The RIP Famous Person Thread

[FloridaBorn]

Damn! Great sax...... Another one gone...like I said, dropping like flies.

[harrybarracuda]

Ben Bradlee, editor who brought down Nixon, dies at 93
Washington Post chief stuck by reporters Woodward and Bernstein as they followed the Watergate scandal all the way to the White House
BY NANCY BENAC October 22, 2014, 7:02 am



In this Nov. 20, 2013 file photo, President Barack Obama awards former Washington Post executive editor Ben Bradlee with the Presidential Medal of Freedom during a ceremony in the East Room of the White House in Washington. Bradlee died Tuesday, Oct. 21, 2014. (photo credit: AP Photo/ Evan Vucci, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — In a charmed life of newspapering, Ben Bradlee seemed always to be in just the right place.

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The raspy-voiced, hard-charging editor who invigorated The Washington Post got an early break as a journalist thanks to his friendship with one president, John F. Kennedy, and became famous for his role in toppling another, Richard Nixon, in the Watergate scandal.

Bradlee died at home Tuesday of natural causes, the Post reported. He was 93.

Ever the newsman and ever one to challenge conventional wisdom, Bradlee imagined his own obituary years earlier and found something within it to quibble over.

“Bet me that when I die,” he wrote in his 1995 memoir, “there will be something in my obit about how The Washington Post ‘won’ 18 Pulitzer prizes while Bradlee was editor.” That, he said, would be bunk. The prizes are overrated and suspect, he wrote, and it’s largely reporters, not newspapers or their editors, who deserve the credit.

Yet the Post’s Pulitzer-winning coverage of the Watergate scandal is an inextricable part of Bradlee’s legacy, and one measure of his success in transforming the Post from a sleepy hometown paper into a great national one.

Critically, he backed his newspaper’s young reporters in exposing the scandal, in the face of other media disinterest and White House denials, establishing that a June 1972 burglary at the Democratic Party’s Washington offices led all the way back to the president, ultimately forcing Nixon’s resignation.

As managing editor first and later as executive editor, Bradlee engineered the Post’s reinvention, bringing in a cast of talented journalists and setting editorial standards that brought the paper new respect.

When Bradlee retired from the Post newsroom in 1991, then-publisher Donald Graham said: “Thank God the person making decisions in the last 26 years showed us how to do it with verve and with guts and with zest for the big story and for the little story.”

With Watergate, Bradlee himself became a big part of a story that epitomized the glory days of newspapers — back before web sites, cable chatter and bloggers drove the talk of the day.

Actor Jason Robards turned Bradlee into a box-office hit with his Oscar-winning portrayal of the editor in the 1976 movie “All the President’s Men,” which recounted the unraveling of Watergate under the reporting of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Bradlee’s marriage in 1978 to Post star reporter Sally Quinn (his third) added more glamour to his image.

He was one of the few to know the identity early on of the celebrated Watergate source dubbed Deep Throat, revealed publicly in 2005 to be FBI official W. Mark Felt.

“I think he did a great service to society,” Bradlee said after Felt’s role finally came out.

In enduring partnership with publisher Katharine Graham, Bradlee took a stand for press freedom in 1971 by going forward with publication of the Pentagon Papers, a secret study of the Vietnam War broken by The New York Times, against the advice of lawyers and the entreaties of top government officials. The ensuing legal battle went all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld the right of newspapers to publish the leaked papers.

The Post’s decision to publish helped pave the way for all of the smaller, difficult ones that collectively produced the newspaper’s groundbreaking coverage of Watergate.

Bradlee “set the ground rules — pushing, pushing, pushing, not so subtly asking everyone to take one more step, relentlessly pursuing the story in the face of persistent accusations against us and a concerted campaign of intimidation,” Katharine Graham recalled in her memoir.

In November 2013, at age 92, Bradlee stood in the White House East Room and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, who saluted Bradlee for bringing an intensity and dedication to journalism that served as a reminder that “our freedom as a nation rests on our freedom of the press.”

Quinn disclosed in September 2014 that her husband had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for several years. She described him as happy to be fussed over and content even in decline. “Ben has never been depressed a day in his life,” Quinn said in a C-SPAN interview.

Impatient, gruff, profane, Bradlee was all that. But also exuberant, innovative, charismatic.

“Ideas flew out of Ben,” wrote Katharine Graham, who died in 2001. “He was always asking important ‘why’ questions. … Ben was tough enough and good enough so that for the most part I not only let him do what he thought was right, I largely agreed with him.”

The low point in Bradlee’s career involved a 1981 Pulitzer for the Post that was rescinded after the Post itself revealed that reporter Janet Cooke had invented her story of an 8-year-old heroin user. Bradlee, whose offer to resign over the debacle was rejected, said it was a cross he would bear forever. Critics faulted editors for failing to ask enough questions about the story and said the incident was in part a reflection of the competition and tension within Bradlee’s newsroom.

Benjamin Crowninshield Bradlee was born Aug. 26, 1921, a Boston Brahmin reared in comfort but for family financial setbacks in the Depression and a six-month bout with polio at age 14.

He hurried through Harvard in three years to take his place on a Pacific destroyer during World War II. On his return in 1945, he helped start a daily newspaper in New Hampshire, but it folded 2½ years later for lack of advertising.

From there, Bradlee experienced a series of lucky breaks.

He landed his first job at the Post in 1948 when a rainstorm in Baltimore prompted him to skip a job interview there and stay on the train to Washington.

He happened to be riding a trolley car past Blair House in 1950 when Puerto Rican extremists opened fire on the presidential guest house while President Truman was staying there. Bradlee turned it into a page-one eyewitness story.

Restless at the Post, he left the paper in 1951 to become press attache at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. Two years later, he joined Newsweek’s Paris bureau and spent four years as a European correspondent before returning to Washington to write politics.

He happened to buy a home in Georgetown in 1957, a few months before Sen. John F. Kennedy and his wife moved in across the street, the beginning of an intimate friendship and a proximity to power that burnished his credentials as a journalist and brought him rare insights into government.

“I was on a roll being in the right place at the right time, a luck that has stayed with me,” Bradlee wrote in his best-selling memoir, “A Good Life: Newspapers and Other Adventures.”

Long after his newspapering days were finished, even in his declining years, Bradlee would head over to the Post once a week to have lunch with “the guys” and “talk about the good old days in journalism,” Quinn recounted.

Bradlee’s access to Kennedy continued through JFK’s presidency, bringing Bradlee scoops for Newsweek, and experiences that he ultimately turned into the 1975 book, “Conversations with JFK.” The release brought Bradlee much attention and cost him a valued friend, Jacqueline Kennedy, who thought the book a violation of privacy and stopped speaking to Bradlee.

Bradlee had been in Newsweek’s Washington bureau four years when he found the nerve in 1961 to telephone Post publisher Philip Graham to propose that The Washington Post Co. buy Newsweek.

“It was the best telephone call I ever made — the luckiest, most productive, most exciting, most rewarding,” Bradlee wrote. The deal came together and Bradlee ended up with a cache of Post stock and the title of Washington bureau chief for Newsweek.

Four years later, it was a conversation with Philip Graham’s widow that proved pivotal for Bradlee. Katharine Graham had taken over the Post after her husband’s suicide and was looking to inject new life into the paper. In a quotation that has become Post lore, Bradlee told her over lunch that if the managing editor’s job ever opened up, “I’d give my left one for it.”

Bradlee soon had the title of deputy managing editor and an understanding he would move up quickly. As recounted in Howard Bray’s book, “The Pillars of the Post,” managing editor Al Friendly cautioned Bradlee, “Look, buster, don’t be in a hurry.” Bradlee smiled and replied: “Sorry, but that’s my metabolism.” He succeeded Friendly three months later.

Bradlee had four children from three marriages: Benjamin C. Jr., Dino, Marina and Quinn. His first two marriages, to Jean Saltonstall and Antoinette Pinchot, ended in divorce. Quinn Bradlee, his son with Sally Quinn, has battled a variety of ailments, including a hole in the heart and epilepsy, and was eventually diagnosed with a genetic syndrome called VCFS.

[bobforest]

I've just read about the death of Alvin Stardust on BBC News, and it's set my mind thinking about things in the '60s that TD people may be able to help me with.

I remember a band called Alvin Lee and the Jaybirds who used to play around Nottingham (YMCA/YWCA) in the mid-60s - they were highly respected by the music/pop 'experts' and seemed to have a big following.

I moved out of this scene shortly afterwards and sometimes thought about what happened to this band and this person.

The BBC report said that he "grew up in Mansfield" and that started me thinking about any connections.

Does the TD brains trust have any ideas?

BobF

[Neo]

Alvin Stardust, glam rock singer, dies aged 72

[palexxxx]

I remember a band called Alvin Lee and the Jaybirds who used to play around Nottingham (YMCA/YWCA) in the mid-60s - they were highly respected by the music/pop 'experts' and seemed to have a big following.


Does the TD brains trust have any ideas?

BobF

Alvin Lee was the guitarist/singer with Ten Years After? He died just recently I believe. In fact 6th March, 2013.

[bobforest]

Thanks for that info, Paleface

[luckyjim]

[harrybarracuda]

David Redfern, jazz photographer, dies aged 78
Frank Sinatra's official photographer had been suffering from cancer



David Redfern, a photographer who captured the British jazz scene for nearly five decades, has died aged 78. Redfern had been suffering from cancer for the past two years, but continued to work in his final years, and passed in his second home in Uzes, France, in the company of his wife Suzy.
Redfern began his career in the Sixties, when he started to photograph musicians from the emergent Trad Jazz scene such as Kenny Ball, Chris Barber and George Melly.
He was a regular photographer at Ronnie Scott's, capturing international stars such as Miles Davis and Ella Fitzgerald as they played the venue. Redfern also took his camera around the world to shoot jazz festivals including Newport, Antibes and Montreux, which allowed him access to rock stars on the rise such as Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix, as well as jazz icons.
In 1980 Redfern took over from Terry O'Neill as Frank Sinatra's official tour photographer and published his first photography book, Jazz Album. His second, The Unclosed Eye, followed in 1999 to critical acclaim.
Over the next decade Redfern received award recognition for his work: The Milt Hinton Award for Excellence in Jazz Photography in 2007 and, earlier this year, a Parliamentary Jazz Award for Services to Jazz at the Houses of Parliament.

Redfern sold his library to Getty Images in 2008. He continued to work at jazz festivals even this summer, where he spent days in the photo pits at Vienne Jazz Festival and Juan les Pins photographing acts including Joss Stone, Imelda May and Charles Bradley.
According to an update on his website, Redfern had plans for the future. In the summer he wrote: "Future plans include a Norwegian fjord cruise in the autumn, the London Jazz Festival in November and an exhibition at the new South Coast Jazz festival in the Shoreham Arts Centre in late January 2015."
He is survived by his wife, whom he thanked for "her unfailing devotion and constant caring", his three children and five grandchilden.

[harrybarracuda]

Former Cream frontman Jack Bruce dies at age 71



LONDON (Reuters) - Jack Bruce, who formed influential British rock band Cream in the 1960s with guitarist Eric Clapton, has died aged 71, his family said on Saturday.

Bruce co-wrote some of Cream's biggest hits including "Sunshine of Your Love" and "I Feel Free" before the band broke up after only two years in 1968.

"The world of music will be a poorer place without him, but he lives on in his music and forever in our hearts," family members said on Bruce's website.

Bruce, who was born in Glasgow, began playing bass as a teenager and dropped out of music school because he was not allowed to play jazz.

After spells with British blues bands, he turned down an offer of work with U.S. soul singer Marvin Gaye in order to get married, according to his website.

He met Clapton while playing in another band and the two of them set up Cream in 1966 with drummer Ginger Baker.

After Cream, Bruce played with top jazz musicians including guitarist John McLaughlin and drummer Tony Williams and with rock stars such as Lou Reed and Frank Zappa. Cream reformed briefly for concerts in 1993 and 2005. The most recent of many solo albums by Bruce was released in March.

Roger Waters, the bassist of British rock band Pink Floyd, once paid tribute to Bruce, calling him "probably the most musically gifted bass player who's ever been."

British media said Bruce had been suffering from liver disease.

[Sumocakewalk]

^
R.I.P. Jack.

I was very happy that Cream got back together for their reunion concerts in 2005. Their Royal Albert Hall album and video are some of my favorites, as well as their original albums.

[Humbert]

Take me back to those green elysian fields. Rest in peace Jack.

[harrybarracuda]

American Actress Marcia Strassman Dies Aged 66
by Nick Hill | 27 October 2014



American actress Marica Strassman, who is known for her roles in such television hits as "Welcome Back, Kotter" and "M*A*S*H," tragically passed away this weekend after losing her battle against breast cancer. She was 66 years-old.

On Sunday (Oct 26th) Strassman's sister confirmed the sad news to Deadline, telling the publication, "She was the funniest, smartest person I ever met, and talented. She knew everything. Now I won't be able to call her and ask her questions."

Strassman first left her home in New Jersey to move to Los Angeles to pursue a career in acting when she was only 18 years-old. Her first breakout role came in the 1975 sitcom 'Welcome Back, Kotter,' a show about a teacher returning to his rough high school and neighbourhood, playing the part of Gabe Kaplan's wife.

Along with her many television and film credits, Strassman was also well known for starring opposite Rick Moranis in the 1989 feature film 'Honey I Shrunk the Kids' and its sequel, 1992's 'Honey I Blew Up the Kids.'

News of Strassman's death emerged when her close friend 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' director Bob Weide, posted on Twitter: "So sad that a sweet friend, kind person & wonderful actress Marcia Strassman lost her brave battle with cancer today."
Another longtime pal, singer/actress Cher, also tweeted: "Wanted U2 No,a Funny,Talented Friend Died.Not 4U 2feel sorry 4me,but she died alone, &Energy from U is powerful &Sends (love) 'Marsha (sic) Strassman'"
R.I.P. Marica Strassman.

[harrybarracuda]

Zambia's President Michael Sata dies at 77
29 OCT 2014 07:21 REUTERS



Zambia’s President Michael Sata has died in London, where he had been receiving treatment for an undisclosed illness, three private Zambian media outlets said on Wednesday.

The reports on the private Muzi television station and the Zambia Reports and Zambian Watchdog websites said the southern African nation’s Cabinet was about to meet.

Government officials gave no immediate comment.

The reports said Sata died on Tuesday evening at London’s King Edward VII hospital. The hospital declined to comment.

Sata (77) left Zambia for medical treatment abroad on October 19 accompanied by his wife and family members, according to a brief government statement that gave no further details.

There has been no official update on his condition and acting president Edgar Lungu had to lead celebrations last week to mark the landlocked nation’s 50th anniversary of independence from Britain.

Concern over Sata’s health has been mounting in Africa’s second-largest copper producer since June, when he disappeared from the public eye without explanation and was then reported to be getting medical treatment in Israel.

He missed a scheduled speech at the UN General Assembly in September amid reports that he had fallen ill in his New York hotel. A few days before that, he had attended the opening of Parliament in Lusaka, joking: “I am not dead.”

Sata has not been seen in public since he returned to Zambia from New York in late September. – Reuters

[can123]

Acker Bilk died today.


BBC News - Acker Bilk: legendary jazz clarinettist dies aged 85

[david44]

Acker Bilk died today.


BBC News - Acker Bilk: legendary jazz clarinettist dies aged 85

[harrybarracuda]

Wow, I go away for a week and Acker Bilk is the only one of note to pop his clogs?

These celebs should pay me to stay in Thailand permanently.

[harrybarracuda]

It's a shame that these uncultured but wealthy heathens have been able to hoard art like bottle tops.



Sheikh Saud bin Mohammed Al-Thani of Qatar, at one time the biggest art collector in the world, died at his home in London on Sunday, aged 48. The news was announced at a museums conference in Doha, earlier today, 10 November. The cause of his death has not been announced, although it is believed to have been from natural causes.
Sheikh Al-Thani, a distant cousin of the current Emir, served as Qatar’s minister of culture from 1997 until 2005 and oversaw an ambitious museum building programme for the oil and gas-rich Gulf state.

He also built a massive collections of antiquities, photography, Chinese and Islamic art (many of his purchases in this field are now on display in the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha). He also collected furniture, vintage cars, natural history, jewellery, even bicycles, but it was sometimes unclear if the collections he had assembled belonged to him or to Qatar. In 2005 he was dismissed and placed briefly under house arrest while some of his purchases were investigated. He returned to the market a short time later, buying for his own collections in various fields including Chinese art and coins.

In 2012, a High Court judge in London froze $15m worth of his assets as part of a dispute over unpaid bills to auction houses. The numismatic auctioneers Baldwin’s, Dmitry Markov and M&M Numismatics, accused him of defaulting on bids for items from the Prospero Collection, a cache of Greek coins.

One of the world?s top collectors Sheikh Al-Thani dies suddenly, aged 48 - The Art Newspaper

[harrybarracuda]

Johanna Weber, who has died aged 104, was a highly accomplished mathematician who was instrumental in the development of Concorde.

The talented German émigré had the vision and courage to recommend radical new approaches to flight.

Nigel Fountain, writing for The Guardian this week, sets the scene: "On 5 November 1956, the government-sponsored supersonic transport aircraft committee held its first meeting, at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, in Farnborough, Hampshire. The aim of the STAC was to explore the development of commercial flight beyond the sound barrier.

"Thirteen years later, Concorde made its first flight and, while it proved to be a commercial disaster, is still hailed as a triumphant application of Anglo-French science. One vital element in the success of the Concorde was provided by two émigré German scientists working at the RAE – Johanna Weber, a mathematician, who has died aged 104, and Dietrich Küchemann, a fluid dynamicist."

What they came up with, in collaboration with Eric Maskell, an RAE dynamicist, was, in the words of the RAE's deputy director of the time, Morien Morgan, "a heresy". It was a slender delta, arrow-shaped wing concept which, for the era of supersonic flight, utilised a separated airflow, challenging what had been seen as basic principles of aircraft design. The thinking, set out in a 1956 paper, became reality with Concorde. Weber, Küchemann and co provided the shape and the sums, others carried their ideas through.

As Fountain explains for The Guardian: "Weber's career was almost entirely bound up in her collaboration with Küchemann, which had begun in pre-Second World War Germany. She was born in Düsseldorf, the child of an impoverished farming family that had migrated to the city. Four years after her birth, in 1914 her father became an early casualty of the First World War – which meant that her family was provided with a small pension for her education.

"Weber, having excelled at convent school, spent two terms at Cologne University reading chemistry and mathematics, with physics, before moving on to Göttingen, a university that exemplified the golden age in German science that was to be shattered by the 1933 Nazi takeover. Weber moved on to a teacher-training diploma but, without Nazi credentials, she was passed over for a teaching job. She spent two years working for the ballistics department of the Krupp company, before taking up a mathematics post in 1939 at the Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt (AVA, experimental aerodynamics institute) in Göttingen."

She met Küchemann and his wife on her first day at AVA. Küchemann, from an anti-Nazi background, had been at the institute for three years. In the months before the Second World War erupted, a "just wonderful" collaboration between the two scientists was born, one that would last until Küchemann's death in 1976.

He had the vision, the instinctive grasp of physics, the ability to see "three-dimensional things", while Weber, who saw herself as a timid person, loth to give lectures, preferred her calculations.

In 1945 Göttingen became part of the British occupation zone. In September the following year, Küchemann, having resisted a move to the US, accepted an initial six-month RAE contract at Farnborough, and in 1947, he persuaded Weber to join him. Weber was officially an enemy alien, but the intellectual freedom, she recalled, compared to wartime Göttingen was liberating.

"I was treated much better than refugees are now," she said in 2000. In 1953 Küchemann and Weber accepted the offer of British citizenship.

In that year, too, their book Aerodynamics of Propulsion, the fruit of research in Göttingen and Farnborough, was published. Although she declined an authorial credit, Weber also played a key role on Küchemann's classic, The Aerodynamic Design of Aircraft, published posthumously in 1978. She retired in 1975, and later enrolled on geology and psychology courses at Surrey University – avoiding anything to do with aeroplanes.

Weber had a circle of friends and a house in Farnham, Surrey, where she lived for 35 years, until moving into a nearby nursing home.

Weber was born on August 8, 1910. She died on October 24.

Genius Johanna Weber behind Concorde's radical design dies aged 104 | Western Daily Press

[panama hat]

died at his home in London on Sunday, aged 48. T
The cause of his death has not been announced, although it is believed to have been from natural causes.

[harrybarracuda]

died at his home in London on Sunday, aged 48. T
The cause of his death has not been announced, although it is believed to have been from natural causes.

Pomplem?

[harrybarracuda]

NOVEMBER 11, 2014 | 08:23PM PT
Jon Burlingame
@jonburlingame
Leigh Chapman, the 1960s actress-turned-screenwriter who wrote “Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry” and “The Octagon,” died Tuesday, Nov. 4 at her West Hollywood home, after an eight-month battle with cancer. She was 75.

Chapman was familiar to TV viewers as Sarah, Napoleon Solo’s efficient secretary in several 1965 episodes of “The Man From U.N.C.L.E.” She also did guest shots on several other mid-’60s series including “Combat,” “Dr. Kildare,” “McHale’s Navy” and “The Monkees.”

But she found her calling as a scriptwriter, starting in TV with “Burke’s Law,” “Mission: Impossible,” “It Takes a Thief,” “The Mod Squad” and “My Favorite Martian.” She penned six scripts for “The Wild Wild West,” one of which earned Agnes Moorehead her only acting Emmy.

Chapman soon graduated to feature-film work, mostly – and unusually for a female writer in the ’70s – in the action-adventure genre, notably with the Peter Fonda car-chase film “Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry.”

Subsequent writing credits included “Steel,” “Boardwalk,” “King of the Mountain,” “Impulse” and the Chuck Norris film “The Octagon.” She did uncredited work on “All the Marbles” and wrote the original treatment that eventually became the Isaac Hayes blaxploitation film “Truck Turner.”

Her final writing credits were the 1993 pilot for “Walker, Texas Ranger” and another first-season episode of the Chuck Norris series, although a creative dispute led her to substitute her mother’s name (Louise McCarn) in the credits for both.

She was born Rosa Lee Chapman in Kannapolis, N.C., in 1939, graduated from Winthrop College in Rock Hill, S.C., and moved to L.A. in the early 1960s, where her first job, as a secretary at the William Morris agency, led to the acting gigs; eventually the agency represented her as a writer.

In later years she took up underwater photography and her work was featured in a 2011 exhibit at Calumet Photography in Hollywood.
Survivors include two sisters and a brother.

[harrybarracuda]

Oh no, how are they going to explain the death of Howard's screeching mother?



Carol Ann Susi, Unseen Actress on 'Big Bang Theory,' Dies at 62
7:32 PM PST 11/11/2014 by Aaron Couch, Lesley Goldberg

Carol Ann Susi, who is best known for voicing Mrs. Wolowitz on CBS's The Big Bang Theory, died early Tuesday morning in Los Angeles after battling cancer. She was 62.

"The Big Bang Theory family has lost a beloved member today with the passing of Carol Ann Susi, who hilariously and memorably voiced the role of Mrs. Wolowitz," read a statement from Warner Bros. Television and Big Bang Theory producers Chuck Lorre, Steve Molaro and Bill Prady. "Unseen by viewers, the Mrs. Wolowitz character became a bit of a mystery throughout the show's eight seasons. What was not a mystery, however, was Carol Ann's immense talent and comedic timing, which were on display during each unforgettable appearance. In addition to her talent, Carol Ann was a constant source of joy and kindness to all. Our thoughts and deepest condolences are with her family during this time, and we will miss her greatly." Her costars mourned her on social media.

Mrs. Wolowitz was rarely seen on-screen — though eagle-eyed viewers caught a glimpse of the pink-clad parent at Howard's (Simon Helberg) wedding in the fifth season finale.

"The glimpse on the rooftop is all you're going to get for now!" Molaro told The Hollywood Reporter at the time. "Isn't she better left to the imagination? There are no plans to actually see her on camera, and I think it's probably better that way."

It is unclear how Susi's passing will impact the show, though it is worth noting Melissa Rauch (Bernadette) does a spot-on impression of her character. Mrs. Wolowitz has had a central storyline this season, in which the gang's friend Stewart (Kevin Sussman) moves in with Mrs. Wolowitz to nurse her through her declining health. Howard becomes jealous, thinking Stewart has replaced him in his mother's heart.

Susi grew up in Brooklyn and moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s. Shortly after, she earned a spot as Kolchak's secretary, Monique Marmelstein, on ABC's The Night Stalker. Other credits include guest appearances on Cheers, Doogie Howser, M.D., Mad About You, Just Shoot Me, Seinfeld and Six Feet Under.

On the 1992 Seinfeld episode "The Boyfriend" (which famously features a guest-starring stint by New York Mets first baseman Keith Hernandez), Susi’s character, the daughter of an unemployment officer, goes out on a horrible date with George (Jason Alexander).

Susi also appeared in several Los Angeles theatrical productions, including Justin Tanner’s Heartbreak Help and Coyote Women, and she was in the original cast (with Lisa Kudrow) of Robin Schiff’s Ladies’ Room.

Susi is survived by her brother, Michael Susi, and his wife Connie, and many friends she considered to be family.

[harrybarracuda]

John Doar, US civil rights champion, dies aged 92
Associated Press in Washington
Wednesday 12 November 2014 03.15 EST



John Doar is awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama in 2012. Photograph: Charles Dharapak/AP


John Doar, who was at the centre of key battles to protect the rights of black voters and integrate universities in the southern United States, has died aged 92. The cause was congestive heart failure, said his son, Burke Doar.

Doar was a justice department civil rights lawyer from 1960 to 1967, serving in the final months of the administration of Dwight D Eisenhower and then staying on during the presidencies of John F Kennedy and Lyndon B Johnson. He rose to the position of assistant attorney general in charge of the department’s civil rights division and challenged discriminatory policies in the south that curtailed minority access to the voting booth and state universities.

A Republican who worked for the federal government at the height of the civil rights movement, Doar played important roles in some of the pivotal moments of that cause. In 1962, he escorted James Meredith, the first black student to enrol in the University of Mississippi, on to the campus while the then governor, Ross Barnett, and angry crowds sought to keep the school segregated. He helped Meredith settle into his dormitory on a campus where violent riots left two dead.

Later he was the lead prosecutor in the federal trial arising from the deaths of three civil rights workers who were shot dead in 1964. A federal jury returned guilty verdicts against some defendants and acquitted others. Those killings inspired the 1988 film Mississippi Burning.

“This was the first time that white persons were convicted for violent crimes against blacks in Mississippi. It was a historic verdict,” Doar said in a 2009 C-SPAN interview.

In a statement on Tuesday, the attorney general, Eric Holder, called Doar a “giant in the history of the rights movement” as well as “a personal hero and an embodiment of what it means to be a public servant”. President Barack Obama described him as “one of the bravest American lawyers of his or any era”.

“Time and time again, John put his life on the line to make real our country’s promise of equal rights for all,” Obama said.

Later in his career, Doar served as special counsel to the House of Representatives as it investigated the Watergate scandal, where he recommended the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.

In awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, Obama credited Doar with laying the groundwork for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

[harrybarracuda]

Warren Clarke Dead: 'Dalziel And Pascoe' Actor Dies, Aged 67
The Huffington Post UK
Posted: 12/11/2014 12:53 GMT Updated: 0 minutes ago



'Dalziel and Pascoe' star Warren Clarke has died aged 67, his agent has confirmed today.

The popular northern actor became a household name for his role in TV crime series 'Dalziel and Pascoe' which ran for years in a primetime slot from its beginning in 1996. He played Detective Superintendent Andy Dalziel opposite Colin Buchanan as Pascoe. The show ran until 2007.

He told the Daily Mail in 2011 that he was "a lucky bastard, although I've worked nearly fifty years for this". Born in Lancashire, he made his debut television appearance in 'Coronation Street', first playing character Kenny Pickup in 1966, and later as Gary Bailey in 1968.

His first big screen appearance came in Stanley Kubrick's 'Clockwork Orange', sharing screen time with Malcolm McDowell.

In a career lasting a further four decades and more, he appeared in all sorts of different TV and film productions, from 'The Breaking of Bumbo' in 1970 to playing a Russian in Clint Eastwood's 'Firefox' in 1982. Despite receiving some big screen offers, he turned his back on Hollywood, decrying it as false.

His most memorable TV appearances include playing gay 'Sophie' Dixon in epic drama series 'Jewel in the Crown', and in 'Blackadder: The Cavalier Years', the family series 'Down to Earth' from 2000 to 2003, and in the BBC big-budget drama 'Bleak House'. He also appeared in 'The Invisibles' and dark trilogy 'Red Riding'.

This year, he had been filming a new series of 'Poldark' in which he played Charles Poldark.

Away from the screen, he was a keen golfer and committed fan of Manchester City Football Club. He leaves his wife Michele, daughter Georgia and son Rowan by his first marriage.

[Chittychangchang]