Dead Celebrity Alert

PARIS (AP) — Paris judicial police say the body of former top model Katoucha Niane has been found in the River Seine.

Police say the body was found Thursday and that a subsequent autopsy confirmed it as the model’s.

Police say the body showed no signs of foul play, pointing to the possibility that she may have fallen accidentally in the river.

The former model went missing in January. … Read full obituary

LONDON (AP) — Dave Clark Five lead singer Mike Smith died of pneumonia Thursday, less than two weeks before the band is to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He was 64. …

He was admitted to the intensive care unit Wednesday morning with a chest infection, a complication from a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed below the ribcage with limited use of his upper body. Lewis said he was injured when he fell from a fence at his home in Spain in September 2003.

Smith had been in the hospital since the accident, and was just released last December when he moved into a specially prepared home near the hospital with his wife. …

Smith wrote songs as well as singing and playing keyboards for the Dave Clark Five, one of many British rock acts whose music swept across the United States in the 1960s during the so-called British Invasion. … Read full obituary

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Car-building legend Boyd Coddington, whose testosterone-injected cable TV reality show “American Hot Rod” introduced the nation to the West Coast hot rod guru, has died. He was 63. …

Coddington, who started building cars when he was 13 and once operated a gas station in Utah, set a standard for his workmanship and creativity, with his popular “Cadzilla” creation considered a design masterpiece. The customized car based on a 1950s Cadillac was built for rocker Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. …

Coddington was a machinist by trade, working at Disneyland during the day and tinkering with cars in his home garage at night and on weekends. His rolling creations captured the imagination of car-crazy Southern Californians and soon he was building custom cars and making money.

Most often, he customized 1932 Ford “little deuce coupes.” … Read full obituary

NEW YORK (AP) — William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right’s post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82.

His assistant Linda Bridges said Buckley was found dead by his cook at his home in Stamford, Conn. The cause of death was unknown, but he had been ill with emphysema, she said. …

“For people of my generation, Bill Buckley was pretty much the first intelligent, witty, well-educated conservative one saw on television,” fellow conservative William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said at the time the show ended. “He legitimized conservatism as an intellectual movement and therefore as a political movement.” …

Buckley founded the biweekly magazine National Review in 1955… Not only did he help revive conservative ideology, especially unbending anti-Communism and free market economics, his persona was a dynamic break from such dour right-wing predecessors as Sen. Robert Taft. … Read full obituary

Steve Fossett, the wealthy, record-setting adventurer who for years blithely sailed, soared and drove through all manner of danger before disappearing in September during what was meant to be a routine short flight, was declared dead Friday by a Chicago court. He was 63…

At 8 a.m. on Sept. 3, 2007, Mr. Fossett took off alone from the Flying-M Ranch, near Yerington, Nev., in a Citabria Super Decathlon, a single-engine two-seater. He was scheduled to be back by noon but never returned. That evening, a search was begun, with airplanes and a helicopter scouring the wild terrain on the Nevada-California border over which he had disappeared. …

The search was called off after several weeks. In late November, Mr. Fossett’s wife, Peggy, petitioned the court to have her husband declared dead. The value of his estate is said to exceed eight figures, Ms. Downie said. … Read full obituary

Steve Gerber, the comic book writer and creator whose signature character was the alienated, cigar-chomping Howard the Duck, has died. He was 60. Gerber, who also co-created Marvel’s “Omega the Unknown” and created the 1980s animated series “Thundarr the Barbarian,” suffered from pulmonary fibrosis.

He died Sunday in a Las Vegas hospital from complications related to the disease, said Mary Skrenes, a friend and writing partner on “Omega” and other comics.

The “Howard the Duck” series became a fast hit after its January 1976 debut on Marvel and remains a cult favorite. Its lead, a disgruntled duck from another universe with a bombshell sidekick named Beverly “Thunder-Thighs” Switzler, was hailed as both smart and subversive.

The adjectives could be applied to Gerber, Skrenes said.

“Howard was his voice. Steve was able to do social commentary and sort of sneak it up on you…” Read full obituary

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — David Groh, the handsome, hardworking character actor who was best known as the easygoing man Rhoda Morgenstern married and divorced during the run of Valerie Harper’s hit 1970s sitcom “Rhoda,” has died. He was 68.

Groh died Tuesday of kidney cancer in Los Angeles, his sister-in-law Catherine Mullally said Thursday. …

[”Rhoda”] had begun in 1974 as a spinoff from television’s hugely popular “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which was set in Minneapolis. …

Groh, who left the series after the divorce episodes, went on to appear in dozens of TV shows and films, as well as on Broadway, over the next 30 years. … Read full obituary

WASHINGTON (AP) — Rep. Tom Lantos, who as a teenager twice escaped from a Nazi-run forced labor camp in Hungary and became the only Holocaust survivor to win a seat in Congress, has died. He was 80. …

Lantos, a Democrat who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee, disclosed last month that he had been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. He said at the time that he would serve out his 14th term but would not seek re-election in his Northern California district, which takes in the southwest portion of San Francisco and suburbs to the south including Lantos’ home of San Mateo. …

Lantos, who referred to himself as “an American by choice,” was born to Jewish parents in Budapest, Hungary, and was 16 when Adolf Hitler occupied Hungary in 1944. He survived by escaping from the labor camp and coming under the protection of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who used his official status and visa-issuing powers to save thousands of Hungarian Jews.

Lantos’ mother and much of his family perished in the Holocaust. … Read full obituary

LITTLE ROCK, Arkansas (AP) — Roy Scheider, the actor best known for his role as a police chief in the blockbuster movie “Jaws,” has died. He was 75.

Scheider died Sunday at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences hospital in Little Rock, hospital spokesman David Robinson said. The hospital did not release a cause of death.

However, hospital spokeswoman Leslie Taylor said Scheider had been treated for multiple myeloma at the hospital’s Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy for the past two years.

Scheider received two Oscar nominations, for best-supporting actor in 1971’s “The French Connection” in which he played the police partner of Oscar winner Gene Hackman, and for best-actor for 1979’s “All That Jazz,” the autobiographical Bob Fosse film. … Read full obituary

NEW YORK — The sign man of Shea Stadium died Thursday.

Karl Ehrhardt was a fixture at Mets games from 1964 through 1981, famous for holding up tailored signs after key plays that displayed his pleasure or frustration with the team. …

Ehrhardt’s block-lettered signs served as color commentary for both fans in the stands and TV viewers at home. He carried dozens to each game, some witty, some biting.

“Jose, Can You See?” was a regular when Mets outfielder after Jose’ Cardenal struck out. “It’s Alive!” was for hitters who broke out of a slump. …

Only the Mets 1969 World Series victory left him speechless. The sign he raised high after the last out read, “There Are No Words.”

At one point he had about 1,200 signs to choose from. … Read full obituary

KEYSTONE, Colo. — Former ABC News correspondent John McWethy died Wednesday after a skiing accident at Keystone Ski Resort. …

According to the Summit County coroner’s office, McWethy died after missing a turn on an intermediate slope and hit a tree chest-first.

McWethy was a correspondent for ABC News from 1979-2003, primarily working as the network’s National Security Correspondent. … Read full obituary

Ruth Stafford Peale, who with her late husband, Norman Vincent Peale, co-founded the global inspirational organization Guideposts, died Wednesday. She was 101.

She died at her home in Pawling, N.Y., about 70 miles north of New York City, Guideposts spokeswoman Kelly Mangold said.

Norman Vincent Peale, one of the 20th century’s foremost preachers and motivational speakers, authored “The Power of Positive Thinking”… Peale, the longtime pastor of Manhattan’s Marble Collegiate Church, part of the Reformed Church in America, died in 1993.

The couple founded the Guideposts organization in 1945, along with the magazine by that name, which is still a leading publication with an annual readership of about 8 million. … Read full obituary

Not just guru to the Beatles, but to many, many high-profile celebs…

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (AP) — Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a guru to the Beatles who introduced the West to Transcendental Meditation, has died at his home in the Dutch town of Vlodrop, a spokesman said Tuesday.

He was thought to be 91 years old. …

Once dismissed as hippie mysticism, the Hindu practice of mind control that the Maharishi taught, called transcendental meditation, gradually gained medical respectability. …

[T]he movement really took off after the Beatles visited his ashram in India in 1968, although he had a famous falling out with the rock stars when he discovered them using drugs at his Himalayan retreat. … Read full obituary

LONDON, England (AP) — Actor Barry Morse, who played a detective pursuing the wrongly accused Dr. Richard Kimble in 1960s TV series “The Fugitive,” has died, his son said Tuesday. He was 89. …

Born in London in 1918, Morse trained at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and appeared in British repertory and West End theaters before emigrating in 1951 to Canada, where he became a regular on radio and television.

The actor’s Web site estimated he played more than 3,000 roles on radio, TV, stage and screen over a seven-decade career. … Read full obituary

REDDING, Calif. — Raymond Jacobs, believed to be the last surviving member of the group of Marines photographed during the original U.S. flag-raising on Iwo Jima during World War II, has died at age 82. …

Jacobs had spent his later years working to prove that he was the radio operator photographed looking up at an American flag as it was being raised by other Marines on Mount Suribachi on Feb. 23, 1945. …

Jacobs retired in 1992 from KTVU-TV in Oakland, where he worked 34 years as a reporter, anchor and news director. … Read full obituary