The RIP Famous Person Thread

[momo8]

I loved Paul Newman, one of the great movie actors. RIP.

[jandajoy]

^^ Yes, sad he's gone. Brilliant actor and, I think, general all round good guy. I kinda grew up with his movies. Ah well, there you go. RIP

[Loy Toy]

^ Agree, the character he played in the Sting (Henry Gondorf) was absolutely brilliant and this movie is one of my favourites of all time.

[barbaro]

Who was Paul Newman? Was he the cnut on that salad dressing label?

[Deck Ape]

"sometimes nothin's a pretty cool hand"

[Bugs]

'Deep Throat' director dead at 80 - Movies - MSNBC.com

'Deep Throat' director Damiano dead at 80
1972 porn flick helped launch modern adult-entertainment industry


FORT MYERS, Fla. - Gerard Damiano, director of the pioneering pornographic film that lent its name to the Watergate whistleblower known as “Deep Throat,” has died. He was 80.

Damiano died Saturday at a Fort Myers hospital, his son, Gerard Damiano Jr., said Monday. He had suffered a stroke in September.

“He was a filmmaker and an artist and we thought of him as such,” the younger Damiano said. “Even though we weren’t allowed to see his movies, we knew he was a moviemaker, and we were proud of that.”

Damiano’s “Deep Throat” was a mainstream box-office success and helped launch the modern hardcore adult-entertainment industry. Shot in six days for just $25,000, the 1972 flick became a cultural must-see for Americans who had just lived through the sexual liberation of the 1960s...... more in the linky

[TizMe]

Bestselling author Michael Crichton dies

Michael Crichton, author of best-selling science fiction adventures including Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain, has died of cancer in Los Angeles, aged 66.

Bestselling author Michael Crichton dies - Books - Entertainment - smh.com.au

[daveboy]

On The Buses actor Reg Varney dies at 92

Reg Varney, the On The Buses actor, has died aged 92, his daughter said.



Reg Varney played main character Stan Butler in the 1970s sitcom On the Buses Photo: MOVIESTORE COLLECTION LTD


The actor died following a short illness in a nursing home in Budleigh Salterton, Devon.
His daughter, Jeanne Marley, 59, said he died "peacefully" just before 2pm.
Varney, who played main character Stan Butler in the 1970s sitcom, was born in London's East End but had lived in Devon for the past 20 years.
After leaving school he took various menial jobs before becoming an actor after showing a flair for performance in working men's clubs.
During the Second World War he joined the Royal Electrical Engineers but carried on being an entertainer in various music halls.
He had a number of roles in different TV shows before achieving fame in his role in On The Buses, which began in 1969 and ran for seven series.
Afterwards Varney took on a number of film roles although it was On The Buses that he continued to be most recognised for.
In later years he went abroad on tour with a cabaret show.
Mrs Marley said he had only recently been admitted to the nursing home after he had begun suffering from a chest infection.
She said: "He's always been very young for his age, when he was in On The Buses he was playing a 35-year-old, but he was actually 50."
Varney, who had lived alone since his wife Lilian died in 2002, is survived by his daughter, two grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.
His funeral has yet to be arranged.

[nedwalk]

a bloody good innings! thanks for the humour ..r.i.p reg!

[Norton]

For those who are African music lovers she was one of the greats.

"South Africa has held a public memorial service for Miriam Makeba, one of Africa's best-known voices and a champion of the fight against apartheid. Makeba, 76, died after a concert in Italy last week."

Farewell to 'Mama Africa' - Africa, World - The Independent

[daveboy]

Summer Wine star Staff dies at 80


Nora Batty was Kathy Staff's most enduring TV role


Actress Kathy Staff, who played Nora Batty in long-running BBC One sitcom Last Of The Summer Wine, has died.
The 80-year-old, who was born in Dukinfield, Greater Manchester, also played cleaner Doris Luke in long-running ITV soap Crossroads.
And she appeared in Emmerdale Farm, Coronation Street, and with David Jason and Ronnie Barker in Open All Hours.
Last of the Summer Wine producer Alan Bell told BBC News the actress had been ill for some time.
"We're distraught, but we have very fond memories of her," he said.
Battleaxe Nora Batty proved to be her most enduring character.

Actor Peter Sallis, who played Norman Clegg, remembered his colleague fondly


She appeared in 243 episodes of the Yorkshire-based comedy, beginning in the first episode in January 1973.
She made her last appearance in August, at the end of the show's 29th series.
Co-star Peter Sallis said he was "terribly upset" by the loss of an "irreplaceable" colleague.
"She dominated anything that she was in. You could stop acting when Kathy was there because she was going to do it all for you," he said.
"We don't know quite for sure whether we're going to do any more episodes, but if we do she's going to be terribly missed." Staff starred alongside Ronnie Barker in Open All Hours

Sallis, who plays Cleggy in the series, joked: "Years and years ago David Frost interviewed her on television and all they seemed to talk about was her wrinkled stockings. "I got hotter and hotter under the collar and thought, why can't they have something about how marvellous it is to work with Peter Sallis? But all we got was wrinkled stockings instead."

[Mathos]

Thanks for that Dave, we visited Holmfirth where the series was and is still filmed. Nice place and Kathy was a superb actress:-




RIP Kathy Staff:-


I have a few photographs here which are not mine, they are scanned post cards. It's quite an interesting tourist village is Holmfirth.




I'll

It's an extremely interesting and picturesque little spot.

You might associate these steps with Nora Batty. (KATHY STAFF)



The famous Cafe as well.




Some of you will be familiar with the scenes above, they are all very famous in the 'Last of The Summer Wine Series'



Last of the Summer Wine


The world's longest-running sitcom seems immortal, which is ironic for a show about people in the autumn of their years.
__________________

[Niteowl]

Bettie Page, Queen of Pinups, dies at 85



Bettie Page, a legendary pinup girl whose photographs in the nude, in bondage and in naughty-but-nice poses appeared in men’s magazines and private stashes across America in the 1950s and set the stage for the sexual revolution of the rebellious ’60s, died Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 85.

Bettie Page, Queen of Pinups, Dies at 85 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

[Mid]

Washington - "Deep Throat," the secret source who helped bring down US president Richard Nixon in 1974, has died at 95, The New York Times and Washington Post reported early Friday on their websites.

"Deep Throat," who helped bring down Nixon, dead at 95 - Nationmultimedia.com

[Jet Gorgon]

^ Huh. Just a week or so after the Deep Throat porn movie director passed.

[Mid]

Singer-Actress Eartha Kitt, 81, Dies of Cancer

CHICAGO _ Considering that she was abandoned by her mother at age 3, forced to pick cotton by age 6 and kicked out of the house at 16, Eartha Mae Kitt did not appear destined for global stardom.

Yet by her 20s she had willed herself into becoming a singing sensation in Europe _ the next Josephine Baker, proclaimed critics in the late 1940s and early '50s. In quick succession thereafter, Kitt seduced American audiences singing in Broadway and Hollywood musicals in the mid-'50s and purring as Catwoman on TV's "Batman" in the '60s.

Triply blessed with a pliant voice, a palpable charisma and a voracious appetite to succeed, Kitt conquered virtually every medium she took on, earning multiple Tony and Grammy Award nominations. Yet if she made her triumphs look easy, her journey was tumultuous from start and practically to finish.

The singer-actor-dancer-raconteur died Thursday at age 81 in Connecticut of colon cancer.


snip


americanchronicle.com


wordpress.com

[DrAndy]

Harold Pinter, excellent playright

RIP

[Jet Gorgon]

Saddened by both of these passings.
Loved Eartha Kitt as Catwoman. Purrrrrrfect purrs in the "per" words.



Mr Pinter
(12-25) 16:36 PST -- Harold Pinter, winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize for Literature and one of the most celebrated and iconoclastic playwrights of the past 50 years, died Wednesday in London after a long battle with cancer.
He was 78, and his death was announced Thursday by his second wife, historian Lady Antonia Fraser.
Mr. Pinter, who had battled cancer of the esophagus for many years, was too ill to travel to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize in person, but used the occasion to videotape a blistering attack on U.S. and British involvement in Iraq.
"The United States ... doesn't give a damn about the United Nations, international law or critical dissent, which it regards as impotent and irrelevant. It also has its own bleating little lamb tagging behind it on a lead, the pathetic and supine Great Britain," he said.
Both on stage and off, Mr. Pinter believed in challenging his audience and had little patience with complacency. Many of his plays - including "The Birthday Party," "The Caretaker," "The Homecoming" and "Betrayal" - are considered seminal works of unparalleled genius, but all demand much from their audiences. Writing about Mr. Pinter's Nobel Prize win three years ago, former Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic Steven Winn cited the "disturbing power, corrosive humor and unnerving silences" of Mr. Pinter's work.
"Writers of all kinds have fallen under its mesmerizing sway," Winn added. " 'Pinteresque' has become not only a shorthand descriptor of his own work but the marker of an enigmatically charged emotional state."
Among his most ardent Bay Area fans and frequent collaborators was Carey Perloff, artistic director of the American Conservatory Theater, which staged a pair of one-acts in 2001, the classic "The Room" and Mr. Pinter's most recent play at the time, "Celebration."
'Minutely observed reality'

"It's hard to imagine a theatrical landscape without Pinter," Perloff said in 2005. "When we talk about menace, a predatory world and a certain kind of sexual ambiguity, everyone recognizes that as Pinteresque. His work is all about minutely observed reality."
"Having spent many hours in the studio with him, what I remember most vividly is that he was the ultimate theater animal, reveling in every minute detail of the rehearsal process, observing every punctuation mark with the precision of a conductor, howling with laughter at his own jokes, unfailingly generous to actors, whom he adored, and relentlessly cantankerous to everyone else," Perloff said in an e-mail interview Thursday.
"I first met him when he walked into my theater in New York and stood in the crummy little lobby for five minutes without saying a word, until someone looked up and screamed 'Harold Pinter is here!' So my memory of Harold Pinter began, appropriately enough, with a Pinter pause. And today, it ends with another pause. It breaks my heart that this astonishing outrageous artist is no longer with us. I think I could be perfectly happy if I spent the rest of my career directing his plays. Theater doesn't get better than that."
Another classic, "The Homecoming," focusing on the disruption of an all-male household by the arrival of a woman, was staged by Berkeley's Aurora Theatre in 2000.
Turning to poetry

Mr. Pinter, the son of a Jewish tailor, was born in London's East End on Oct. 10, 1930. He won admission to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art but dropped out to turn his attention to writing poems under the name "Harold Pinta." His first play, "The Room," opened in 1957, but it was his next effort that made his name: "The Birthday Party," the story of a young man hiding from childhood guilt when his home is beset by invaders, was savaged by critics when it also opened in 1957.
Soon, though, both critics and audiences embraced Mr. Pinter with the premieres of "The Dumb Waiter" and "The Caretaker." A steady stream of new plays followed over the next two decades, including "The Homecoming" in 1964 and "No Man's Land" in 1974. In all, he wrote more than 30 plays, a novel, "The Dwarfs," and a number of screenplays including "The Quiller Memorandum" in 1965, "The Last Tycoon" in 1974 and "The French Lieutenant's Woman" in 1980.
Having begun his career as an actor with British repertory companies, Mr. Pinter continued to perform throughout his career. A decade ago, he was about to leave his London home for the Donmar Warehouse to act in his 1961 play "The Collection" when Winn caught up with him by telephone.
Why did he continue to act at this stage in his career, Winn asked.
'Always an actor'

"I just feel like it," Mr. Pinter replied. "For some time I was too busy writing and directing. But I've been a professional actor all my life. I started acting in all sorts of things, including Shakespeare, when I was 19. Once an actor always an actor, you know."
Two years ago, though in very frail health, Mr. Pinter performed in Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" during the 50th anniversary of the Royal Court Theatre.
Winn asked in 1998 whether acting served his writing in any way.
"I have no idea," Mr. Pinter replied. "I'm not an analyst of those kinds of things. I don't really excavate the relationships and correspondences. I just do things - I do acting and directing."
Mr. Pinter was equally reticent about assessing the meaning of his own work. "Who supposes I'm striving for lucidity?" he wrote to a director who was seeking guidance on the meaning of "The Birthday Party." In 2001, he said of his play "Ashes to Ashes": "I wouldn't attempt to define it. If I could have defined it, I wouldn't have written it."
In the final decades of his career, Mr. Pinter's work took on an even more overtly political point of view in plays such as "One for the Road" in 1984 and the political satire "Party Time" in 1991. Over the years, his output included essays, poems, published speeches, sketches, radio plays and other prose work.
Mr. Pinter was married to actress Vivien Merchant from 1956 to 1980, although for seven of those years he was involved with journalist and television presenter Joan Bakewell. That relationship became fodder for Mr. Pinter's play "The Betrayal," in 1978. In 1975, he took up residence with Antonia Fraser, the wife of actor Hugh Fraser. His 1980 divorce from Merchant enabled the two to marry. Mr. Pinter is survived by Fraser and his son, Daniel, from his first marriage.
Funeral arrangements have not been announced.

[barbaro]

Saddened by both of these passings.
Loved Eartha Kitt as Catwoman. Purrrrrrfect purrs in the "per" words.

Why did that bitch dress up like a cat?

She high?

[Jet Gorgon]

^ You on pain killers today, MM? Coz she was in the Batman TV series, numnuts.

[barbaro]

^ You on pain killers today, MM? Coz she was in the Batman TV series, numnuts.

No painkillers.

Batman was before my time.

Adam West and Robin, the fag.

And this she-cat.

I hope Batmand and Robin are dead, by now.

[Jet Gorgon]

^ Well, your endorphins are pretty high...

[barbaro]

^ Well, your endorphins are pretty high...

I don't like dolphins.

[daveboy]

Helen Suzman, a celebrated South African MP and anti-apartheid campaigner, has died at the age of 91.
Ms Suzman, a member of parliament first for the United Party and later the liberal Progressive Party, was an outspoken critic of apartheid.
For 13 years, Suzman, the daughter of Lithuanian Jews, was the only MP to openly condemn South Africa's whites-only apartheid regime.
She was made an honorary dame by the Queen in 1989.
She was also twice-nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

[DrivingForce]

it seems the first tragedy of the new year is an unexpected one, the 16 year old son of a famous person.....Actor John Travolta's son..

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Autopsy planned in death of John Travolta's son

By JUAN McCARTNEY, Associated Press Writer Juan Mccartney, Associated Press Writer 22 mins ago
NASSAU, Bahamas – An autopsy is planned for John Travolta's teenage son, who died after apparently hitting his head on the bathtub while the family was vacationing at their home in the Bahamas, authorities said.
Jett Travolta, 16, had last been seen entering the bathroom on Thursday and had a history of seizures, Police Superintendent Basil Rahming said in a statement.
A house caretaker found the teenager unconscious in a bathroom late Friday morning. He was taken by ambulance to a Freeport hospital, where he was pronounced dead, the statement said.
Jett apparently hit his head on the bathtub, said a police officer who declined to be named because she was not authorized to speak on the matter.
Family attorney Michael Ossi said in a statement that Jett died suddenly on Friday. Publicists Samantha Mast and Paul Bloch released the statement but could not be reached for additional comment.
Obie Wilchcombe, a parliament member and former tourism minister in the Bahamas, said that an autopsy is planned for Monday, and "we expect a quick resolution."
"John spoke with the minister of health and the doctors and police are at the hospital. They're very, very quick to resolve things," he said.
Wilchcombe said Travolta "spent a tremendous amount of time with Jett."
"He always brought him along. There was a close affectionate relationship and lots of love," Wilchcombe told "Larry King Live" in a live telephone interview. "People in the old Bahama community today are in shock."
Travolta, 54, and his wife, actress Kelly Preston, 46, also have an 8-year-old daughter, Ella Bleu. The family had arrived in the Bahamas on a private plane Tuesday and was vacationing at their home in the Old Bahama Bay resort community.
Preston and Travolta have said that Jett became very sick when he was 2 years old and was diagnosed with Kawasaki disease, an illness that leads to inflammation of the blood vessels in young children. She blamed household cleaners and fertilizers, and said that a detoxification program based on teachings from the Church of Scientology helped improve his health, according to People magazine. Both Travolta and Preston are practicing Scientologists.
"I was obsessive about his space being cleaned. We constantly had the carpets cleaned," Travolta said in a 2001 interview with CNN's Larry King, a portion of which was rebroadcast on the "Larry King Live" show Friday night. During that interview, when Jett was 9, Travolta spoke of how his son nearly died when he was 2.
It is unclear whether Jett was taking any medications for his seizures.
The Scientology Celebrity Center in Los Angeles declined to comment.
A spokeswoman for Rand Memorial Hospital in Freeport said she could not release any information because of privacy concerns.
Travolta's corporate and commercial attorney, Michael McDermott, said the actor had a very strong relationship with his son.
"There was unspoken communication between the two. ... It's just so hard," he said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "Kelly is very quiet and both are grieving."
McDermott said his family and other friends are with the couple in the Bahamas. The group came for a two-day New Year's celebration and had planned to return to Florida on Sunday.
"We're are all here and trying to help in any way we can," McDermott said. "Their pain is so evident."
Travolta, who gained fame as Vinnie Barbarino on the 1970s television show "Welcome Back, Kotter" and the 1977 film "Saturday Night Fever," went on to become one of Hollywood's biggest names. He married Preston in 1991.
A television actress, Preston appeared with Travolta in the 2000 film "Battlefield Earth," based on a novel by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard.
_____
Associated Press Writers Josh Dickey in Los Angeles, Lisa Orkin Emmanuel in Miami and Kathy Corcoran in Mexico City contributed to this report.


Print Story: Autopsy planned in death of John Travolta's son - Yahoo! News