The RIP Famous Person Thread

[misskit]

Great actress. Nurse Ratched was evil!

[misskit]

Doobie Brothers Drummer John Hartman Dies at 72

The Doobie Brothers paid tribute to their co-founder and “wild spirit” drummer John Hartman on Thursday (Sept. 22) in a post announcing the 72-year-old rock veteran’s death. “Today we are thinking of John Hartman, or Little John to us,” read a social statement from the group. “John was a wild spirit, great drummer, and showman during his time in the Doobies.”


At press time no additional information was available on when Hartman passed or his cause of death.


“He was also a close friend for many years and an intricate part of the band personality! We send our condolences to all his loved ones at this difficult time,” read the statement. Hartman moved to Northern California to join what was planned as a Moby Grape reunion with that band’s leader, Skip Spence, in 1969 that never materialized, according to a band bio.

But after Spence introduced him to future bandmate singer/guitarist Tom Johnston, the pair started playing gigs in Bay Area bars, adding in singer/finger-picking guitarist Pat Simmons to the lineup. The band’s 1971 Warner Bros. debut featured original bass player Dave Shogren, who split before the Doobies recorded their 1972 follow-up, Toulouse Street. The latter finally got them on the charts thanks to the easy-rocking hits “Listen to the Music” and “Jesus is Just Alright/Rockin’ Down the Highway.”


By 1972, the Doobies had added new bassist Tiran Porter as well as second drummer Michael Hossack, initiating what would become their signature double-percussionist sound. They continued to churn out a string of indelible AM-radio hits throughout the decade, including “China Grove,” “Black Water,” “Long Train Runnin’,” What a Fool Believes,” “Minute by Minute” and “Takin’ it to the Streets.”


Hartman left the group in 1979 before the release of the band’s ninth album, 1980’s One Step Closer. He returned 10 years later and played on 1989’s Cycles and 1991’s Brotherhood before leaving again in 1992. The beloved drummer was on hand in 2020 when the Doobies were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.


See the band’s statement and watch a 1977 live version on “Takin’ it to the Streets” below.

John Hartman Dead: Doobie Brothers Drummer Was 72 – The Hollywood Reporter

[harrybarracuda]

‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ rapper Coolio dead at 59



Rapper Coolio died on Wednesday at age 59, according to TMZ.
Coolio’s longtime manager, Jarez, told the outlet that the rapper was at a friend’s home in Los Angeles when he excused himself to go to the bathroom.


When he didn’t return after a reasonable amount of time, the friend reportedly called out to him — but didn’t get a response.
Worried, the friend went into the bathroom and discovered Coolio — whose real name is Artis Leon Ivey Jr. — on the floor. The paramedics were called immediately.


Following a suspected cardiac arrest, Coolio was pronounced dead at the scene. However, the official cause of death is still pending.
The rapper, who began his career back in the 80s, rose to fame in 1995 after the release of “Gangsta’s Paradise,” which was featured in the movie “Dangerous Minds.”

'Gangsta's Paradise' rapper Coolio dead at 59

[misskit]

Some outstanding lyrics here.

[nidhogg]

^Probably the only rapper and rap song I know. Great song.

[S Landreth]

• Sacheen Littlefeather Dead: Actress Who Delivered Brando Oscar Speech Was 75

Sacheen Littlefeather (Apache/Yaqui/Ariz.), the Native American actress and activist who took to the stage at the 1973 Academy Awards to reveal that Marlon Brando would not accept his Oscar for The Godfather, has died. She was 75.

Littlefeather died at noon Sunday at her home in the Northern California city of Novato surrounded by her loved ones, according to a statement sent out by her caretaker. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which reconciled with Littlefeather in June and hosted a celebration in her honor just two weeks ago, revealed the news on social media Sunday night.

Littlefeather disclosed in March 2018 that she had been diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer, and it had metastasized in recent years.

Brando had decided to boycott the March 1973 Oscars in protest of how Native Americans were portrayed onscreen as well as to pay tribute to the ongoing occupation at Wounded Knee, in which 200 members of the American Indian Movement (AIM) faced off against thousands of U.S. marshals and other federal agents in the South Dakota town.

After presenters Liv Ullmann and Roger Moore listed the nominees for best actor and Ullmann called out Brando’s name as the winner, the telecast cut to Littlefeather, then 26 and wearing a traditional Apache dress, walking to the stage from her seat at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as the announcer explained, “Accepting the award for Marlon Brando and The Godfather, Miss Sacheen Littlefeather.”

Littlefeather, however, held up her right hand to decline the statuette proffered by Moore as she reached the podium and told the Chandler audience and the 85 million viewers watching at home that Brando “very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award.”

Speaking in measured tones but off-the-cuff — Brando, who told her not to touch the trophy, had given her a typed eight-page speech, but telecast producer Howard Koch informed her she had no more than 60 seconds — she continued, “And the reasons for this being are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry … and on television in movie reruns, and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee.”

The New York Times published Brando’s entire speech three days later.

Littlefeather’s remarks were met in the building by a smattering of boos as well as applause, but public sentiment in the immediate aftermath of her appearance was largely negative. Some media outlets questioned her Native heritage (her father was Apache and Yaqui and her mother was white) and claimed she rented her costume for the ceremony, while conservative celebrities including John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Charlton Heston — three actors who had starred in many a Western — reportedly criticized Brando and Littlefeather’s actions.

As she was becoming an indelible part of Oscar lore, Wayne “was in the wings, ready to have me taken off stage,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2016. “He had to be restrained by six security guards.” That may not have been the case, an investigation showed.

Regardless, nearly 50 years later, the Academy issued her an apology.

“The abuse you endured because of this statement was unwarranted and unjustified,” then-AMPAS president David Rubin wrote to her in a letter dated June 18. “The emotional burden you have lived through and the cost to your own career in our industry are irreparable. For too long the courage you showed has been unacknowledged. For this, we offer both our deepest apologies and our sincere admiration.”

“I was stunned. I never thought I’d live to see the day I would be hearing this, experiencing this,” Littlefeather told The Hollywood Reporter. “When I was at the podium in 1973, I stood there alone.”

Born Marie Louise Cruz on Nov. 14, 1946, in the coastal Northern California city of Salinas, Littlefeather was primarily raised by her mother’s parents. She began exploring her Native identity at California State University in Hayward and participated in the Native occupation to attempt to reclaim Alcatraz Island in 1969, and it was her fellow activist friends who renamed her.

Shortly thereafter, Littlefeather received a full scholarship to study acting at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater. “Dancing and acting was an escape from reality,” she told The Native American Times in 2010.

She got some work in radio and TV ads (including as Miss Vampire USA for a Dark Shadows soap opera promotion) but found it a struggle to land substantive parts in Hollywood: “Americans liked the blonde Sandra Dee look … I got speaking parts in Italian films because they liked the exotic.”

In 1972, she participated in a planned Playboy shoot called “Ten Little Indians” that was scrapped before publication when the occupation at Wounded Knee began in February 1973. But after Littlefeather’s Oscar appearance, Playboy printed her photos as a standalone feature, further discrediting her in some people’s eyes.

She had met Brando for the first time a few years earlier when she was in Washington giving a presentation to the FCC on race and minorities.

“In the ’70s, you had AIM and the Indian Civil Rights Movement and that was the part that I was in,” she said. “I was a spokesperson, so to speak, for the stereotype of Native Americans in film and in television. All I was saying was, ‘We don’t want Chuck Connors playing Geronimo.'”


When she mentioned to Brando that she didn’t have an evening dress for the Oscars, “Marlon told me to wear my buckskin,” she said in the 2018 documentary Sacheen: Breaking the Silence.

Three months after the Oscars, Brando appeared on The Dick Cavett Show and said that he “was embarrassed for Sacheen. She wasn’t able to say what she intended to say, and I was distressed that people booed and whistled and stomped even though perhaps it was directed at myself. They should have at least had the courtesy to listen to her.”


Although Brando’s stunt had the intended effect of renewing attention on Wounded Knee, Littlefeather said it put her life at risk and killed her acting career, claiming that she lost guild memberships and was banned from the industry. (In addition, the Academy subsequently prohibited winners from sending proxies to accept — or reject — awards on their behalf.)

“I was blacklisted — or, you could say, ‘redlisted,'” Littlefeather said in her documentary. “Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett and others didn’t want me on their shows. … The doors were closed tight, never to reopen.”

Littlefeather managed to appear in a handful of films (The Trial of Billy Jack, Johnny Firecloud and Winterhawk among them) before she quit acting for good and earned a degree in holistic health from Antioch University with a minor in Native American medicine. Her work in wellness included writing a health column for the Kiowa tribe newspaper in Oklahoma, teaching in the traditional Indian medicine program at St. Mary’s Hospital in Tucson, Arizona, and working with Mother Teresa on behalf of AIDS patients in the Bay Area. She would go on to serve as a founding board member of the American Indian AIDS Institute of San Francisco.

Littlefeather also continued her involvement in the arts, co-founding the nonprofit National American Indian Performing Arts Registry in the early ’80s, advising on multiple PBS programs and continuing to be an advocate for Native American inclusion in Hollywood (she appeared in the 2009 documentary Reel Injun).

“I was the first woman of color to ever make a political statement in the history of the Academy Awards,” Littlefeather said in Sacheen, and at the time, Coretta Scott King and Cesar Chavez were among the few who publicly praised her Oscar speech.

But over the decades, her onstage advocacy proved to be a precursor for the conversation about diversity in Hollywood that continues today, and Jada Pinkett Smith cited her as an inspiration for her own boycott of the 2016 Academy Awards (the #OscarsSoWhite ceremony).

The two exchanged emails at the time, with Smith writing, “Thank you for being one of the brave and courageous to help pave the way for those of us who need a reminder of the importance to simply be true.”

Littlefeather will be buried next to her husband, Charles Koshiway (Otoe/Sac&Fox), in Red Rock, Oklahoma. Koshiway died of blood cancer in November 2021. The two met 32 years ago at a pow wow at the University of California at Davis.

“The night before we met, I had a dream that I was introduced to this good-looking Indian man, and he tipped his white Stetson cowboy hat and talked in this very soft Oklahoma accent: ‘How’re yew?'” she told THR in August. “The next day, my roommate and I drove up to the UC Davis pow wow and underneath this white Stetson cowboy hat was this very handsome Indian man, and the first thing he did was tip his hat, look in my eyes and say, ‘How’re yew?’ That’s all it took. The man of my dreams.”

Upon receiving the Academy’s apology, Littlefeather said of her late husband, “His spirit is still here with me, and I know that what he wanted for me was always justice and reconciliation.” And two weeks before her death, when she took to an Academy stage for the second time in her life, at the museum’s celebration in her honor, she knew her own passing was imminent: “I’m crossing over soon to the spirit world. And you know, I’m not afraid to die. Because we come from a we/us/our society. We don’t come from a me/I/myself society. And we learn to give away from a very young age. When we are honored, we give.”

A Catholic Requiem Mass for her will be held this month at St. Rita Church in Fairfax, California, with a reception to follow. Littlefeather requested that donations be made to the American Indian Child Resource Center of Oakland.

In her final public appearance, she spoke again on behalf of all Native peoples: “I am here accepting this apology, not only for me alone but as acknowledgment, knowing that it was not only for me, but for all of our nations that also need to hear and deserve this apology tonight. Look at our people. Look at each other and be proud that we stand as survivors, all of us. Please, when I’m gone, always be reminded that whenever you stand for your truth, you will be keeping my voice, and the voices of our nations, and our people, alive.”

[harrybarracuda]

conservative celebrities including John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Charlton Heston — three actors who had starred in many a Western — reportedly criticized Brando and Littlefeather’s actions.

One of those talked to a chair, another glorified firearms at the scene of the shooting death of a young black kid and, well....

[panama hat]

Fuck the white trash

[harrybarracuda]

Loretta Lynn, 'Coal Miner's Daughter' singer, dies aged 90




Loretta Lynn, the coal miner's daughter from a hill in Butcher Holler, Kentucky, who became one of American country music's biggest stars died on Tuesday at the age of 90, her family said on Twitter.

Lynn died at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, the family said in a Twitter post.

“Our precious mom, Loretta Lynn, passed away peacefully this morning, October 4, in her sleep at home in her beloved ranch in Hurricane Mills,” the post said.

Lynn, who through her music became an accidental feminist, once told an interviewer that 14 of her songs had been banned by radio stations.

“I wasn't the first woman in country music,” she told Esquire magazine in 2007. “I was just the first one to stand up there and say what I thought, what life was about. The rest were afraid to.”

Lynn's down-home twangy voice was a regular feature on country music radio and honky-tonk juke boxes in the 1960s and 1970s as she scored hits with songs such as Fist City, You Ain't Woman Enough (to Take My Man) and the autobiographical Coal Miner's Daughter. According to her website, Lynn had more than 50 top-10 hits.

Loretta Lynn, '''Coal Miner'''s Daughter''' singer, dies aged 90

[misskit]

Angela Lansbury, Entrancing Star of Stage and Screen, Dies at 96

Angela Lansbury, the irrepressible three-time Oscar nominee and five-time Tony Award winner who solved 12 seasons’ worth of crimes as the novelist/amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher on CBS’ Murder, She Wrote, has died. She was 96.


Lansbury, who received an Emmy nomination for best actress in a drama series for each and every season of Murder, She Wrote — yet never won — died in her sleep at 1:30 a.m. Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles, her family announced. She was five days shy of her birthday.

Lansbury went 0-for-18 in career Emmy noms but did get some love from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who gave her an honorary Oscar in 2013 for her career as “an entertainment icon who has created some of cinema’s most memorable characters, inspiring generations of actors.”

The London-born Lansbury, then 19, received a best supporting actress Oscar nom for her very first film role, as the young maid Nancy in the home of Charles Boyer and his new bride Ingrid Bergman in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944).


For her third movie, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), she received another nom for playing the lovely singer whose heart is broken by the hedonistic title character. (Her mother, West End actress Moyna MacGill, played a duchess in the film.)


Lansbury then took a turn toward evil and was rewarded with her final Oscar nom for portraying Laurence Harvey’s manipulative mother in the Cold War classic The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The actress often played characters much older than herself, and in this case, Harvey was just a few years younger than Lansbury.


Her charismatic performance as the eccentric title character in a 1966 production of Mame vaulted her to Broadway superstardom and resulted in the first of her four Tonys for best actress in a musical.


She followed with wins for playing “the madwoman of Chaillot” in 1969’s Dear World, with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman; for starring as the ultimate stage mother Rose in a 1974 revival of Gypsy; for dazzling as the off-the-wall Mrs. Lovett in the original 1979 production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd; and, in 2009, for portraying the clairvoyant Madame Arcati in a revival of the Noël Coward farce Blithe Spirit.

She was still on the road in Blithe Spirit as she approached her 90th birthday, and in December 2018 she was back on the big screen, as the Balloon Lady, in Mary Poppins Returns.


In June, she received yet another Tony, this one for lifetime achievement.


In the early 1980s, Lansbury was not interested in headlining a TV series when she was approached by Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link to star in Murder, She Wrote.


The pair earlier had created Ellery Queen, another show about a crime-solving writer, and former All in the Family star Jean Stapleton had already turned them down.


“I couldn’t imagine I would ever want to do television,” Lansbury said in a 1985 interview with The New York Times. “But the year 1983 rolled around and Broadway was not forthcoming, so I took a part in a miniseries, Gertrude Whitney in Little Gloria, Happy at Last [a dramatization of Gloria Vanderbilt‘s childhood].


“And then [there was] a slew of roles in miniseries, and I began to sense that the television audience was very receptive to me, and I decided I should stop flirting and shut the door or say to my agents, ‘I’m ready to think series.'”


Then 59, Lansbury signed on as the widowed Jessica, a retired English teacher, mystery writer and amateur detective who enjoyed riding her bicycle (she didn’t drive) in the cozy coastal town of Cabot Cove, Maine. Late in the series, Jessica spent time teaching criminology at a Manhattan university.

Universal Television’s Murder, She Wrote ran from 1984-96 (plus four telefilms) and was a huge ratings hit on Sunday nights following 60 Minutes. Both CBS shows appealed to intelligent, older viewers, and Lansbury was the rare woman in the history of television to carry her own series.


The show went 0 for 3 in the Emmy race for outstanding drama series and won just twice in 41 tries overall, according to IMDb.


“Nobody in this town watches Murder, She Wrote,” Lansbury, referring to the TV industry, said in 1991. “Only the public watches.”


The show was ranked in the top 13 in the Nielsen ratings (and as high as No. 4) on Sundays in its first 11 seasons but plummeted to No. 58 when CBS moved it to Thursdays in 1995-96 against NBC’s then-powerful lineup. The series finale, quite appropriately, was titled “Death by Demographics.”


“What appealed to me about Jessica Fletcher,” she said, “is that I could do what I do best and [play someone I have had] little chance to play — a sincere, down-to-earth woman. Mostly, I’ve played very spectacular bitches. Jessica has extreme sincerity, compassion, extraordinary intuition. I’m not like her. My imagination runs riot. I’m not a pragmatist. Jessica is.”


During the course of 12 seasons, Jessica solved some 300 murders — and still had time to write more than 30 books!


Angela Brigid Lansbury was born Oct. 16, 1925, in London to a timber-merchant father and an actress mother, a star of the English stage. She participated in school plays at Hampstead School for Girls and studied for a year at drama school, passing with honors at the Royal Academy of Music.

With the outbreak of World War II, she, her mother and her younger twin brothers, Bruce and Edgar, moved to the U.S. (Her father had died when she was 9; her half-sister stayed behind and married actor Peter Ustinov in 1940.)


The blue-eyed Lansbury attended the Feagin School of Dramatic Art in New York City and graduated in 1942. Although still in her mid-teens, she auditioned for nightclub appearances, and her songs and imitations of comic actress Beatrice Lillie won her an offer from the Samovar Club in Montreal. She fibbed about her age and got a six-week engagement.


Her mother, who had wound up in Hollywood at the end of the war, brought her daughter to California, and the 18-year-old was signed by MGM and given the role in Gaslight. She then appeared in National Velvet (1944) with Elizabeth Taylor but spent much of the next several years stuck in small parts at the studio.


“I ended up playing some of the most ridiculous roles at MGM,” she said.


But Lansbury found a home in the theater. She made her Broadway debut in 1957 in the farce Hotel Paradiso, and her first musical came with the 1964 Sondheim production Anyone Can Whistle.


On the big screen, Lansbury also was memorable as Elvis Presley’s mom in Blue Hawaii (1961), as a cold-hearted parent in The World of Henry Orient (1964), as the English witch Eglantine Price in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and as the teapot Mrs. Potts in the animated Beauty and the Beast (1991).


Warming up for her Murder, She Wrote stint, Lansbury starred in two Agatha Christie projects: as a novelist in Death on the Nile (1978) and as the spinster sleuth Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack’d (1980).

When she was 19, she wed actor Richard Cromwell, then 37, but the marriage lasted less than a year, and she later discovered he was gay. In 1949, she wed British agent and producer Peter Shaw, and they were together until his death in 2003. They had two children, Anthony and Deirdre.


In 1971, after her house burned to the ground in Malibu, the family moved to a farmhouse in Cork, Ireland, and stayed there for a decade. She said that saved her kids from succumbing to drugs.


Her brothers also went on to show business careers, with Edgar working as an art director and producer and Bruce, who died in February 2017, serving as a producer on Murder, She Wrote; The Wild Wild West; Wonder Woman; and other shows.


In addition to Edgar, Anthony and Deirdre, survivors include another son, David; grandchildren Peter, Katherine and Ian; and five great-grandchildren. A private family ceremony will be held at a date to be determined.

Angela Lansbury Dead: ‘Murder, She Wrote’ Star Was 96 – The Hollywood Reporter

[misskit]

Goodbye, Ms. Lansbury. You were the best of the best.

[harrybarracuda]

Not many thespians can claim a 74 year career.

Bless her, what a trouper.

[harrybarracuda]

Robbie Coltrane death: Harry Potter and James Bond star dies aged 72




Robbie Coltrane, the Scottish actor best known for playing Hagrid in the Harry Potter film saga has died aged 72, his agent confirmed Friday (14 October).

A cause of death has not yet been revealed.

Aside from the towering, wizarding half-giant, Coltrane also starred in two James Bond films as ex-KGB intelligence officer Valentin Zukovsky.

Robbie Coltrane death: Harry Potter and James Bond star dies aged 72 | The Independent

[david44]

A real Cracker , so many great performances.

[Reg Dingle]

A real Cracker

Great series that.
Downloading again now

R.I.P fatty

[malmomike77]

Great series that.

indeed

[harrybarracuda]

For a second there I thought there was a run on Potter actors.



https://leadership.ng/famed-harry-po...an-dies-at-72/

[panama hat]

Goodbye, Ms. Lansbury. You were the best of the best.

Sad to know she's no longer with us

[harrybarracuda]

Jim McDivitt, astronaut who led Gemini 4 and Apollo 9, dies at 93




October 17, 2022 — Former NASA astronaut James McDivitt, who commanded the first U.S. mission to conduct a spacewalk before leading the first test flight of the Apollo moon lander in Earth orbit, has died at the age of 93.

Jim McDivitt, astronaut who led Gemini 4 and Apollo 9 missions, dies at 93 | collectSPACE

[harrybarracuda]

‘America’s pastor’ Billy Graham dies at 99



MONTREAT, N.C. (AP) — The Rev. Billy Graham, who transformed American religious life through his preaching and activism, becoming a counselor to presidents and the most widely heard Christian evangelist in history, died Wednesday. He was 99.
Graham, who long suffered from cancer, pneumonia and other ailments, died at his home in North Carolina, according spokesman Mark DeMoss.
More than anyone else, Graham built evangelicalism into a force that rivaled liberal Protestantism and Roman Catholicism in the United States. His leadership summits and crusades in more than 185 countries and territories forged powerful global links among conservative Christians, and threw a lifeline to believers in the communist-controlled Eastern bloc. Dubbed “America’s pastor,” he was a confidant to U.S. presidents from Gen. Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush.
In 1983, President Reagan gave Graham the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor. When the Billy Graham Museum and Library was dedicated in 2007 in Charlotte, former Presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton attended.
“When he prays with you in the Oval Office or upstairs in the White House, you feel he’s praying for you, not the president,” Clinton said at the ceremony.
Beyond Graham’s public appearances, he reached untold millions through his pioneering use of prime-time telecasts, network radio, daily newspaper columns, evangelistic feature films and globe-girdling satellite TV hookups. Graham’s message was not complex or unique, yet he preached with a conviction that won over audiences worldwide.
“The Bible says,” was his catch phrase. His unquestioning belief in Scripture turned the Gospel into a “rapier” in his hands, he said.
A tall, striking man with thick hair, stark blue eyes and a firm jaw, Graham was a commanding presence at his crusades. He would make the altar call in his powerful baritone, asking the multitudes to stand, come down the aisles and publicly make “decisions for Christ,” as a choir crooned the hymn “Just As I Am.”
By his final crusade in 2005 in New York City, he had preached in person to more than 210 million people worldwide. No evangelist is expected to have his level of influence again.

‘America’s pastor’ Billy Graham dies at 99 – Minden Press-Herald

[Freed]

Good riddance to another bible-thumping hypocrite.

[Iceman123]

‘America’s pastor’ Billy Graham dies at 99

Harry’s losing the plot, Billy Graham died more than 4 years ago in 2018.

[david44]

‘America’s pastor’ Billy Graham dies at 99

Harry’s losing the plot, Billy Graham died more than 4 years ago in 2018.

Big queue maybe at the gates to Hell so much Covid so many sinners, perhaps he'll come forward and volunteer for spit roasting adulterers

[Iceman123]

Harry, you really are going senile, you reported his death on this thread on 21st Feb 2018

[helge]

Harry, you really are going senile, you reported his death on this thread on 21st Feb 2018

Most of his posts are reruns.

To be fair