The RIP Famous Person Thread

[Scottish Gary]

Have a good trip Hugh.....now that was a life worth living rip

[harrybarracuda]

How did anyone find those awful bunny girl outfits attractive? horrible.

You've never seen an Arab see his first ankle, have you?

[Cujo]

Viagra will need to cut their factory output by 50%

Actually not. Surprisingly I read recently that playboy has decided to do away with the naked women.
Wank material is too easy to get online these days I suppose.
RIP (rest in pussy) Hugh.

[misskit]

Monty Hall, Longtime Host of 'Let's Make a Deal,' Dies at 96





The Winnipeg native, renowned for his charity work, co-created the game show and appeared on more than 4,700 episodes, spanning five decades.


Monty Hall, the playful host of Let’s Make a Deal who gave game-show contestants the agonizing choice of taking the cash or what was behind Door No. 3, has died. He was 96.


Hall, who by his own estimation presided over more than 4,700 episodes of the show he co-created, died Saturday due to heart failure, his rep confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter.


Survivors include his three children: daughters Joanna Gleason, a Tony Award-winning actress and the wife of actor Chris Sarandon; Sharon Hall, president of Endemol Shine Studios and the wife of TV producer Todd Ellis Kessler; and son Richard Hall, an Emmy Award-winning producer (Amazing Race).


His wife of nearly 70 years, Marilyn, who was an Emmy-winning producer, TV writer and author, died in June.


A native of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Hall served as a radio color man for New York Rangers’ NHL games and hosted other game shows like the scandal-plagued Twenty One, Video Village and revivals of Beat the Clock and Split Second.


However, it was Let’s Make a Deal, which he created with Stefan Hatos, that made him a television legend.


The show, which premiered in December 1963, featured contestants who would come to the studio with signs and/or dressed in outlandish, colorful costumes in a bid to attract Hall’s attention.


“When we did our first show, people showed up in business suits and dresses, nice-looking people in the studio audience,” Hall recalled in a 2002 interview with the Archive of American Television. “By about the second week or so, a woman showed up with a sign.


“One sign said, ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, I came here to deal with you.’ I stopped, read the poem and picked her. The next week, everybody had a sign. Then somebody else had a funny hat, then came costumes.”


The frantic contestants could gamble and pick what was hidden behind a curtain or one of three doors, or they could opt for the sure thing — cash rolled up in Hall’s jacket pocket. The host, with a twinkle in his eye, engaged in unscripted interactions with these regular folks; it was priceless.


“You’re in the pit with the people,” he said in a 2009 interview with The Toronto Star. “You know what the prizes are, but you have to make up the dialogue. The star is not you, it’s the contestant, and the drama is what they decide. So you have to be able to ad lib based on their choices.”


The prize (wonderfully framed by model Carol Merrill) could be a car … or a cow. Contestants who wound up with such a booby prize were “zonked.”


Born Monty Halperin on Aug. 25, 1921, Hall was president of the student body at the University of Manitoba and distinguished himself by performing in school musicals and plays. Simultaneously, he served as emcee of Canadian Army shows during World War II.


Following graduation, Hall gathered all his belongings in one small suitcase and headed for Toronto, where he broke into show business as an actor, singer, emcee and sportscaster.


Hall’s first TV appearance came in 1953 when he hosted Floor Show, a summer program for the CBC. He came up with an idea for a quiz show, Who Am I?, that ran for a decade in syndication in Canada.


In 1955, Hall made his way to New York and emceed the NBC programs Cowboy Theatre and The Sky’s the Limit. He got a huge break when he was chosen to replace Jack Barry on the hugely popular NBC game show Twenty One.


However, after just four weeks on the job, the program was hit with contest-rigging accusations, and Barry was brought back. “My dreams of making it to the top were sinking faster than the Titanic,” Hall said.


(Hall was never implicated in the controversy, which served as the basis for the 1994 Robert Redford film Quiz Show.)


Hall did some sportscasting and served as a Rangers color man on WINS radio in 1958-59 and 1959-60, making $50 a game. He was working the contest in November 1959 when Jacques Plante of the Montreal Canadiens became the first goaltender to wear a protective mask.


Hall hosted CBS’ Keep Talking, a comedy game show, then succeeded Jack Narz as the “mayor” of Video Village, which featured contestants as “tokens” on a Monopoly-like game board. He followed the show from New York to Los Angeles and sold a new game show to NBC called Your First Impression.


After Video Village was axed in 1962, Hall and Hatos developed Let’s Make a Deal, which debuted on NBC (after ABC passed on it) on Dec. 30, 1963. Its rapid success prompted the network to position it against CBS’ No. 1 daytime show, the venerable soap opera As the World Turns.


NBC even moved Deal to Sunday evenings for a few months in 1967, where it was pitted against The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS and The FBI on ABC. It made it into the Nielsen top 20, peaking at No. 6.


Deal later moved to ABC, running in daytime — and occasionally in primetime — from December 1968 through July 1976, and then in syndication. Other versions of the show have since aired (he returned to emcee a Dick Clark-produced version out of Orlando in the 1990s and did a week of shows in 2010), and Wayne Brady hosts the current edition.


During the height of his popularity, Hall was roasted by Dean Martin, guest-starred on such shows as The Odd Couple, That Girl and The Flip Wilson Show and hosted a series of primetime “All-Star Parties” for the likes of Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, Ronald Reagan and Clint Eastwood that raised millions of dollars for charities.


Hall, in fact, was active in a number of charitable organizations and philanthropic endeavors. He served as president of the Variety Clubs International, and children’s wings bear his name at UCLA Medical Center, Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia, Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.


In recognition of his vast humanitarian works, his native country presented him with its esteemed Order of Canada award in 1988.


Survivors also include grandchildren Aaron (and his wife Stacey), Mikka (Mark), Maggie (Adam), Jack and Levi.


An avid tennis player back in the day, Hall served as the honorary mayor of Hollywood for about a decade, replaced by Johnny Grant.


Plus, he has a head-scratching puzzle that mathematicians named after him.


From the 2009 book The Monty Hall Problem: The Remarkable Story of Math’s Most Contentious Brain Teaser: “Imagine that you face three doors, behind one of which is a prize. You choose one but do not open it. The host — call him Monty Hall — opens a different door, always choosing one he knows to be empty. Left with two doors, will you do better by sticking with your first choice, or by switching to the other remaining door?”


Monty Hall Dead: 'Let?s Make a Deal' Host Was 96 | Hollywood Reporter






Checking out at 96. Monty did well.

[BaitongBoy]

RIP, Monty...

The Monty Hall problem is a brain teaser, in the form of a probability puzzle (Gruber, Krauss and others), loosely based on the American television game show Let's Make a Deal and named after its original host, Monty Hall. The problem was originally posed (and solved) in a letter by Steve Selvin to the American Statistician in 1975. It became famous as a question from a reader's letter quoted in Marilyn vos Savant's "Ask Marilyn" column in Parade magazine in 1990.

"Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?"

Vos Savant's response was that the contestant should switch to the other door. Under the standard assumptions, contestants who switch have a 2/3 chance of winning the car, while contestants who stick to their initial choice have only a 1/3 chance.

Guinness Book of Records cited vos Savant's performance on two intelligence tests, the Stanford-Binet and the Mega Test. She took the 1937 Stanford-Binet, Second Revision test at age ten. She claims her first test was in September 1956 and measured her mental age at 22 years and 10 months, yielding a 228 score.

[Maanaam]

RIP Tom Petty.

[bsnub]

RIP Tom Petty.

Huge loss for music fans. RIP

[bobo746]

CBS Erroneously Reports Tom Petty’s Death

[uncle junior]

LA Times is reporting he's still alive and off life support. Not looking good.

[terry57]

Looks like he is gunna peg out at 66 years old and Filthy rich worth millions.

Get spending Boys.

[Davis Knowlton]

As of 20 minutes ago, he's dead.

[Norton]

Tom Petty, Heartbreakers frontman who sang 'Breakdown,' 'Free Fallin'' and other hits, dies at 66

Reportedly found unconscious at his Malibu home on Sunday night, Petty was rushed to UCLA’s Santa Monica hospital in full cardiac arrest and died Monday at 66. For hours, multiple media outlets reported his death only to retract those reports; his death was confirmed Monday night by his family’s spokeswoman. A cause has not been announced.

Tom Petty, Heartbreakers frontman who sang 'Breakdown,' 'Free Fallin'' and other hits, dies at 66 - LA Times

[uncle junior]

Only 2 wilburys still travelling

[misskit]

Sad day.

[Thai3]

RIP Tom Petty.

Can honestly say never knowingly heard any of his work, so don't care

[Looper]

Suppose you're on a game show, and you're given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say No. 1, and the host, who knows what's behind the doors, opens another door, say No. 3, which has a goat. He then says to you, "Do you want to pick door No. 2?" Is it to your advantage to switch your choice?

How much mileage is on the goat vs the car?

[uncle junior]

Jimmy Buffet's ode to Monty Hall...

[kmart]

Can honestly say never knowingly heard any of his work, so don't care

He made a lot of decent music over a 40+ year career. How this has managed to evade your thick ears in the intervening years is anybody's guess. Ignorance is evidently bliss.

[David48atTD]

Linkin Park singer and father-of-six Chester Bennington commits suicide aged 41 on the birthday of his late friend Chris Cornell

I know this is old, but I just saw this ...



... a favourite song of mine.

[harrybarracuda]

Roy Dotrice dead: Game Of Thrones and Amadeus actor dies aged 94


THE veteran actor Roy Dotrice, best known for his role as Leopold Mozart in Oscar-winning film Amadeus, died yesterday at the age of 94.


By MARK REYNOLDS
PUBLISHED: 16:01, Mon, Oct 16, 2017 | UPDATED: 16:54, Mon, Oct 16, 2017




The TV star and stage veteran was also father to a famous daughter, the actress Michele Dotrice who played Betty in Some Mothers Do Have ‘Em from 1973 to 1978.


In a statement, his family said he “died peacefully on Monday October 16 in his London home surrounded by family, including his three daughters, grandchildren and great-grandson”.


While known for being a character actor throughout his career, Dotrice gained a new fanbase in recent years as the narrator of George RR Martin’s A Song Of Ice And Fire series.


His narration of the series - the inspiration for TV fantasy series Game Of Thrones - saw Dotrice awarded a place in the Guinness World Records in 2004 for the greatest number of characters voiced in an audio book at 224.


During his decades-long career as an actor, Dotrice won a handful of prestigious accolades, including a Tony Award for his role in the Broadway revival of A Moon For The Misbegotten in 2000.


In 1969, he claimed the TV Bafta best actor award for his role as Albert Haddock in the BBC adaptation of AP Herbert’s Misleading Cases.


He also appeared in TV series Shaka Zulu, Mr And Mrs Smith and Life Begins, and films including Eliminators, The Cutting Edge and Hellboy II: The Golden Army.


Prior to his acting career, Dotrice was in the military, which he said inspired him to become an actor.


Born on Guernsey, Dotrice joined the Royal Air Force and was trained as a wireless operator and air gunner.


His plane was shot down and he was held as a prisoner of war - where his first taste for the theatre took root, performing concerts to raise the spirits of his fellow inmates.


In 2008 Dotrice was awarded an OBE for services to drama by the Queen.


At the time, he said he had never imagined he would be receiving an honour at Buckingham Palace.


Dotrice was married to his wife Kay for 60 years, until her death in 2007.


They had three daughters together - Yvette, Karen and Michele who was married to actor Edward Woodward, who died in 2009.


Roy Dotrice dead: Game Of Thrones and Amadeus actor dies aged 94 | Celebrity News | Showbiz & TV | Express.co.uk

[bobo746]

AC/DC producer and Easybeats musician George Young dead at 70

AC/DC said in a statement the band would not exist without Young's "help and guidance"
"As a musician, songwriter, producer, advisor and much, much more, you could not ask for a more dedicated and professional man," the statement read.
"You could not ask for a finer brother. We will always remember him with gratitude and hold him close to our hearts."

George was the eldest brother of Australian rock legends Malcolm and Angus Young. He was born in Scotland in 1946 but emigrated to Australia with his family when he was still a child.
He shot to fame in the '60s as a guitarist for the Sydney-based rock band The Easybeats. While the band broke up in 1970, he and lead guitarist Harry Vanda were later inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame.
Young was also known for co-producing AC/DC's early albums, including TNT, Dirty Deeds Done Cheap and Let There Be Rock.



AC/DC producer and Easybeats musician George Young dead at 70

[bobo746]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtYPVlT5Oz8

[bobo746]

Robert Guillaume, TV's 'Benson,' Dead at 89


Robert Guillaume, who played the quick-witted and sarcastic Benson DuBois on Soap and the spinoff Benson, has died. His widow, Donna Brown Guillaume, told The Associated Press that he died at home in Los Angeles where he was battling prostate cancer. He was 89.
In 1977, Guillaume took on the role of DuBois, a butler to the wealthy Tate family, on ABC's soap-opera parody sitcom Soap. The role was such a hit with viewers that the network created Benson in 1979, where it remained on the air through 1986. On the spinoff, DuBois was promoted to managing the governor's mansion, eventually running for political office himself. In 2015, the show ranked among Rolling Stone's 20 Best TV Spin-offs. "To me, Benson was the revenge for all those stereotyped guys who looked like Benson in the Forties and Fifties [movies] and had to keep their mouths shut," Guillaume said in 2001, according to the AP
Robert Guillaume, TV's 'Benson,' Dead at 89 - Rolling Stone

[Chittychangchang]

[harrybarracuda]

Rock Pioneer Fats Domino Dies at 89
10/25/2017 by Gil Kaufman






Rock and roll has lost one of its most iconic architects. Antoine "Fats" Domino passed away in New Orleans on Wednesday (Oct. 25) at the age of 89, according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The boogie-woogie piano legend brought some of his home city's signature jazz and R&B flair to the emerging genre in the early 1950s on such genre building block hits as "Ain't That a Shame," "Blueberry Hill" and "I'm Walkin'." He reportedly sold more records than any other '50s-era rockers outside of Elvis and hit Billboard pop and R&B charts from the mid-1950s through the late 1960's, notching more hits than such fellow rock godfathers as Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Little Richard.


Antoine Dominique Domino Jr. was born on Feb. 26, 1928, in New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward into a large musical family and began playing in local bars at age 14 after dropping out of high school, working factory jobs and hauling ice to make enough to support his musical pursuits. The portly piano-pounder received his iconic stage name in 1946 when he started sitting in with local bass player and band leader Billy Diamond. Arranger Dave Bartholomew discovered the budding star in 1949 and helped him release his first single, "The Fat Man," on Imperial Records -- his recording home until 1963. The track is credited with being the first rock record to sell over one million copies and some consider it to be the first rock single.


By 1955, Domino released the first in a string of gold and multi-platinum singles, "Ain't It a Shame," (later covered by Pat Boone as "Ain't That A Shame," a No. 1 hit on the pop charts, while Domino's peaked at No. 10) followed the next year by one of Domino's biggest hits, a cover of the 1940s Glenn Miller Orchestra track "Blueberry Hill," at No. 2 on the pop charts his highest charting hit. The hits kept coming, with such songs as "If You I Love," "Valley of Tears," "The Big Beat," "Whole Lotta Loving," "I'm Ready" and "Walking to New Orleans," which all highlighted Domino's signature Dixieland-inspired rhythmic piano playing.


Paving the way for future stars such as Elvis, Domino became a teen icon thanks to his appearance in a pair of youth-focused films, 1956's music comedy Shake, Rattle & Roll and that same year's Jayne Mansfield comedy The Girl Can't Help It. Though Domino was hugely popular and appeared on Dick Clark's American Bandstand in 1957, Biography notes that he and his band were still denied lodging and forced to use segregated facilities while touring in the 1950s.


The singer continued to crank out popular songs into the late 1950s such as "Whole Lotta Loving," "I'm Ready" and "I Want To Walk You Home," leaving Imperial in 1963 after scoring 37 top 40 hits for the label. His influence reverberated throughout the next decade as British Invasion acts including the Beatles and Rolling Stones employed some of his building blocks to make rock a global phenomenon. One of Domino's last charting singles was a 1968 cover of the Beatles' "Lady Madonna," a track that was notably influenced by his percussion piano playing. After leaving Imperial, Domino recorded albums for labels including Mercury, Warner Bros., Atlantic and Broadmoor, releasing his final major-label album, Christmas is a Speical Day, in 1993.


The singer toured the world into the early 1990s, but mostly stayed in New Orleans with his eight children and wife after a health scare took him off the road in 1991. His legendarily stately home was destroyed in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina when floodwaters swamped the Lower Ninth Ward, wiping out most of his possession and forcing a helicopter evacuation by the Coast Guard. He was one of the initial inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986 alongside such fellow icons as Elvis, James Brown, Little Richard and Chuck Berry. He received the National Medal of Arts from former Pres. Bill Clinton in 1998 and the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987.


http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/8013989/fats-domino-dies-at-89