The RIP Famous Person Thread

[Cujo]

not at all famous people dying all over the place.

[harrybarracuda]

not at all famous people dying all over the place.

Said Cujo from his Intel-powered computer.

[harrybarracuda]

Ah bless, the light that burns brightest....

Former mayor of Toronto Rob Ford dies at the age of 46 after cancer battle
17:22, 22 MAR 2016 UPDATED 17:23, 22 MAR 2016
BY RECORD REPORTER
EX-TORONTO mayor Rob Ford has died at just 46 years old, following a cancer battle.



Mr Ford, whose drug and alcohol addiction was well documented during a career plagued by controversy, was diagnosed with a rare cancer in 2014.

Popular with voters, he won a city council seat in a landslide result in the same year.

Announcing news of his passing, Mr Ford's family described him as "a dedicated man of the people who spent his life serving the citizens of Toronto."

Read more at Former mayor of Toronto Rob Ford dies at the age of 46 after cancer battle - Daily Record


TORONTO—Rob Ford, the former mayor of Toronto, served not only as chief executive of one of the most successful metropolises in North America, but as an international buffoon, a symbol of toxic masculinity, and, as has become clear in 2016, the inventor of a new and virulent style of politics composed of equal parts comedy, rage and celebrity culture. The man rewrote the political playbook without trying. Rob Ford died an accidental prophet.

But he was also just a 46-year-old man. A man with a wife who will be a widow, and children who will live the rest of their lives without a father. A man with a family who loved him, a man with a troubled past, who had more than his share of struggles with the basic business of living as a human being and as a man.

For Toronto, the city in which I live, Rob Ford will endure as a permanent symbol of the underlying turbulence on which its supposedly liberal facade rests. Toronto imagines itself, and it mostly is, a city of openness and reason—a tolerant city where over half of the population is foreign-born and rational government intervention is widely accepted. Rob Ford represented the precise opposite of that civic fantasy. He exposed the deep rifts of class and race that run through Toronto. I don't think he intended to. His politics were instinctual and personal rather than intellectual. He won the mayoralty by hammering away at a more or less meaningless catchphrase ("Respect for Taxpayers") but his tenure in office quickly fell apart because he had no idea what to do with actual power, except to reward his friends and punish his enemies. Family loyalty was the best of him; it was also the worst of him.

Even before he died, idiots were asking "Why were we all so hard on Rob Ford?" The Fords were constantly whining about "the media," and how vicious we all supposedly were on them. All I can say is, if there is any reason for a free press to exist in democracy, it is to report that the mayor is smoking crack. The disgrace of the Canadian press is not that it was too hard on Ford, but that it wasn't hard enough. It took an American website, Gawker, to break the story of the crack video, which is a permanent blot on the record of every Canadian newspaper and on the state of our libel laws. The fact that Rob Ford was never arrested is a similar disgrace on the police force of this city. Rob Ford was driving around this city chugging bottles of vodka, and they did nothing to stop him. In the infamous picture of Rob Ford at the crack house, everyone in the picture except the mayor was arrested or shot. And it was because he was rich and white and they were poor and black.

For Toronto, a city desperately hungry for the approval of others, Rob Ford represented above all an unprecedented level of exposure. At a certain point, it stopped being embarrassing because the size of the story was so bizarre. It wasn't just New York media, or European media, though he regularly made the front pages of all the international papers. I was in a cab in Senegal in the middle of his various scandals, and the cab driver, finding out we were from Toronto, said "Ah, Toronto. Rob Ford." A friend I met there, returning from Burkina Faso, said that Ford was on the cover of newspapers there.

The irony is that his legacy is evident more outside the city he ruled rather than inside it. Canada has abandoned, to the absolute maximum, the politics that Rob Ford represented. Justin Trudeau is the new pop culture phenomenon from the North, and Trudeau calls himself a feminist and he doesn't do racist caricatures late at night in Jamaican restaurants. He doesn't talk about eating his wife's pussy to the press. Instead, he talks to the Obamas about how wonderful their daughters are. In the infamous crack video, Ford's most controversial remark was that Trudeau was a "faggot." Well, the guys he thought were "faggots" run the country now.

No, the true legacy of Rob Ford is that he identified a bizarre longing in the populations of rich cities with dysfunctional governments, and that longing is much more evident in the United States than in Canada right now. After Ford confessed to smoking crack, and refused to step down—still one of the craziest political decisions ever undertaken--his poll numbers went up. He stumbled on a fact nobody had realized before: such is the loathing of the political class among voters that craziness will be taken as authenticity.

Rob Ford, like many other discoverers, stumbled on his discovery. But other, more self-aware, more skilled, politicians were watching. Other politicians—ones with more cynical hearts and fewer self-destructive addictions—were learning. And so here we are in 2016 when the most salient political fact in the world is that the next Rob Ford could easily be the next President of the United States.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics...ord-influence/

[harrybarracuda]

I could almost have posted that in the Republican thread.

[BaitongBoy]

Crack kills...First Marion Barry (though 2 years ago) and now this...Though Barry had a few extra decades...

[harrybarracuda]

Fuck, Johan Cruyff's dead, didn't even know he was ill.

https://teakdoor.com/the-sports-room/...ml#post3235826

[can123]

Fuck, Johan Cruyff's dead, didn't even know he was ill.

He told me not to tell you because it would only upset you.

[can123]

It's Gary Shandling's turn now. It's not safe to be alive these days, is it ?

US comedian and actor Garry Shandling dies at 66 - BBC News

[Black Heart]

I didn't know he wrote Sanford and Son and Welome Back Kotter.

Born in Chicago, Shandling was raised in Tucson, Ariz., and started out majoring in electrical engineering before completing a marketing degree at the University of Arizona. After moving to Los Angeles, he sold a script for “Sanford and Son” and also wrote for “Welcome Back, Kotter.” He guest-hosted on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and was in consideration to become Carson’s replacement. After a serious car accident, he began working on his stand-up comedy act.

Garry Shandling Dead: ?Larry Sanders Show? Star Dies at 66 | Variety

[misskit]

That's sad about Garry Shandling. He was a very funny man.

[harrybarracuda]

Dupe.

Loved the pen joke

Here he is on SNL

[harrybarracuda]

‘Legends Of The Fall’ Author Jim Harrison Dies At Age Of 78
March 27, 2016 9:22 PM



NEW YORK (CBSNewYork/AP)– Jim Harrison, the fiction writer, poet, outdoorsman and reveler who wrote with gruff affection for the country’s landscape and rural life and enjoyed mainstream success in middle age with his historical saga “Legends of the Fall,” has died at age 78.

Spokeswoman Deb Seager of Grove Atlantic, Harrison’s publisher, told The Associated Press that Harrison died Saturday at his home in Patagonia, Arizona. Seager did not know the cause of death. Harrison’s wife of more than 50 years, Linda King Harrison, died last fall.

The versatile and prolific author completed more than 30 books, most recently the novella collection “The Ancient Minstrel,” and was admired worldwide. Sometimes likened to Ernest Hemingway for the range and kinds of his interests, he was a hunter and fisherman who savored his time in a cabin near his Michigan hometown, a drinker and Hollywood scriptwriter who was close friends with Jack Nicholson and came to know Sean Connery, Orson Welles and Warren Beatty among others. He was a sports writer and a man of extraordinary appetite who once polished off a 37-course lunch, a traveler and teller of tales, most famously “Legends of the Fall.”

“His voice came from the American heartland and his deep and abiding love of the American landscape runs through his extraordinary body of work,” Grove Atlantic publisher and CEO Morgan Entrekin said in statement Sunday.

Published in 1979, “Legends of the Fall” was a collection of three novellas that featured the title story about Montana rancher Col. William Ludlow and his three sons of sharply contrasting personalities and values, the narrative extending from before World War I to the mid-20th century, from San Francisco to Singapore.

The book was a best-seller, and Harrison worked on the script for an Oscar-nominated 1994 film of the same name starring Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins and Aidan Quinn. Harrison’s screenplay credits also included “Revenge,” starring Kevin Costner, and the Nicholson film “Wolf.” But he would liken the unpredictable and nerve wracking process to being trapped in a “shuddering elevator” and reminded himself of his marginal status by inscribing a putdown by a Hollywood executive, “You’re just a writer,” on a piece of paper and taping it above his desk.

Harrison could have been a superb character actor, a bearded, burly man with a disfigured left eye and a smoker’s rasp who confided that when out in public with Nicholson he was sometimes mistaken for the actor’s bodyguard. Erudite enough to write reviews for The New York Times and to quote Wallace Stevens from memory, he also had a strong affinity for physical labor and a history of writing stories for and about men.



Harrison had displayed numerous talents before the general public caught on to him. He was an accomplished poet and sports journalist and a fiction writer with a strong feel for open spaces and the pull and consequences of history. He set many works in the rural north of his native Michigan, including the detective novels “The Great Leader” and `”The Big Seven,” and used Nebraska as the backdrop for one of his most acclaimed works, “Dalva.”

His other books included a volume of novellas, “The River Swimmer”; the poetry collections “Songs of Unreason” and “Returning to Earth”; and a memoir about food, “The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand.” He was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2007.

Harrison married Linda King in 1959 and had two daughters.

His turnaround involved a true Hollywood twist. Harrison was visiting his in-laws’ home when he came upon the journals of his wife’s great-grandfather, a mining engineer named William Ludlow, and was inspired to write a story. The completion of what became “Legends of the Fall” was made possible by a $15,000 loan from Nicholson.

?Legends Of The Fall? Author Jim Harrison Dies At Age Of 78 « CBS New York

[bobo746]

Patty Duke Is Dead at 69 - ABC News

Patty Duke, Oscar-winning actress and the star of an eponymous TV show, died this morning, ABC News has confirmed.
According to her rep, Mitchell Stubbs, the cause of death was sepsis from a ruptured intestine.
The actress, whose real name was Anna Pearce, was 69.
"She was a wife, a mother, a grandmother, a friend, a mental health advocate and a cultural icon," Stubbs added in a statement. "She will be greatly missed."

[Sumbitch]

I don't have specific memories anymore but, God, that first picture pulls on the heart strings in a general sense. R.I.P.

[Cujo]

I don't have specific memories anymore

Man, you must be REALLY old.

[harrybarracuda]

Italian Job Actress Maggie Blye Dies At 73

Ben Arnold
30 March 2016



Maggie Blye, star of the 1969 classic ‘The Italian Job’, has died at the age of 73.

Her sister, the casting director Judy Blye Wilson, confirmed that she had passed away on March 24, following a two-year battle with cancer.

Born in Houston, Texas, she started her acting career on TV, in shows like 'Perry Mason’ and the western drama 'Gunsmoke’.

In 1967, she appeared opposite Paul Newman in the movie 'Hombre’, based on the Elmore Leonard novel.


Then in 1969, she played the girlfriend of Benny Hill’s character Professor Peach in 'The Italian Job’, in one scene pelting Michael Caine with stuffed animals.

She also appeared opposite James Coburn twice, first in 'Waterhole No. 3’ in 1967, and then in 'Hard Times’ in 1975.


She appeared in further high-profile TV shows through the 1970s including 'The Rockford Files’ and 'Hart To Hart’, and into the 90s in 'Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman’, opposite Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher.

Blye served for several years on the Foreign Language Film Award Screening Committee for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

She is survived by her sister, her brother Richard and several nieces and nephews.

https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/post/141...ye-dies-at-73?

[harrybarracuda]

And it's Goodnight from Him...

BREAKING NEWS: Comedy legend Ronnie Corbett has died aged 85 surrounded by his family
Scottish-born comedian best known for being one half of The Two Ronnies
He was ill with gall bladder problems in 2014 but later made a recovery
TV star died surrounded by his wife of 50 years and their two daughters
By RICHARD SPILLETT FOR MAILONLINE

PUBLISHED: 11:46, 31 March 2016 | UPDATED: 11:50, 31 March 2016



Corbett is survived by his wife, Anne Hart, who he married in 1965, and the couple's two daughters, actresses Emma and Sophie Corbett. Corbett and his wife celebrated their golden wedding anniversary last year.

The 5ft 1in entertainer has divided his time in recent years between his homes in Croydon, south London and Gullane, East Lothian, which is not far from his birthplace of Edinburgh.

Corbett collapsed at a dinner to celebrate him being awarded a CBE in 2012 and was rushed to hospital, from where he was discharged two days later.

His wife later said her husband had been taking a ‘considerable amount of medication’ following a knee operation and she believed the drugs contributed to his collapse.

He was also hospitalised with gall bladder problems in 2014 but was back on his feet a week later and was said to be 'enjoying work and life'.

Corbett will be best remember for his role in classic sketches in the Two Ronnies, as well as his monologues delivered from a large armchair. Barker died of heart failure in 2005.

Corbett said of his iconic status in 2013: 'I do find the 'national treasure’ thing very touching. Actually, it brings a tear to my eye when people call me that.'

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti..._campaign=1490

[blue]

[Iceman123]

^
Fantastic, humble man, supported many charities and was always a gentleman.

[Looper]

Bad month for British 80's TV short-arses

RIP Ronnie

[Mathos]

Special Guy, he had a great innings.

RIP Ronnie, you were extremely talented.

[Humbert]

Zaha Hadid, renowned British architect 1950-2016

A real visionary has died leaving an incredible legacy.



Postscript: Zaha Hadid, 1950-2016 - The New Yorker

[barrylad66]

^
Fantastic, humble man, supported many charities and was always a gentleman.

Met him and Ronnie barker when I was kid. My old man was in a Welsh Choir ( treorchy )and they were doing a sketch for the 2 Ronnie show. Had a great day,and the 2 r onnies were great to everyone...

R.IP little one...

[Neverna]

[Sumbitch]

Man, you must be REALLY old.

65.