Dead Celebrity Alert

Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday. He was 86.

Helms’s former chief of staff, James Broughton, said the senator died at the Mayview Convalescent Center in Raleigh, where he had lived for several years. Helms had been in “a period of declining health,” Broughton said.

In a 52-year political career that ended with his retirement from the Senate in 2002, Helms became a beacon for the right wing of American politics, a lightning rod for the left and, often, a mighty pain for presidents whatever their political leaning. … Read full obituary

Irina Baronova, the last of the three “baby ballerinas” whose international careers were launched by choreographer George Balanchine, has died. She was 89.

Ms. Baronova died in her sleep Saturday at her home in Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia, according to the Australian News.

She came to fame at the age of 12 when Balanchine cast her in a 1931 Paris staging of composer Jacques Offenbach’s operetta “Orpheus in the Underworld.” French critic Andre Levinson wrote, “The sensation of the evening was the tiny child Baronova, who went through the final galop (gallop) like a whirlwind.” … Read full obituary

On what should have been one of the happiest days of their musical careers, Fort Collins band Tickle Me Pink was mourning the loss of one of its own.

Tuesday morning TMP bassist Johnny Schou, 22, was found dead of unknown causes at the band’s Fort Collins home just hours before the group was to appear at a Denver in-store event celebrating Tuesday’s release of its major-label debut CD, “Madeline.” …

An autopsy Tuesday was inconclusive, and there was no obvious cause of death, said Larimer County Chief Deputy Coroner Diane Fairman. Further examination, including toxicology and microbiology tests, will be necessary, but it could be weeks before a cause of death is known.

Those in the Colorado music scene were stunned and saddened by the loss. … Read full obituary

Dody Goodman, whose ditzy comic persona was well known to patrons of theatre, film and television from the 1950s on, died June 22 at the Actors Fund Home in New Jersey, a spokesperson for the Fund confirmed. Her age was thought to be 92 by many accounts, though the subject of her birthdate was something she was known to falsify throughout her career. Her agent said she was 94. …

Her airhead persona, buttressed by curly hair, wide childlike blue eyes and a long, loopy grin, attracted the attention of Jack Paar, then the host of “The Tonight Show.” …

Fame and good fortune returned in the late ’70s when she took on the role of Martha Shumway in the widely praised, if short-lived, mock soap opera “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” and made a much-commented-upon supporting turn in the film of “Grease.” A semi-regular role on “Diff’rent Strokes” followed. She was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for her performance in an 1984 revival of Ah, Wilderness!. She also spent a great deal of time in productions of Nunsense and its sequels. … Read full obituary

LOS ANGELES — Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture hero famed for his routines about drugs and dirty words, died of heart failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital on Sunday, a spokesman said. He was 71.

Carlin, who had a history of heart and drug-dependency problems, died at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica about 6 p.m. local time (9 p.m. ET) after being admitted earlier in the afternoon for chest pains, spokesman Jeff Abraham told Reuters.

Known for his edgy, provocative material, Carlin achieved status as an anti-Establishment icon in the 1970s with stand-up bits full of drug references and a routine called “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television.” A regulatory battle over a radio broadcast of the routine ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court. … Read full obituary

NEW ORLEANS — Revius Ortique Jr., the first black justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court, [died Sunday] of complications from a stroke. He was 84. …

As a civil rights lawyer in the 1950s and ’60s, he helped integrate state labor unions and sued to get equal pay for black workers.

He held several presidential appointments, including a stint as an alternate delegate to the United Nations under President Clinton. … Read full obituary

February 2, 1921 - May 18, 2008

As Michelangelo was to Pope Julius II, and Bernini to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, so was Pietro Cascella to Silvio Berlusconi. Neither was perhaps in the same league as their predecessors as artist and patron respectively, but despite his many public monuments, notably that at Auschwitz, Cascella is most likely to be remembered for having sculpted the Italian Prime Minister’s colossal private mausoleum. …

The turning point in his career came when he and his brother and the architect Julio Lafuente won a competition in 1957 to build a monument at Auschwitz. … Read full obituary

January 12, 1908 - June 19, 2008

In the 1950s Jean Delannoy was the French film director whom the upstart talent of the Nouvelle Vague most liked to bait and wound.

François Truffaut, the future director of Jules et Jim, told the readers of Cahiers du Cinéma that he had sat through Delannoy’s 1954 Jean Gabin drama Chiens perdus sans collier three times, in order to learn how not [to] direct.

His sins, in Truffaut’s eyes, included the academic precision of his images, the coolness of his temperament — both undoubted characteristics — and something much harder to prove: insincerity. … Read full obituary

GRAZ, Austria: Austrian media say the country’s oldest known woman has died at age 110.

Public broadcaster ORF has reported that Hermina Dunz died Saturday in the southern city of Graz.

The city’s mayor, Siegfried Nagl, said Dunz celebrated her 110th birthday Feb. 24, and that she was in remarkably good shape for a woman of her age. … Read full obituary

October 27, 1927 - May 16, 2008

Jimmy Slyde was the aptly named practitioner of a sinuous, slithering form of tap dance that helped to define the heyday of an ever-changing cultural phenomenon. Whereas modern tap is aggressive, sometimes even obstreperous, Slyde embodied a seemingly effortless ability to, well, slide across a stage, often letting slip the odd mot juste as he made his way past an admiring public.

An early acolyte of such African-American tap legends as Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Slyde in turn helped pave the way for the likes of Savion Glover, who transformed Slyde’s vaunted rhythmic ease into something deliberately rougher and more raw. The two generations of performer were both seen on Broadway in the elaborate 1989 revue Black and Blue, which began in Paris in 1985 before settling into a two year run in New York, where it won three Tony Awards. … Read full obituary

1924 - April 8, 2008

Kazuo Shiraga was a distinguished Japanese avant-garde artist noted for his unusual method: using his own body to apply paint to the canvas. Revolutionary in the 1950s, this technique now seems to anticipate later international developments in performance art and conceptual art.

Born in Hyogo Prefecture in Western Japan, Shiraga initially studied Japanese-style painting at the Kyoto City Specialist School of Arts (now the Kyoto City University of Arts). After graduating in 1948, however, he gravitated towards Western styles, taking up oil painting. In the aftermath of Japan’s wartime defeat, the time was ripe for iconoclasm, and in 1952 he became a founder member, along with Akira Kanayama, Saburo Murakami and Keiko Tanaka, of the “Zero Group”, so named because of the artists’ belief that every work of art is created from nothing. By 1955, he and his fellow Zero Group artists had joined a more significant avant-garde movement: the Gutai Art Association… Read full obituary

Cielo — a member of San Jose’s celebrity falcon family whose birth, along with her siblings, created a bird lovers’ reality show — has died. She was 2 months old.

The peregrine falcon, who had been living on a ledge at San Jose City Hall, had been recently learning to fly. She most likely suffered a clumsy landing and crashed into the building. She was found bruised and dehydrated Monday morning, and died late Monday night or early Tuesday. …

Cielo’s siblings, Meyye and Mercury, are still alive. Her sister and brother are flying about, and are expected to leave the nest for good sometime this summer.

The family has drawn widespread interest from falcon watchers from Silicon Valley, Europe and beyond. With Web cams and the Internet, they frequently peer into these once-endangered birds’ lives, watching them sleeping, eating dead pigeon meat, and in the last few weeks, learning to fledge, as flying is called. … Read full story

April 16, 1964 - June 14, 2008

Few bands demonstrated that jazz is no longer an exclusively American art form better than the trio led by the Swedish pianist Esbjörn Svensson. Mixing sparkling and virtuoso performances of jazz standards by the likes of Thelonious Monk with programmes of entirely original material, EST (as the trio were known) blurred the boundaries between jazz and both rock and classical music. They were widely regarded as Europe’s leading contemporary jazz group. Performances were brilliantly tailored to their audiences so that deeply-felt romantic ballads had the grey heads nodding in approval at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham whereas their gritty urban funk propelled by the drumming of Magnus Öström, with howling electronic bass effects from Dan Berglund, turned the Miles Davis Hall at Montreux into a teeming, sweaty mosh-pit for 18 to 25-year-olds.

At the heart of everything they did was Svensson’s piano playing…

The band had just finished recording its twelfth album, Leucocyte, and were about to begin an international tour encompassing this summer’s Edinburgh and Brecon jazz festivals. Svensson was scuba diving with a group in the Stockholm archipelago when he was found severely injured on the seabed. Attempts to resuscitate him were unsuccessful. … Read full obituary

March 29, 1915 - March 28, 2008

Novelist Helen Yglesias’s death, a day before her 93rd birthday, recalls “a contented middle-aged couple sat up in bed, seen from the waist up in neatly pressed pyjamas with the piped edge of the lapels wonderfully reproduced in stone, faint smiles upon their modeled lips, their deep-set eyes gazing pleasantly upon the prospect of their buried bodies which became a natural extension of the stone figures”. This graveyard features in Sweetsir (1981), the best-known of her five novels, the first published at fifty-seven: in these, marriage oftens proves rockier than that stone’s depiction. … Read full obituary

BERKELEY – David Hooson, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and a scholar of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, national identities and the history of geographic ideas, died on May 16 at the age of 82.

He drowned during his regular swim at Shell Beach in Tomales Bay, near his home in Marin County’s Inverness Park, a small unincorporated community adjacent to Point Reyes National Seashore.

His work is said to have made a significant impact on geography within the Soviet Union, and his publications — including the books “A New Soviet Heartland?” (1964) and “The Soviet Union: A Systematic Regional Geography” (1966) — reportedly spurred passionate discussion in the Soviet Union. … Read full obituary