotte, Hass embarked on a series of filming safaris in the Red Sea. He shot the Oscar-winning feature film Unternehmen Xarifa (Under the Caribbean), the first German film to be produced in Technicolor, and which included the first underwater shots of a sperm whale.

Hass gave up diving and filmmaking in 1961 to concentrate on developing his Energon Theory, which maintains that evolution can be broken down into three phases: single-cell; multi-cell; and so-called “hyper-cell” organisms . Man, he argued, is a multi-cell organism, but becomes a hyper-cell organism by developing and using technology to enhance his natural physical capacity. In this way, Hass suggested, technology was an evolutionary phenomenon.

In 1999 he founded the International Hans Hass Institute for Energon-Cybernetic Research at the University of Vienna, where he was appointed to a professorship.

Hass was the author of 28 books, among them Men And Sharks (1949); Diving To Adventure (1952); and Manta: Under The Red Sea With Spear and Camera (1953).

His first marriage, to the actress Hannelore Schroth, ended in divorce. Lotte Hass survives him with a son by his first wife.


Hans Hass, born January 23 1919, died June 16 2013

[Mr Lick]

Mark Fisher

Mark Fisher, who has died aged 66, was an acclaimed creator of live rock shows, designing spectacular, complex and often startling stage sets for the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, a multimedia show to inaugurate the Millennium Dome in 1999, and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics in 2008.





As a rock tour design specialist, Fisher swept away the clichéd pyrotechnics achieved by a few lasers and buckets of dry ice. A typically dazzling Fisher extravaganza for Pink Floyd, for example, would feature an almost life-size fibreglass dive bomber zooming over the crowd during the first number and exploding on the stage in a ball of flame.

Another staple were 30ft-high inflatables operated by wires from the stadium roof.



Mark Fisher's set for Pink Floyd's 'the Wall' concert in Berlin, 1991





For “Pop Mart”, U2’s epic world tour launched in Las Vegas in front of 40,000 fans in 1997, he designed the kind of preposterous spectacle that defines the desert gambling city. The set was dominated by a 100ft golden arch supporting the group’s enormous PA rig. Stage-right was a cocktail stick of equally monstrous proportions, on the tip of which sat an illuminated olive, 12ft in circumference. The world’s largest video screen, 150ft wide and 50ft high, served as a backdrop, conjuring images of consumer culture by means of one million separate LED fittings.


But the biggest surprise was a rotating mirror-ball lemon, 35ft in diameter, that shimmered out along a track into the audience and opened to reveal the group. “It’s the carnival, the circus,” Fisher explained. “The grail is to give the audience something spectacular it really didn’t expect.”


Fisher’s talents were not confined to rock venues. For the Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, he could conjure a forest of 80ft trees made out of corrugated steel, or a huge, sinister “wheel of death” torture machine. Back in London he also designed the sets for the West End stage production of the Queen tribute musical We Will Rock You.


Whatever the gig, Fisher never stinted on his spectaculars. One of his shows might consume 3,000 amps of power, running through almost 20 miles of cable. As well as his signature inflatables, there might be up to 100 moving lights, some zipping overhead like UFOs on racks in the roof, all at the fingertips of a video controller seated at a bank of computers. It would take three hard drives of two terabytes just to deliver the visuals, beamed in high-definition from more than 20 projectors.


A graduate of the avant-garde Architectural Association, Fisher eschewed a conventional design career when he left college in the early 1970s, working instead on the set design for the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar. His break came when he was asked to make an inflatable menagerie for Pink Floyd’s “Animals” tour of 1977, which confirmed the band as the masters of stadium rock.

But it was Fisher’s design for the ex-Floyd member Roger Waters’s one-off concert in Berlin in 1990 that catapulted him to fame. Waters gave a performance of the group’s 1979 album The Wall at the site of the Berlin Wall in the Potsdamer Platz. To mark the occasion, Fisher (with his then partner, Jonathan Park) built the largest set in the world from 2,500 styrofoam bricks stretching 550ft across what had been No-man’s-land.

The concert featured the demolition of a monumental 60ft wall by a 100ft helium-filled inflatable pig and cost $16 million. “All in all it’s just another hole in the wall” assailed the eardrums of 200,000 watching fans as Fisher blew up his set. After the show he recycled the styrofoam bricks as cavity wall insulation.

Fisher acknowledged learning much about stagecraft from that gig. “It’s to do with having a series of big visual spectacles that, taken sequentially, make up a narrative,” he explained. Perhaps the most successful application of his formula was in the case of the Rolling Stones, all of whose touring concerts he designed after 1989, lacing them with such startling surprises as an 80ft fire-spitting cobra and a giant inflatable pastiche of Elvis’s mantelpiece.

For the central arena of the Millennium Dome at Greenwich in 1999, Fisher had at his disposal an area the size of Trafalgar Square, high enough to accommodate Nelson’s Column. Attracted by something so huge spatially but physically ethereal he devised a 20-minute show in which he completely filled the space with constructions of lightweight materials.

Fisher worked with the musician Peter Gabriel and the choreographer Micha Bergese, Mick Jagger’s one-time personal dance trainer, to create a show in which aerial performers worked at heights many times greater than any usually encountered by circus acrobats, inviting comparisons with the traditional Big Top, but on an altogether more spectacular scale.

Until the 1990s, rock concert sets were built entirely from scaffolding, requiring gangs of roadies hired at every venue. By the end of the century almost every set was assembled from a kit of prefabricated parts rented from specialist suppliers, halving the requirement for casual labour. In the case of U2’s “Pop Mart”, three sets of the giant jigsaw leapfrogged the concert venues in 11 trucks, each crewed by its own 12-man team which built it in 36 hours with the help of a few casual workers. The elements Fisher conceived and custom-built, like the video screen, would arrive at the stadium to be assembled on the day of the concert.

He recognised that technology had revolutionised the live music experience, and that fans spent much more on tickets than they had in the past. A band like Pink Floyd, for example, might play 110 gigs in venues each holding around 20,000 people. With the average cost of a ticket set at £75, production and touring costs of £37 million were far outstripped by potential ticket sales of £165 million.

“It’s all about economics,” Fisher explained. “For the sums to add up on a major tour, an artist needs to play three to four concerts a week, and to keep the price of the set below $1 million per gig. We spent $4 million on the specials for 'Pop Mart’ and the expenses added up to between $50 and $60 million.”

With the Rolling Stones, Fisher worked most closely with drummer Charlie Watts — himself a former graphic designer — as well as with Mick Jagger, who considered set design crucial to how the Stones maintained their provocative, contemporary edge. It was not always an easy relationship: for the band’s “Bridges To Babylon” tour in 1997, for example, Fisher proposed a telescopic bridge linking two parts of the set, only for Keith Richards to respond: “What the f*** do we want that for?” But when Fisher returned 10 months later with an animation illustrating the same idea, Richards said: “That’s fantastic; we gotta have one of those.”

With the bespectacled look of a mad professor, Fisher admitted to thinking of himself a rock star manqué but never took his work too seriously. After all, he would joke, rock set design is no more than “the invention of the unnecessary by the unemployable”.

The son of a schoolteacher, Mark Eliott Fisher was born on April 20 1947 in Warwickshire. After Pocklington School in Yorkshire, he graduated from the Architectural Association in London in 1971.

He moved swiftly into showbusiness, reviving an architectural tradition dating back to the 18th century, when Inigo Jones and John Nash designed theatrical sets. “In Britain, modern architects became involved in the seedy world of office blocks,” he explained, “while the entertainment business ran showbiz. They took away all the fun from architects. That’s why I moved back.”

In 1984 he established the Fisher Park Partnership with Jonathan Park. The partnership was dissolved 10 years later when Fisher established Stufish, the Mark Fisher Studio.

Although best known as a rock venue designer, Fisher also designed the Queen Victoria Memorial stage at Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s diamond jubilee in 2012; the opening ceremony for the 2010 Asian Games in Guangzhou; and the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. He was an executive producer for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic opening and closing ceremonies.

Fisher’s other rock tour commissions included Tina Turner’s “Private Dancer” (1985), George Michael’s “Faith” (1988), Jean Michel Jarre’s “Concerts In China” (1981) and U2’s “ZooTV” (1992-93). His more recent shows included “The Immortal Michael Jackson” for Cirque du Soleil and Elton John’s “Million Dollar Piano” at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

In 2012 he designed Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way Ball” and Madonna’s “MDNA” tour.

For his work on the Millennium celebrations Fisher was appointed OBE in 2000. In 2002 he was appointed MVO for his contribution to the Queen’s golden jubilee celebrations.
His wife, Cristina Garcia, survives him.


Mark Fisher, born April 20 1947, died June 25 2013

[Mr Lick]

Roger LaVern

Roger LaVern, who has died aged 75, was the keyboard player in The Tornados who, in 1962, became the first British group to reach No 1 in America, with Telstar; his rewards, however, were more sexual than financial.




Roger LaVern (top right) with The Tornados in 1964


The Tornados were the creation of the record producer Joe Meek, who assembled a line-up of session musicians to act as house group for the artists he managed; at the same time they worked on tour for the impresario Larry Parnes, backing Billy Fury and other singers. But it was Telstar, a tribute to the world’s first communications satellite, that made their name, with initial sales of five million worldwide. It went on to become the biggest-selling instrumental of all time, and for a while The Tornados were seen as serious rivals to The Shadows.


Driven by a small electronic keyboard known as a clavioline, and opening with the sound of “radio signals” from outer space, Telstar was recorded in Meek’s studio during a short break from The Tornados’ summer season with Billy Fury at Great Yarmouth. LaVern played a piano in the rhythm section, as there was no time for him to lay down the main melody line. The clavioline and associated sound effects were overdubbed later.


Yet Telstar seemed to capture the excitement of the early space age. As well as reaching No 1 in the States, it spent 25 weeks in the UK charts, five of them at No 1. The Tornados went on to record three more Top 20 hits — Robot, Ice Cream Man and Globetrotter, which made it to No 5 — but their time in the limelight was short-lived.

Within a year or so of Telstar, pop instrumentals were giving way to the Mersey Sound.


In the summer of 1963, as the group’s fortunes waned, The Tornados’ bassist Heinz Burt left to start a solo career, and LaVern followed shortly afterwards. As well as their session fees, Meek paid them £1,900 each for their hits. But this was nothing compared to what they should have received and, after leaving the group, LaVern declared voluntary bankruptcy in an unsuccessful attempt to wrest royalties from Meek’s publishing company.


At the time, though, the royalties from Telstar were being withheld due to a copyright infringement suit. Meek, a flamboyant homosexual who was rumoured to mix with gangsters and dabble in drugs and black magic, shot himself dead in 1967 and did not live to see the case settled in his favour. The Tornados, meanwhile, did not receive a penny more until 1990 when, after a long-running series of legal wrangles, they won back the rights to their work — with a cheque for £2,900.


There had been some compensations, though. “There were so many girls,” LaVern recalled. “You came out of the stage door and you could click your fingers and say 'you, you and you’. It was like plucking apples off a tree.” Over 30 or so years he bedded, by his own estimate, “a good 3,500”, married nine times (one union only got as far as the wedding reception and he married his last wife twice), and furnished a further four women with children (“all accidents”). “I would get so wrapped up in girls that they would take over everything,” he recalled. “I felt a bit like a lemming that kept throwing itself off the cliff.”

On the strength of Telstar, LaVern went on to develop a career as a solo pianist and found success in Mexico, where he appeared in television commercials for Ron Castillo Rum and Chevrolet cars and played the piano on television and in hotels and nightclubs.
Known as El Lobo Plateado (“The Silver Wolf”), he became something of a celebrity, playing at presidential cocktail parties. In 1978 he broke the world record in a piano-playing marathon which lasted 48 days, 20 hours and 47 minutes.

But eventually his hands seized up with Dupuytren’s Contracture and he had to return to Britain for a series of operations which took 10 years to correct the condition. His professional career was over, and at one point in the early 1990s he was reduced to working as a security guard for Associated Newspapers.

He was born Roger Keith Jackson on November 11 1937 and brought up at Kidderminster. His father, George, a director of a confectionery company, had wide contacts in the entertainments world and Roger would recall being bounced, aged nine, on the knee of Oliver Hardy until he was nearly sick.

His father was something of a womaniser (Roger described him as “too good-looking for his own good”), and his parents’ marriage was not a happy one. In 1948 Roger’s world fell apart when his father was found guilty of murdering an actress, one of his mistresses, and sentenced to be hanged. However, the “murder” was found to have been a suicide pact from which Roger’s father had chickened out at the point of turning the gun on himself. The death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, of which he served seven and a half years.

As a result of the scandal, Roger was removed from his day school in Kidderminster and dispatched to the Royal Commercial Travellers’ boarding school in Middlesex. There, to escape the bullies, he would shut himself away in the gym, which was equipped with a piano on which he taught himself to play Winifred Atwell’s rags. He was later expelled from the school after being caught out late at night with a girl.

In 1956 he joined the Army and was accepted into the Household Cavalry. During the Suez Crisis he was stationed for a while in Churchill’s War Rooms, mimeographing classified documents.

On demob in 1959, he returned to Kidderminster, embarked on the first of his marriages and got a job as an accountant, while performing as a pianist in his spare time on the local pub, club and wedding circuit. But he soon ditched both job and wife and decamped to London where, under the name LaVern (borrowed from the rhythm and blues singer LaVern Baker), he worked as a pianist at the Granada Cinema in Walthamstow before being recruited for The Tornados.

After leaving the band, and a spell as a social worker, in 1972 LaVern flew to Mexico, where he enjoyed his biggest success as a musician. Back in England in 1975, he reunited with other former Tornados to record a stereo version of Telstar, which gained little airplay. He also took over the management of Screaming Lord Sutch and Jet Harris, the former Shadows bass guitarist, but with no great success. He returned to Mexico and lived there until forced to give up performing.

After seven operations over 10 years, by 1996 LaVern’s hands were partially restored and he returned to performing at charity gigs. In 2011 he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the STAR Foundation, in the House of Lords, for his charitable work.

Roger LaVern’s wife Maria survives him.


Roger LaVern, born November 11 1937, died June 15 2013

[Mr Lick]

Commander Eddie Grenfell

Commander Eddie Grenfell, who has died aged 93, was a leading light in the campaign for Arctic convoy veterans to be awarded their own medal.





In 1942 Grenfell was responsible for the radar which was fitted in the Empire Lawrence, a catapult-armed merchant ship (or CAM), which carried a single Sea Hurricane fighter.

The Hurricane was to be launched by catapult in the event of an aerial attack on convoy PQ16, bound for Murmansk.


On May 26 Empire Lawrence’s radar was damaged by enemy gunfire. Grenfell volunteered to climb the mast to carry out a repair while another air attack developed.

He clung to the masthead while cannon shells and machine-gun bullets whistled past, then scrambled to the deck past a jagged hole where the mast had been hit. He was rewarded with a tot of what he called “the best of Jamaica’s golden liquid” — and the ship’s master promised that he would be recommended for bravery in the face of the enemy.


Later that day, when the convoy was attacked by German bombers, Empire Lawrence was able to fly off her Sea Hurricane and shoot down two of the enemy. The Sea Hurricane, however, ditched into the sea and the pilot had to be plucked from the water by a rescue ship.


This single aircraft constituted the convoy’s entire airborne defence, and the next day three enemy bombers dived on Empire Lawrence. Their bombs exploded in No 2 hold, causing her cargo of ammunition to go up and turning the ship into a gigantic fireball. Grenfell recalled: “I flew through the air surrounded by large chunks of steel, one that looked like the ship’s funnel, hitting the water and going down very deep, and when I opened my eyes, I found myself faced with a swirling black turmoil instead of the green sea I had expected. With my lungs close to bursting, I prayed, even argued with my Maker. Something was hanging on my right arm. I gave a heave, and brought to the surface the body of someone impossible to recognise. A piece of metal, still there, had almost halved his head in two.”


The survivors of Empire Lawrence were landed in Murmansk, where they were left on the quayside, cold and hungry, until the next morning. They were then taken to a Russian camp where they lived on a diet of tea and pork fat. Grenfell’s wounds were slight: cuts and bruises, and incipient frostbite in his lower legs. He was repatriated in the destroyer Hussar.


William Edward Grenfell was born at Peterhead in Scotland on January 17 1920 and educated at Montrose Academy, Angus, and the Prince of Wales Sea Training School at Limehouse , which trained deck ratings for the Merchant Navy.

On the outbreak of war he joined the Royal Navy as a torpedoman, trained as an electrician, and was sent to sea, first in the cruiser Edinburgh and then in Empire Lawrence, in which his role was to operate and maintain the ship’s radio direction-finding equipment (or RDF, as radar was then known).

Post-war, Grenfell was commissioned into the Navy’s newly formed electrical branch, and after serving as assistant British naval attaché in Bonn (1961-65) he lived in Germany for 15 years, at first running an import-export business. After being seriously injured in a car accident, he rebuilt his life working as a gardener and later as a tour guide.

Apart from his tot of rum, Grenfell’s bravery in May 1942 was never formally acknowledged, and his treatment rankled. When the Russian government began to award medals on the 40th, 50th and 60th anniversaries of the Great Patriotic War, with special reference to service in the defence of the Soviet Arctic, and it began to invite survivors to commemorative events in Archangel and Murmansk, Grenfell’s sense of injustice increased. In his retirement he began a campaign for participants in the Arctic convoys to be awarded a medal.

Successive British governments resisted the argument that the Russian convoys were a distinct campaign, although naval historians recognised that the struggle in the Barents Sea, more than 800 miles from the Atlantic proper, was very definitely a separate affair from the Battle of the Atlantic.

When, in 2006, the Blair government offered a lapel badge, it was dismissed as being “like something you find at the bottom of a cornflakes packet”. Grenfell went further: “We are disgusted, absolutely disgusted. Mr Blair effectively told us we were a great bunch of fellows but there was a limit to what he could do and we would have to be happy with a badge. I am not satisfied. The only way that a campaign, especially one as dreadful as the Arctic one, goes down in history is by a medal. A badge means nothing.”

Then, in December 2012, Grenfell heard that he had won his fight. By March this year, however, he was too ill to travel to the official award ceremony in Downing Street. He was presented with his medal by the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Sir David Richards, at the Lord Mayor’s parlour in Portsmouth.

Grenfell also received a personal letter from the Prime Minister, and he thanked the PM by acknowledging the part he had played in achieving success for the veterans: “He always supported our claim but was hampered by civil service bureaucracy just as I was,” said Grenfell. “I’m just sad that so many of my colleagues are no longer with us to receive their medals.”

Eddie Grenfell married first, in 1942 (dissolved 1967), Beryl Hodgkins; he married secondly, in 1968 (dissolved 1974), Irene Haneberg. He is survived by two daughters of his first marriage.


Cdr Eddie Grenfell, born January 17 1920, died June 28 2013

[Mr Lick]

James Martin

James Martin, the pioneering computer scientist who has died aged 79, was hailed “The Guru of the Information Age” for his books on the impact of computer technology; in 2005 he became the largest individual benefactor to Oxford University in its 900-year history, donating $150 million towards a new research school.





His vast fortune stemmed from a career that spanned four decades and produced some of the most influential textbooks in the information technology industry. He also led the field of Computer Aided Software Engineering , which uses computers themselves to help in the creation of new programs , effectively automating much of the process.


Martin’s writings during the 1960s and 1970s were eerily precognisant, anticipating trends decades before their realisation. Future Developments in Telecommunications (1977) predicted the rise of online shopping and rolling 24-hour news. The Wired Society (1978) was written in the era before the mobile telephone; yet it declared that “the phone of the future will be more mobile, do a host of different tasks and be part of a complex, far-reaching information network”.


In 2005 he offered Oxford University $100 million for the launch of a new centre — the James Martin 21st Century School — aimed at conducting research in healthcare; energy and the environment; technology, and politics and governance. Another $50 million followed five years later. For ideas he drew upon his business contacts, consulting Bill Gates and George Soros. Soros later pledged $5 million towards a programme of research into economic theory. Rechristened the Oxford Martin School, the centre today encompasses 30 different disciplines

Martin outlined his vision in The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for Ensuring Our Future (2006). It painted a dramatic picture of a forthcoming “age of extremes”, governed by scientific advances and increasingly radical ideologies. In order to adapt, Martin argued, society would need to educate the next generation as never before.

“Revolutionary change is essential,” he wrote, “and today’s young people will make it happen.”


James Martin was born on October 19 1933 at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicester, and attended the local grammar school before winning a scholarship to Keble College, Oxford, where he read Physics. After National Service he joined IBM in 1959.


The company had produced the first commercially-available computer, the IBM 701, seven years previously, and Martin was set to work on the first model to use a hard disk drive, the 305 RAMAC. The size of a room, it could complete 50 operations per second (today, computers produced by IBM are capable of 1,000 trillion operations in the same length of time).

He wrote his first book, Programming Real-Time Computer Systems, in 1963, and the following year he worked on BOAC’s first worldwide computer network, which handled passenger reservations, flight planning and crew scheduling. Eventually incorporating 200 terminals in 70 countries, it was then one of the most complicated and expensive projects of its kind.

He left IBM in 1978 and founded various consultancy companies during the 1980s. Between 1977 and 2000 he delivered a series of five-day “World Seminars” on complex computer systems, which often commanded ticket prices of several thousand dollars a head.

He was an honorary fellow of Keble College and of the Royal British Institution.

At the end of the 1990s he purchased the private Agar’s Island in Bermuda and built himself a colonial-style house there. The design incorporated parts of a 19th-century gunpowder store and an old limekiln, with vaulted chambers where he would entertain guests such as Michael Douglas and Rudy Giuliani. Martin was found drowned in the waters off the island.

James Martin is survived by his third wife, Lilian, and by a daughter of his first marriage.


James Martin, born October 19 1933, died June 24 2013

[Smug Farang Bore]

^^^^^ he looks like the lead singer out of Nickelback...!

[patsycat]

I thought that too!!

[harrybarracuda]

Actor Jim Kelly of 'Enter the Dragon' fame dies at 67
"Enter the Dragon" star Jim "The Dragon" Kelly died of cancer on Saturday.




Jim Kelly Black Samurai. Al Adamson/Wikipedia
Published: July 1, 2013 at 9:02 AM By VERONICA LINARES, UPI.com
American martial arts artist Jim "The Dragon" Kelly died Saturday at the age of 67 of cancer.

Kelly's former wife Marilyn Dishman told CNN the former martial arts instructor died of cancer at his home in San Diego, Calif. but did not elaborate on the details.

Kelly is best known for his performance in the 1973 film "Enter the Dragon," where he starred alongside Bruce Lee.

After a brief career in action movies, Kelly became a professional tennis player. He was a ranked player on the USTA senior circuit.

"I never left the movie business," Kelly told the Los Angeles Times in 2010. "It's just that after a certain point, I didn't get the type of projects that I wanted to do."
Kelly is survived by his partner of 33 years and his ex-wife.

[Mr Lick]

Enter the Dragon actor Jim Kelly dies of cancer aged 67



Kelly stepped away from the movie business in the 1980s


US actor and karate expert Jim Kelly, who starred with Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon, has died at the age of 67.

Kelly became famed for his cool one-liners and fight scenes as the charismatic Williams in the 1973 martial arts classic.

His other films included Black Belt Jones, Three the Hard Way, Golden Needles and the Black Samurai.

Marilyn Dishman, Kelly's ex-wife, said he died on Saturday of cancer at his home in California.

Enter the Dragon is considered to be one of the most popular kung fu films of all time, it was Lee's first film in the English language and was released days after his death at the age of 32.

In the 1980s, Kelly re-trained as a professional tennis coach.

In an interview with the LA Times in 2010, Kelly said: "I broke down the colour barrier - I was the first black martial artist to become a movie star. It's amazing to see how many people still remember that, because I haven't really done much, in terms of movies, in a long time."

He added: "I never left the movie business. It's just that after a certain point, I didn't get the type of projects that I wanted to do. I still get at least three scripts per year, but most of them don't put forth a positive image.

"There's nothing I really want to do, so I don't do it. If it happens, it happens, but if not, I'm happy with what I've accomplished."

Kelly was born in Kentucky and began studying martial arts there in 1964 before moving to California.

By the end of the decade, he was teaching at his own karate school before being sought out by Enter the Dragon producer Fred Weintraub, who had heard about his karate skills.

[Mr Lick]

Singer Bernie Nolan dies aged 52



Bernie Nolan spent 20 years as lead singer of the hit Irish girl group


Actress and singer Bernie Nolan has died at the age of 52, following a long battle with breast cancer.

The former lead singer of The Nolans was first diagnosed in 2010, and had chemotherapy and a mastectomy, receiving an all-clear in 2012.

However, months later the disease returned and spread to her brain, bones, lungs and liver.

In recent years she was best known for her acting roles in The Bill and Channel 4 soap Brookside.

"Bernie passed away peacefully this morning with all of her family around her," said a spokesperson for the family.

"The entire family are devastated to have lost beloved Bernie, a wonderful wife, adoring mother and loving sister, she is irreplaceable."

Nolan turned to acting following 20 years leading the original six-strong Irish girl group The Nolans, and a string of hits including I'm in the Mood for Dancing and Don't Make Waves.

She left the group in 1994, and took to the stage, performing in productions including Blood Brothers in London's West End.

She moved into television playing hairdresser Diane Murray in Brookside from 2000-2002 and joining ITV's police drama The Bill in 2003, as Sergeant Sheelagh Murphy.

She married Steve Doneathy in 1996 and leaves one daughter, Erin.

Speaking to BBC Breakfast in May this year, Doneathy said Nolan had stopped chemotherapy and entered palliative care.

"But she's still being as positive as you can be under those circumstances. You get up every day, face the day, and make that day the best it can be."

[Mr Lick]

Computer mouse inventor Doug Engelbart dies at 88





Richard Lister looks back at his life


The inventor of the computer mouse, Doug Engelbart, has died aged 88.

Engelbart developed the tool in the 1960s as a wooden shell covering two metal wheels, patenting it long before the mouse's widespread use.

He also worked on early incarnations of email, word processing and video teleconferences at a California research institute.

The state's Computer History Museum was notified of his death by his daughter, Christina, in an email.

Her father had been in poor health and died peacefully on Tuesday night in his sleep, she said.

Doug Engelbart was born on 30 January 1925 in Portland, Oregon, to a radio repairman father and a housewife mother.


'Mother of all demos'

He studied electrical engineering at Oregon State University and served as a radar technician during World War II.





Dr Engelbart's first ever mouse demo


He then worked at Nasa's predecessor, Naca, as an electrical engineer, but soon left to pursue a doctorate at University of California, Berkeley.

His interest in how computers could be used to aid human cognition eventually led him to Stanford Research Institute (SRI) and then his own laboratory, the Augmentation Research Center.

His laboratory helped develop ARPANet, the government research network that led to the internet.

Engelbart's ideas were way ahead of their time in an era when computers took up entire rooms and data was fed into the hulking machines on punch cards.

At a now legendary presentation that became known as the "mother of all demos" in San Francisco in 1968, he made the first public demonstration of the mouse.

At the same event, he held the first video teleconference and explained his theory of text-based links, which would form the architecture of the internet.

He did not make much money from the mouse because its patent ran out in 1987, before the device became widely used.

SRI licensed the technology in 1983 for $40,000 (£26,000) to Apple.

At least one billion computer mice have been sold.

Engelbart had considered other designs for his most famous invention, including a device that could be fixed underneath a table and operated by the knee.




How the computer mouse got its name


He was said to have been driven by the belief that computers could be used to augment human intellect.

Engelbart was awarded the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT prize in 1997 and the National Medal of Technology for "creating the foundations of personal computing" in 2000.

Since 2005, he had been a fellow at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

He is survived by his second wife, Karen O'Leary Engelbart, and four children.

[Mr Lick]

Lord Campbell of Alloway

Lord Campbell of Alloway, who has died aged 96, began a distinguished legal career in Colditz, defending British officers facing Wehrmacht courts martial for attempting to escape or “baiting” their guards.



Campbell (2nd from right in the picture)

Called to the Bar just before the war, Lt Alan “Black” Campbell was in constant demand as inmates tested their captors to the limit; Peter Tunstall, most persistent of the “goon-baiters”, was court-martialled five times. To Campbell’s relief – and that of the defendants – the Wehrmacht conducted the proceedings in Leipzig punctiliously.


At Tunstall’s third court martial, for disrupting a German inspection by throwing a water-bomb from an upper window, Campbell got him off with a month in solitary. At the fourth, on the more serious charge of jabbing a guard with his finger when refused a bath, he secured an acquittal.


When Campbell was not allowed to appear, he was permitted to engage a civilian lawyer, Dr Naumann, who practised in Colditz village. Inmates’ faith in Naumann – based on his having been a POW in Britain during the First World War and his ability to achieve tolerable sentences – offset their conviction that he was overcharging.



Campbell handled most of the cases involving inmates in British uniform, going over their stories with them meticulously in one of the castle’s dormitories. The most serious, in August 1944, involved 13 Czechs who had enlisted with the RAF and were charged with taking up arms for an enemy. The trial, before German’s highest tribunal, never took place as the war neared its end, but three other RAF Czechs were executed.


He also framed the defence of an American, Col Schaefer, brought to Colditz after obstructing an officer trying to post a notice at another camp, which warned: “Escaping is no longer a game.” After his court martial, Schaefer came back to Colditz under sentence of death; he appealed to Hitler, but it was the Fuehrer who had ordered his execution. Held in solitary confinement, he was saved by the end of the war.


Halfway through his time at Colditz, Campbell and 11 persistent escapers were sent to the supposedly even more secure Oflag IXA at Schloss Spangenberg. On his arrival the senior British officer asked him: “Are you intending to escape?” “Maybe,” Campbell replied. “Please do not,” the SBO told him. “We are comfortable here and do not wish to lose our privileges, our parcels, our walks. That is an order.” “I may disobey it.” responded Campbell. And he did.

Campbell teamed up with Capt Jimmy Yule of the Royal Signals, in the adjoining cell; they took a door off its hinges so their neighbours could get out and play cards with them. But when he and Yule tried to break out, they were captured crossing the castle moat. They were then returned to Colditz.

Campbell the barrister achieved political prominence because of Edward Heath’s Industrial Relations Act. He featured in a number of high-profile cases before the Industrial Relations Court, before the unions began ignoring the judgments it handed down.

Created a life peer by Margaret Thatcher in 1981, Campbell spoke with authority in the Lords as her government finally passed reforms that stuck; his contributions were always measured, as when he warned that banning strikes in essential services would only work if arbitration were mandatory.

He was also a leading opponent of the War Crimes Bill, passed only after John Major’s government invoked the Parliament Act to override the Lords’ veto. Murder was murder in any country, he argued, but the jurisdiction to try it was sovereign.

Campbell told the Lords he had been “among the uninvited guests of the Third Reich”. He saw no reason to reopen issues arising from his captivity; in 1984 he urged Lord Kimberley to stop pressing for an inquiry into claims that the Treasury had pocketed deductions from officer POWs’ pay, saying it would be “wholly inappropriate” 35 years after the event for payments to be made except on grounds of hardship.

His most moving contribution came during a 1998 debate on reforming the law on treason. He told the House: “I think the last person who was hanged in the Tower was a stool pigeon at Colditz. That was for treason. I am not going to mention his name. Those of us who were there were delighted to hear the result.”

Alan Robertson Campbell was born on May 24 1917, the son of John Kenneth Campbell, and educated at Aldenham, the École des Sciences Politiques in Paris and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple in 1939, becoming a bencher in 1972.

Commissioned into the Royal Artillery, he joined the British Expeditionary Force.

Captured in May 1940 as it fell back on Dunkirk, he proved a thorn in the Germans’ side in a series of camps before arriving in Colditz in June 1941.

After the castle was liberated, Campbell practised on the Western Circuit, taking Silk in 1965. He appeared in high-profile child custody and abuse cases, and represented defendants in an “Angry Brigade” bomb trial and the fraud trial resulting from the collapse of Rolls Razor. But increasingly he specialised in employment and trade union law.

However he was not always pitched against the unions; in 1969 he represented the National Union of Railwaymen against a member whom it had barred from seeking its presidency. Nor was he a union-basher; when Dr David Owen proposed mandatory postal ballots for union elections, Campbell said they should first be given the opportunity to regulate themselves.

When Barbara Castle published In Place of Strife, Campbell argued that giving the government the right to interfere in industrial relations was not the answer; an independent Industrial Court would be better. And when after the 1970 election Heath produced his Bill, Campbell predicted it would strengthen responsible trade unionism.
The temperature began to rise as the Bill made its way through Parliament; Campbell was retained by five members of the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers, disciplined for not joining a protest strike against the legislation.

In June 1972, with the National Industrial Relations Court (NIRC) in place, he was retained by the owners of a Hackney cold store picketed by dockers for not employing registered dock labour. Campbell asked the Court to sit in secret as the workers feared intimidation; it refused, but granted an order to end the blacking – which was ignored.
Campbell then went to the Chancery Division, seeking a remedy under the pre-existing law, which the dockers had said they would obey. But Mr Justice Megarry said the dockers could not choose which courts to obey, and sent the case back to the NIRC. The picketing went on for eight months, the company eventually dropping its case.

In between criminal cases at Winchester crown court, Campbell appeared regularly before the NIRC. He secured an undertaking from the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers to halt disruption at a factory from which it was trying to oust another union; represented a lighterage firm forced to pay a man to do nothing because trade unionists would not work with him; and attempted to have a May Day strike by the AUEW banned as “political”.

After little more than two years, and now under a Labour government committed to repealing the Act, the NIRC heard its last case on July 25 1974. It was Campbell who paid tribute to the court and its staff on behalf of the Bar.

In 1976 Campbell was appointed a Recorder, a post he held until 1989. He continued to take briefs, appearing for Private Eye when it was accused of libelling Cecil Parkinson, and for the mother of an eight-year-old violent deaf boy sent to a mental hospital where he was the only non-adult. He also chaired, in 1976, a Society of Conservative Lawyers group that advocated incorporating the European Convention of Human Rights into UK law and setting up an Administrative Court to protect the citizen.

Arriving in the Lords, Campbell called for hospital pickets to be prevented from barring medical supplies and advocated “cooling-off periods” before strikes. When in 1983 Eddie Shah’s Warrington printing plant was besieged by pickets from the National Graphical Association, Campbell spoke of “a political dispute launched against Parliament by a handful of trade union officials, with the apparent support of the Opposition and the TUC”.

He was a prominent supporter of Clause 28, passed in 1988 to prohibit the promotion of homosexuality by local councils and in schools. Campbell insisted the clause was designed not to harass homosexuals but to curb attacks on family life. But he did press ministers for assurances that homosexuals were prevented from serving as prison chaplains.

Campbell served on the Lords’ Committee for Privileges (for 18 years) and Ecclesiastical Committee, the Select Committee on Murder and Life Imprisonment and the Joint Committee on Human Rights.

From 1998 to 2004 he was president of the Colditz Association. At various times he was Vice-President of the Association de Juristes Franco-Britanniques, patron of the Inns of Court School of Law Conservatives, and a member of the British Council’s law advisory committee and the management committee of the UK Association for European Law. He was awarded the Emergency Reserve Decoration in 1996.

He wrote several textbooks: Restrictive Trade Practices and Monopolies (with Lord Wilberforce); Restrictive Trading Agreements in the Common Market (1964); Common Market Law (1969-75); The Industrial Relations Act (1971); EC Competition Law (1980); and Trade Unions and the Individual (1980).

Alan Campbell was thrice married: first, in 1947, to Diana Watson-Smyth (they divorced in 1953); secondly, in 1957, to Vivien de Kantzow, who died in 2010; and thirdly, in 2011, to Dorothea Berwick, daughter of Col Edward and Lady Elizabeth Berwick. She survives him with a daughter of his first marriage.


Lord Campbell of Alloway, born May 24 1917, died June 30 2013

[Mr Lick]

The Waltons actor Joe Conley dies at 85



Conley starred in the long-running series for more than 10 years

US actor Joe Conley, best known for his role as shopkeeper Ike Godsey in long-running TV series The Waltons, has died aged 85.

His wife, Louise, said he died at a care home in Newbury Park, California, on 7 July.
Conley, who starred in The Waltons for more than 10 years, had been suffering from dementia.

He landed the role of the Jefferson County general store owner when the series started in 1972.

The actor spent most of his on-screen time opposite Ronnie Claire Edwards, who portrayed his bossy wife Corabeth Walton Godsey.

Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1928, Conley moved to California to pursue an acting career after serving in the army during the Korean War.

He had bit parts in the 1960s series Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies before he joined The Waltons.

He published his autobiography, Ike Godsey of Walton's Mountain, in 2009.

[Mr Lick]

Anna Wing, EastEnders' Lou Beale, dies aged 98



Actress Anna Wing, best known for her role as Lou Beale in the BBC soap EastEnders, has died aged 98.

The star, who appeared in the BBC One programme from its start in 1985, passed away on Sunday, her agent said.

Wing featured as the opinionated Beale and Fowler family matriarch for three years, alongside Gretchen Franklin as her best friend Ethel Skinner.

Her character Lou, who was based on the aunt of EastEnders creator Tony Holland, was killed off in 1988.

"From the very first episode of EastEnders, Anna created one of the most iconic matriarchs in television history," said a spokesman on behalf of the programme.

Actor Adam Woodyatt, who plays Wing's on-screen grandson Ian Beale, paid tribute to "a wonderful lady" who put him "completely at ease" when filming.

"I have so many fond memories of her, my thoughts are with her family and friends," Woodyatt added.


Wing received an MBE for services to drama and charity in 2009


Actress June Brown, who starred as Lou's friend Dot Cotton, had appeared in a film with Wing before working with her on EastEnders.

"She was a very generous woman in many ways, and an excellent actress who made a script her own, lifting the character off the page and making it quite different from what you'd have expected," she said, in a statement.

Wing was 71 when she auditioned for the role, armed with her birth certificate to prove she was from London's East End.

Born in Hackney, London in October 1914, Wing started her career as an artist's model, before working in hospitals during World War II.

She gained a scholarship, funded by an unknown benefactor, to the Croydon School of Acting at the age of 21.

During the 1960s and 70s, she starred in a number of TV mini-series and films, including Doctor Who and The Woman in White.

Following her role in EastEnders, Wing appeared in The Bill, Casualty and most recently, Silent Witness.

She was made an MBE in the 2009 Birthday Honours, for services to drama and charity.
Speaking at the time she said "I wanted to be an actress when I was a little girl and everybody said no, but I did it. I stuck it out and I've done it for 70 years and I'm still working."

[KEVIN2008]

12 July 2013

Broadcaster Alan Whicker dies at 87

Alan Whicker's career spanned six decades

Journalist and broadcaster Alan Whicker has died at the age of 87 after suffering from bronchial pneumonia.

His spokeswoman said he died in the early hours of Friday morning at his home in Jersey.

With a TV career that stretched nearly six decades, he was best known for his long-running documentary series, Whicker's World.

The show, which ran from 1959 to 1988 on both the BBC and ITV, saw him travel all over the world.

The series featured Whicker reporting on the unusual and bizarre, interviewing all types of people from millionaires and monks to gangsters and dictators.

He once said he counted himself one of the luckiest men in the world because he enjoyed his work so much.


Whicker was made a CBE in 2005
After joining the British Army at the end of World War II, it was his stint as the editor of the British Army newspaper that whetted Whicker's appetite for a future in journalism.

He joined the BBC in 1957, where he became a correspondent for the flagship current affairs show Tonight.

There he was credited with bringing interview techniques like walking to camera and cutaways to television.

But it was Whicker's World, a perennially popular ratings winner, that made him a household name.

The show even inspired a famous Monty Python sketch about Whicker Island, a mythical place populated by Alan look-alikes awaiting that "inevitable interview".

Whicker moved to Jersey in the 1970s after visiting many times in the '60s, saying the slow pace of life attracted him to the island.

[Mr Lick]

^



An English Gentleman - well played sir!

[Gravesend Dave]

Whicker's World gave us a view of how the other half lived!

Cheers Alan good innings.

[Gravesend Dave]

Actor Jim Kelly of 'Enter the Dragon' fame dies at 67
"Enter the Dragon" star Jim "The Dragon" Kelly died of cancer on Saturday.




Jim Kelly Black Samurai. Al Adamson/Wikipedia
Published: July 1, 2013 at 9:02 AM By VERONICA LINARES, UPI.com
American martial arts artist Jim "The Dragon" Kelly died Saturday at the age of 67 of cancer.

Kelly's former wife Marilyn Dishman told CNN the former martial arts instructor died of cancer at his home in San Diego, Calif. but did not elaborate on the details.

Kelly is best known for his performance in the 1973 film "Enter the Dragon," where he starred alongside Bruce Lee.

After a brief career in action movies, Kelly became a professional tennis player. He was a ranked player on the USTA senior circuit.

"I never left the movie business," Kelly told the Los Angeles Times in 2010. "It's just that after a certain point, I didn't get the type of projects that I wanted to do."
Kelly is survived by his partner of 33 years and his ex-wife.

Respect to this feller Enter The Dragon!

Jim played a good role in that movie indeed,even though Bruce Lee was the man.

[harrybarracuda]

Acoustics pioneer and founder of Bose Corporation dies at 83
Last updated on: July 13, 2013 09:58 IST

Amar Bose, the founder and chairman of the audio technology company Bose Corporation has died. He was 83.



Announcing his death company president Bob Maresca said, "He was more than our chairman. He was our teacher - always encouraging us, always believing that we could do great things, and that anything was possible," adding, "His vision is our history, and our future and Bose Corporation will forever be his company.

Bose received his bachelor's and master's degrees and doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in electrical engineering. He joined the MIT faculty in 1956 and continued till 2001.

Founded in 1964, and based in the Boston suburb of Framingham, Bose Corporation is known for making radios and noise-cancelling headphones.

In a tribute to Bose, Ratan Tata tweeted, "My good friend Dr Amar Bose passed away today. He was respected for his sharp mind and for his humility. The world has lost a great leader."

[Necron99]

GLEE star Cory Monteith has been found dead, Canadian police have confirmed.
The 31-year-old actor, who played Finn in the popular TV series, reportedly died of a drug overdose in a Vancouver hotel room.
Sources close to the actor have confirmd his death, The Hollywood Reporter reports.
More to come





Read more: Glee star Cory Monteith found dead in Vancouver after reported drug overdose | News.com.au

[harrybarracuda]

I don't know the bloke, but 31 is no age at all. So much for celebrity, eh?

The actor was found dead at Vancouver's Fairmont Pacific Rim hotel.

Glee star Cory Monteith was found dead at Vancouver's Fairmont Pacific Rim hotel Saturday, The Hollywood Reporter has comfirmed. He was 31.
The actor was found at noon today on the hotel's 21st floor, Vancouver police said in a news conference. He checked into the hotel on July 6, and was expected to check out today. When Monteith missed his checkout time at noon, hotel staff went to his room and found him.
Police said Monteith was with other people last night, but an examination of hotel video footage showed him returning to his room alone early Saturday. Police to believe he was alone when he died. No cause of death was given and no foul play is suspected, police said.
In March, Monteith voluntarily checked himself into rehab for substance abuse. He previously checked into rehab when he was 19. It was unclear why the British Columbia-native had checked into the Vancouver hotel.
Family, Vancouver police said, have just been informed.
Monteith has played Finn on Glee since it debuted in 2009. He also has a role in the upcoming indie All the Wrong Reasons. More to come.