The RIP Famous Person Thread

[Chittychangchang]

^On behalf of Manchester City fans can I offer my sincere condolences to Manchester United fans on the untimely death of your owner, Mr Malcolm Glazer. May he rest in peace and may his sons find the strength to carry on. Respect.

CCC

[harrybarracuda]

On behalf of the US taxpayer, can I just say feck him and the taxpayer-bailed-out ship he sailed in on.

I would think that many true Manchester United fans will be dancing with joy.

The owner of Manchester United is Floridian Malcolm Glazer. He bought the British club for £790 million. But, says the London Telegraph, “instead of paying with cash, or with a small and manageable amount of debt, the Glazers slammed a massive mortgage on Manchester United and leveraged it to the hilt.”

You may puke now, because it is getting worse.

In a filing to the SEC, it was disclosed that “six lineal descendants of Malcolm Glazer” used the soccer club as an ATM. £10 million (nearly $16 million) were loaned to Glazer’s children “for general personal purposes.” That in addition to £13.2 million (nearly $21 million) in management fees paid from 2009 – 2011 to Glazer-owned holding company Red Football LLC. But fear not, the loans were paid back “in connection with the £10.0 million dividend distributed to our principal shareholder on April 25, 2012,” as the SEC document states. So there is a company that is nearly suffocating under a £423 million ($664 million) debt pile, and the company can afford a dividend payment that just happens to be big enough to wipe out the Glazer children’s debt.

[harrybarracuda]

May 29, 2014 08:52 AM Eastern Daylight Time
WASHINGTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Roger Lee Easton, Sr., visionary, inventor, and pioneer of modern day navigation passed away Thursday, May 8, 2014 at his Wheelock Terrace residence located in Hanover, New Hampshire.



Born April 30, 1921, in North Craftsbury, Vt., to Frank Birch Easton, Sr. and Della (Donnocker) Easton, he was raised in Craftsbury Common and graduated from the Craftsbury Academy in 1939. He was a member of the class of 1943 at Middlebury College. After graduation he attended the University of Michigan for one semester where he met his wife Barbara.

In 1943 Easton began work as a physicist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, where he spent his entire 37-year career. During 1944 and 1945 he served in the U.S. Navy while working at the laboratory on radar beacons and blind landing systems. In the early 1950s he was involved in early rocket experiments carried out at the White Sands Proving Grounds in N.M.

In 1955 he assisted in writing the proposal for the Vanguard Project, a scientific satellite program for the International Geophysical Year (IGY), and served on the design team for that satellite. From there he went on to design Minitrack, a system for following varying types of Earth-orbiting objects.

A problem with synchronizing the timing of the tracking stations led Easton to the idea of putting highly accurate clocks in multiple satellites which could also be used to determine the precise location of someone on the ground. He called this system Timation for Time-Navigation. Following the origin and development of the NRL time-based navigation system, select features were adopted by the Department of Defense (DoD) in the early 1970s and the system renamed the Global Positioning System, or GPS.

Easton held 11 U.S. patents including patent 3,789,409 for “Navigation Systems Using Satellites and Passive Ranging Techniques” for Timation. He received many awards for his inventions and in 1978 was awarded the Thomas L. Thurlow navigation award for Timation. In 1993 he was recognized as a member of the GPS team which received the Robert J. Collier Trophy aviation award.

In 1997 Easton shared the Magellanic Premium given by the American Philosophical Society and was inducted into that organization in 1998. He was also awarded the National Medal of Technology for 2004 and inducted into the National Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 2010. In June 2013 he was awarded the Infomatics Badge of Honor by the Amir Sheikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah of Kuwait.

In 1980 Easton retired as Head of the Space Applications Branch at the Naval Research Laboratory and he and Barbara moved to Canaan, N.H., where he continued efforts to improve GPS and to work on energy issues — a proponent of solar energy, Easton had installed solar cells on his garage roof. He served two terms in the New Hampshire Legislature and ran for Governor in the primary election of 1986 to offer a moderate alternative in the Republican Party and in opposition to the Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant. As he did throughout his life, he maintained his sense of humor in this campaign, telling his family that “The only thing worse than losing would be winning.”

Easton is survived by his wife of 68 years, Barbara Coulter Easton, daughter Ruth Easton, two sons Roger Easton, Jr. and Richard Easton and daughter-in-law Kathleen Easton of Winnetka, sister Penelope Easton of Durham, NC, five grandchildren and many nieces and nephews. He was predeceased by daughters Ann Davis and Joan Dunleavy, half-brother Daniel and brothers Frank, Jr., Charles, and Nelson.

[harrybarracuda]

Joan Lorring, Oscar-nominated actress, dies at 88
By Kyle Johnson, 5/31/2014



Joan Lorring, who was nominated for an Oscar for The Corn is Green passed away Friday night in New York City at the age of 88.


Her daughter, Santha Sonenberg, confirmed her mother's death to the The Associated Press, but no cause of death has been reported.

In a statement, Sonnenberg said, "Right up until her death, she continued to have fans who wrote and sought her autograph and she had a following."

Lorring was born in Hong Kong, but moved to San Francisco in 1939 with her mother and eventually began a career in radio. She also began appearing on stage and eventually on television. Her first U.S. film was the 1944 film Song of Russia.

In 1946, she was nominated for best supporting actress for The Corn is Green and she acted opposite Bette Davis. That same year she also was in Three Strangers and The Verdict.

Four years later she won the Donaldson Award for the role of Marie in the stage production of Come Back, Little Sheba.

According to Variety, Lorring appeared in the television shows Ryan's Hope and The Love Boat. Both projects would be her last on screen appearances.

[FloridaBorn]

'Brady Bunch' Star Ann B. Davis Dead at 88 (Report)



Ann B. Davis, best known as the ever-chipper live-in housekeeper Alice Nelson on the highly rated ABC series The Brady Bunch, has died in San Antonio, CNN reported. She was 88.
Davis, who earlier won two Emmy Awards for her role as the peppery secretary Schultzy on The Bob Cummings Show, died Sunday after a fall in her bathroom, CNN reported, adding that she hit her head and never regained consciousness.

https://tv.yahoo.com/news/brady-bunc...224606806.html

[harrybarracuda]

Anna Berger, a character actress known for playing matriarchal figures from different ethnic backgrounds in films like Woody Allen’s “Crime and Misdemeanors” and television shows like “The Sopranos,” died on May 26 in Manhattan. She was 91.

Her brother Alex confirmed the death.

Ms. Berger began playing a diverse array of older women while she was still young; as early as her student days at the Dramatic Workshop at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, she was cast as Juno Boyle, an Irish working-class mother, in a production of Sean O’Casey’s “Juno and the Paycock.”

“I played my mother; it wasn’t difficult,” she said in an interview with the filmmaker Peter Rinaldi in 2008.

Her credits stretch back more than 60 years and read like an Ellis Island immigrant registry. In “Crimes and Misdemeanors” she played an elderly Jewish socialist. On “The Sopranos,” in 2002, she was Cookie Cirillo, a cantankerous Italian-American nursing home resident.

She appeared in similar supporting roles in films, including the Adam Sandler comedy “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” (2008) and “Ghost World” (2001); on Broadway, in the short-lived adaptation “Unlikely Heroes: 3 Philip Roth Stories” (1971); and on television, in “Everybody Loves Raymond” and “N.Y.P.D. Blue,” among other shows.

Ms. Berger said that portraying elderly, sometimes overbearing but often marginalized women came naturally. “I just thought of the women I knew, and I would portray the heartache they were going through,” she said.

Anna Berger was born in Manhattan on July 26, 1922, the third of William and Stella Berger’s eight children. She grew up in a two-bedroom tenement on the Lower East Side and began acting as a child. After graduating from Seward Park High School, she studied acting with Erwin Piscator at the Dramatic in 1948.

In 1957 she originated the role of Golde in “Tevye and his Daughters,” a dramatic adaptation of Sholem Aleichem’s stories that predated the musical “Fiddler on the Roof.” In 1974 she played a mother taken hostage on a subway in “The Taking of Pelham One Two Three” (1974), which starred her childhood neighbor and friend Walter Matthau.

In addition to her brother Alex, Ms. Berger, who lived on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, is survived by her husband, Robert Malatzky; two daughters, Susan Malatzky and the actress Joanna Sanchez; another brother, Milton; and two sisters, Florence Adler and Shirley Brauner.

More recently Ms. Berger wrote a one-woman autobiographical show, “Absolutely Anna,” which she performed at the Puffin Cultural Forum in Teaneck, N.J., in 2011.

[crocman]

Doc Neeson lead singer of The Angels died today after a long battle with brain cancer.

R.I.P. Doc.

Am I ever gonna see your face again, NO WAY GET FUCKED,FUCK OFF.

[bobo746]

Every aussie on this forum.
The angels were the back ground music to my formative years

[crocman]

Take a long line.

[harrybarracuda]

Let's give him a proper send off then:

4 JUNE 2014



Doc Neeson, the charismatic frontman for the seminal Australian rock band the Angels, has died from brain cancer.

Bernard "Doc" Neeson died in his sleep at his family's Sydney home, his friend and publicist Catherine Swinton said.

"He has battled with a brain tumour for the last 17 months and sadly lost his fight this morning," Neeson's family said in a statement.

Neeson was born into a Roman Catholic family in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1947 and migrated with his family to Adelaide, South Australia, at 13.

He was studying to become a teacher when he was drafted into the Australian army in the late 1960s. But he avoided the Vietnam War when the army became aware of his education training and he was sent to Papua New Guinea to teach the Pacific Island Regiment.

Neeson later took advantage of a returned soldiers' scheme to study film-making in Adelaide. He met musicians there and formed the Moonshine Jug and String Band, which morphed into the Keystone Angels and then the Angels.

The Angels became Australia's highest-paid band by the late 1970s and continued with a string of hits into the 1990s, with Neeson as singer/songwriter.

The Angels' first single, Am I Ever Going to See Your Face Again, released in 1976, became a youth anthem. Audiences around Australia reply with the same expletive-laden response to the song's chorus decades later.

Neeson said he heard what he described as "the response" or "the chant" from audiences in London and the Middle East, as well as around Australia.

"In a way, I'm really delighted to hear that because it's Australian audiences making the song their own," he said last month.

"When the band had first started, we were trying to write songs for Australian audiences and they've made it their own in a way I never would have thought possible."

Neeson is survived by his partner Annie Souter and four children.

[Ozcol]

RIP Loved the music .a definate legend.

[harrybarracuda]

The Electric Company cast members (from left): Lee Chamberlin, Bill Cosby, Rita Moreno, Judy Graubart, Skip Hinnant and Morgan Freeman.
BETTMANN/CORBIS

Lee Chamberlin, an original cast member of the 1970s' PBS children's show The Electric Company, and who then went on to a decades-long acting career on stage and screen, died Monday in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, of metastatic cancer, The New York Times reports. She was 76.

The actress, who was living in Paris, had been visiting her son Matthew at the time of her death.

Chamberlin – who starred on The Electric Company alongside Bill Cosby, Rita Moreno and then-newcomer Morgan Freeman – played the character Vi, who owned a diner and sang duets with Freeman.

She left after two seasons to take on stage and film roles, including King Lear's Cordelia with James Earl Jones at Central Park's Delacorte Theater, in 1976. The two also later appeared together in the CBS police drama Paris.

Her movie work included Uptown Saturday Night and Let's Do It Again, directed by Sidney Poitier, and she also worked on TV's NYPD Blue, Diff'rent Strokes and The Practice, according to Broadway World.

Soap opera fans also knew her as Pat Baxter on All My Children.

Born in New York City in 1939 as Alverta La Pallo, Chamberlin later changed her name for her career. She graduated New York University and married Daniel Edward Chamberlin, in 1960. They had one son.

[harrybarracuda]

Last Of The Navajo 'Code Talkers' Dies At 93
by SCOTT NEUMAN
June 04, 2014 2:54 PM ET

The last of the Navajo "Code Talkers" who used their native language as the basis of a cipher that confounded the Japanese military during World War II has died at age 93.



Chester Nez, of Albuquerque, N.M., died Wednesday of kidney failure, member station KPCC reports. He was the last of the 29 U.S. Marine Code Talkers who were the subject of the 2002 film Windtalkers, starring Nicolas Cage.

According to azcentral.com, Nez was in the 10th grade when he was recruited in the spring of 1942 by representatives of the the U.S. Marines, who came to his Arizona boarding school looking for Navajo speakers.

Azcentral.com says:

"The military, ferrying troops to battle sites across the Pacific, was urgently seeking an undecipherable code to transmit classified information. It had attempted to use various languages and dialects as code, but each was quickly cracked by cryptographers in Tokyo."
But the written record for Navajo was scarce and "[its] syntax and grammar were elaborate. The spoken language used tones that were difficult for an untrained ear to understand," azcentral.com writes. The code developed from Navajo ultimately proved insurmountably difficult for the Japanese to decipher.

USA Today notes: "It wasn't until 1968, when the Code Talkers operation was declassified, that the men began to receive recognition for their service. In 2001, the original 29 Navajo Code Talkers were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Other Code Talkers were awarded the Silver Medal."

Fellow code talkers Keith Little and George Smith died in 2012.

[Looper]

British comedian and actor Rik Mayall has died aged 56, according to his manager.



He played the obnoxious, poetry-writing anarchist Rick in The Young Ones alongside his friend, Adrian Edmonson.

The duo later went on to star in Bottom and he was also known for appearances in shows including Blackadder and The New Statesman.

He was left seriously ill after a quad bike accident in 1998 which left him in a coma for several days.

BBC News - Comedian and actor Rik Mayall dies

[harrybarracuda]

Feck that's a bit young. But he did have a long career.

[Gravesend Dave]

RIP Rik!

Not confirmed what took him so was quite a shocker at 56!

[harrybarracuda]

RIP Rik!

Not confirmed what took him so was quite a shocker at 56!

If I had to bet, I'd go stroke or aneurysm.

[Shrinking Violet]

absoluely gutted. as a teen in the 90s loved young ones/bottom. not particularly subtle but he carried his zanyness with real pananche

[Mr Lick]

Early in his career, one of Rik Mayall's characters was the socially awkward Kevin Turvey who appeared on TV show A Kick Up the Eighties in 1981



Mayall [far right] appeared as Rick in anarchic sitcom The Young Ones - with Adrian Edmondson as Vyvyan, Nigel Planer as Neil, Christopher Ryan as Mike




He played out-of-work actor Richie in 1986 BBC sitcom Filthy, Rich and Catflap




Rik Mayall stole the show as the swashbuckling Lord Flashheart in Blackadder II




He was back as flying ace Lord Flashheart in the World War One-set Blackadder Goes Forth in 1989




Mayall and Adrian Edmondson played Richie and Eddie in Bottom (1991) - the pair had a long-running comedy partnership




Tributes to Mayall, seen here on Wogan in 1991, praise him as a pioneer of alternative comedy




Mayall, pictured here in 1999, survived an almost fatal accident a year earlier when a quad bike accident left him in a coma for several days




Rik Mayall and Marsha Fitzalan posed as their comic 1980s TV characters Alan and Sarah B'Stard, launching the UK tour of the stage adaptation of The New Statesman in 2006




He was in good form at the British Comedy Awards at 2011 in London




Mayall played DI Gideon Pryke in detective drama series Jonathan Creek - he is seen here in the 2013 episode The Clue Of The Savant's Thumb, with Sheridan Smith, Alan Davies and Joanna Lumley

[Gravesend Dave]

Cheers Mr Lick you jogged my mind!

Alan Bastard,Rik making politics interesting for me

[Gravesend Dave]

RIP Rik!

Not confirmed what took him so was quite a shocker at 56!

If I had to bet, I'd go stroke or aneurysm.

Pretty sure he recovered the best he could from the quad bike accident.

There has been no reports of ill health so maybe stroke,heart attack but I would not want to guess on that.

Perhaps the poor gents been hiding a hidden illness.

[FloridaBorn]

Last Of The Navajo 'Code Talkers' Dies At 93
by SCOTT NEUMAN
June 04, 2014 2:54 PM ET

The last of the Navajo "Code Talkers" who used their native language as the basis of a cipher that confounded the Japanese military during World War II has died at age 93.



Chester Nez, of Albuquerque, N.M., died Wednesday of kidney failure, member station KPCC reports. He was the last of the 29 U.S. Marine Code Talkers who were the subject of the 2002 film Windtalkers, starring Nicolas Cage.

According to azcentral.com, Nez was in the 10th grade when he was recruited in the spring of 1942 by representatives of the the U.S. Marines, who came to his Arizona boarding school looking for Navajo speakers.

Azcentral.com says:

"The military, ferrying troops to battle sites across the Pacific, was urgently seeking an undecipherable code to transmit classified information. It had attempted to use various languages and dialects as code, but each was quickly cracked by cryptographers in Tokyo."
But the written record for Navajo was scarce and "[its] syntax and grammar were elaborate. The spoken language used tones that were difficult for an untrained ear to understand," azcentral.com writes. The code developed from Navajo ultimately proved insurmountably difficult for the Japanese to decipher.

USA Today notes: "It wasn't until 1968, when the Code Talkers operation was declassified, that the men began to receive recognition for their service. In 2001, the original 29 Navajo Code Talkers were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Other Code Talkers were awarded the Silver Medal."

Fellow code talkers Keith Little and George Smith died in 2012.

Like the Red tails a significant contribution to the war effort.. The timing of his death is very ironic in deed...

[harrybarracuda]

RIP Rik!

Not confirmed what took him so was quite a shocker at 56!

If I had to bet, I'd go stroke or aneurysm.

Pretty sure he recovered the best he could from the quad bike accident.

There has been no reports of ill health so maybe stroke,heart attack but I would not want to guess on that.

Perhaps the poor gents been hiding a hidden illness.

The accident left him with epilepsy apparently.

[harrybarracuda]

[MANICHAEAN1]

Had not seen that clip before. Very funny.