Dead Celebrity Alert

Laura Branigan, a singer whose high-volume vocals in the disco song “Gloria” propelled her into pop stardom, died in her sleep on Thursday night at her home in East Quogue, N.Y. She was 47.

The cause was a brain aneurysm, said her brother Mark Branigan.

After touring as a backup singer with Leonard Cohen, Ms. Branigan released her first album, “Branigan,” in 1982. It included “Gloria,” which became a hit, lasting on the pop charts for 36 weeks. It earned her a Grammy nomination for best female pop vocalist, the first of four nominations in her career. …

Ms. Branigan was born on July 3, 1957, in Westchester County, N.Y. … Read full obituary

Elmer Bernstein, the versatile, Oscar-winning composer who scored such movie classics as The Ten Commandments, The Magnificent Seven, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Escape and True Grit, died Wednesday [18 August]. He was 82.

Julia Child, whose chirping words of encouragement and unpretentious style brought French cuisine to American homes through her television series and books, died Friday. She was 91.

A 6-foot-2 American folk hero, “The French Chef” was known to her public as Julia. She showed a delight not only in preparing good food but in sharing it, and ended her landmark public television lessons at a set table with the wish, “Bon appetit.”

Child died at her home in an assisted-living center in Montecito, about 90 miles northwest of Los Angeles, said her niece, Philadelphia Cousins. …

“America has lost a true national treasure,” Nicholas Latimer, director of publicity for Child’s publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, said in a statement. … Read full obituary

Fay Wray, the actress best known for her role as the object of a giant ape’s desire in the 1933 film “King Kong,” died yesterday. She was 96.

Wray died in her Fifth Avenue apartment in New York, the New York Times reported, citing friend Rick McKay.

As blonde-haired beauty Ann Darrow in “King Kong,” Wray earned the nickname “The Queen of Scream” for the yelp she uttered as she was plucked out of an Empire State Building window by the giant ape and carried to the top of the 102-story skyscraper. …

Fay made more than 100 films in her career, yet she was forever identified with “Kong.” …

Wray often repeated the story of how one of the movie’s producers told her that he had an idea for a film, and “the only thing he’d tell me was that it was going to have ‘the tallest and darkest leading man in Hollywood.’”

“Well, naturally I thought of Clark Gable, hopefully, and when the script came I was absolutely appalled! I thought it was a practical joke,” she said. …

Fay Wray was born Vina Fay Wray near Cardston, Alberta, on Sept. 15, 1907. Her parents divorced when she was young and her mother moved Wray and her five siblings to Los Angeles. … Read full obituary

Flamboyant funk music pioneer Rick James, a dynamic performer famed for the sensuous 1981 dance hit “Super Freak (Part 1)” as well as a descent into drugs and crime, died in his sleep Friday morning of natural causes, officials said.

James, 56, the self-proclaimed “icon of drug use and eroticism,” battled a crack-cocaine habit for years. He had been in fragile health since suffering a stroke in 1998 after bursting a blood vessel at a concert in Denver.

He sometimes required help walking, but was in upbeat spirits as recently as late June when he received a lifetime achievement award at a music industry dinner in Beverly Hills. …

Indeed, James became a hooked on crack-cocaine and began a long descent into disgrace. In 1993, he was sentenced to five years in prison (serving three) for assault and false imprisonment stemming from two grisly incidents. … Read full obituary