Dead Celebrity Alert

Angus Fairhurst, one of the group of “Young British Artists” who came out of London’s Goldsmiths College, has died at age 41.

Spokeswoman Erica Bolton said Fairhurst committed suicide Saturday during a walk in a remote part of Scotland.

A contemporary of bad boy artist Damien Hirst, who attend Goldsmiths at the same time and a former partner and collaborator of Sarah Lucas, he was one of new generation of installation and conceptual artists who gained international recognition in the 1990s.

Fairhurst was known for installation, photography and video works, including an installation in which he rewired the phones of London art dealers so they could only talk to each other — a comment on the insular nature of the art world. … Read full obituary

ATHENS (AFP) — Veteran US moviemaker Jules Dassin, who died Monday in Athens at the age of 96, was a film noir master who sought exile in Europe after being named during the anti-communist witch-hunts of the 1950s.

Dassin married the legendary Greek actress Melina Mercouri, joined her campaign for the return of Greece’s lost Parthenon marbles and was eventually awarded honorary Greek citizenship.

Born in Middletown, Connecticut in 1911, Dassin earned a reputation as an innovative director and was one of America’s hottest young filmmakers of the 1940s with films such as “Brute Force” (1947) and “Naked City” (1948).

But as an active Communist who never compromised on his beliefs, he was blacklisted at the height of the witch-hunts on leftists unleashed by Senator Joseph McCarthy. …

In 1960, Dassin made “Never on Sunday” a story about an American in Greece trying to save a kind-hearted prostitute.

The film won an Oscar for Best Song for composer Manos Hadjidakis, and is considered one of the finest movies ever made in Greece. …

More importantly for Dassin however, the film starred Melina Mercouri, one of Greece’s most adored actresses. … Read full obituary

Sean Levert, son of O’Jays lead singer Eddie Levert, was found dead in a Cleveland, Ohio, jail over the weekend, sources said.

Sean Levert, 39, was being held for allegedly failing to pay about $80,000 in child support. The cause of death was not immediately known.

Sean Levert was a member of the R&B group LeVert with his late brother Gerald Levert and Marc Gordon. Gerald Levert died Nov. 10, 2006 at the age of 40. … Read full obituary

Related:
Singer Gerald Levert, 40

NEW YORK (AP) — Dith Pran, the Cambodian-born journalist whose harrowing tale of enslavement and eventual escape from that country’s murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries in 1979 became the subject of the award-winning film “The Killing Fields,” died Sunday. He was 65.

Dith died at a New Jersey hospital Sunday morning of pancreatic cancer, according to Sydney Schanberg, his former colleague at The New York Times. Dith had been diagnosed almost three months ago. …

It was Dith himself who coined the term “killing fields” for the horrifying clusters of corpses and skeletal remains of victims he encountered on his desperate journey to freedom.

The regime of Pol Pot, bent on turning Cambodia back into a strictly agrarian society, and his Communist zealots were blamed for the deaths of nearly 2 million of Cambodia’s 7 million people. … Read full obituary

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Herb Peterson, who invented the Egg McMuffin as a way to introduce breakfast to McDonald’s restaurants, died Tuesday at his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 89. …

Mr. Peterson came up with the idea for the menu item, the signature McDonald’s breakfast dish, in 1972. The Egg McMuffin made its debut at a restaurant in Santa Barbara that Mr. Peterson owned with his son, David Peterson. Modeled on eggs Benedict, it consists of an egg formed in a Teflon circle with the yolk broken, topped with a slice of cheese and grilled Canadian bacon. It is served on a toasted and buttered English muffin. … Read full obituary

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Abby Mann, writer of socially conscious scripts for movies and television and winner of the 1961 Academy Award for adapted screenplay for “Judgment at Nuremberg,” has died at 80.

Writers Guild of America spokesman Gregg Mitchell said Mann died Tuesday. The cause of death was not given.

Mann also won multiple Emmys, including one in 1973 for “The Marcus-Nelson Murders,” which created a maverick New York police detective named Theo Kojak. The film, starring Telly Savalas, was spun off into the long-running TV series “Kojak.”

In a career spanning more than 50 years as a writer, director and producer, Mann returned repeatedly to morally conscious themes, doing films for television on such subjects as Martin Luther King Jr., human rights advocate Simon Weisenthal and the Teamsters. … Read full obituary

Richard Widmark, who created a villain in his first movie role who was so repellent and frightening that the actor became a star overnight, died Monday at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 93.

His death was announced Wednesday morning by his wife, Susan Blanchard. She said that Mr. Widmark had fractured a vertebra in recent months and that his conditioned had worsened.

As Tommy Udo, a giggling, psychopathic killer in the 1947 gangster film “Kiss of Death,” Mr. Widmark tied up an old woman in a wheelchair (played by Mildred Dunnock) with a cord ripped from a lamp and shoved her down a flight of stairs to her death. …

Tommy Udo made the 32-year-old Mr. Widmark, who had been an established radio actor, an instant movie star, and he spent the next seven years playing a variety of flawed heroes and relentlessly anti-social mobsters in 20th Century Fox’s juiciest melodramas.

His mobsters were drenched in evil. … Read full obituary

March 23, 2008 — Al Copeland, a hard-charging, high-living entrepreneur who built an empire on spicy fried chicken and fluffy white biscuits, died Sunday in Munich, Germany, of complications from cancer treatment. He was 64. …

Born in poverty, Mr. Copeland burst onto the scene in 1972, when he opened his first Popeyes fried-chicken stand. The Arabi restaurant was the start of a franchise that, under his leadership, had 700 outlets, in the United States, Puerto Rico, Panama and Kuwait.

The money he earned led to public displays of opulence such as speedboats kept in a glass-walled showroom along Interstate 10 when he wasn’t racing them, a Lamborghini sports car parked outside his corporate headquarters and, of course, the massive Christmas displays that required sheriff’s deputies to direct the traffic outside his Metairie home. … Read full obituary

Former WCW wrestler Chase Tatum was found dead late Sunday afternoon of an apparent accidental drug overdose, his father said.

Tatum, 34, was recovering from back surgery 10 days earlier to repair a degenerative disc. His father, Roy Tatum of Kennesaw, said his son had been battling a painkiller dependence for years but had made plans to enter a rehabilitation facility in Miami. …

Chase Tatum’s body was discovered by a friend at his Buckhead home around 4 p.m. Sunday. He was unresponsive and could not be revived by emergency personnel. A toxicology report has been ordered by the Fulton County Medical Examiner, which will take anywhere from six to eight weeks, said Laura Salm, an investigator with the coroner’s office. …

Chase Tatum was 19 years old when he won the Mr. Georgia bodybuilding competition. He was always a big kid, his father said, An online movie resume described him as 6-feet, 3-inches tall and 265 pounds. …

Tatum’s wrestling career was unplanned and short-lived. … Read full obituary

John E. List, who escaped his drab existence as a failed New Jersey accountant by killing his family in 1971, disappearing and building a new life far away until a true-crime show on television led to his capture almost 18 years later, died on Friday. He was 82.

Mr. List died at St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton four days after being taken there from the New Jersey State Prison, officials told The Associated Press. The cause was complications of pneumonia.

The larger world had never heard of John Emil List until his neighbors began to wonder why the lights in his family’s house in Westfield, N.J., were going out one by one in the fall of 1971…

When police officers entered the home on Dec. 7, 1971, they heard organ music on an intercom system and found the bodies of Mr. List’s wife, Helen, 46; his daughter, Patricia, 16; his sons John, 15, and Frederick, 13, and his mother, Alma, 85. All had been shot to death. …

In 1989, Union County prosecutors asked the producers of the Fox program “America’s Most Wanted” to look at the case. To help, the producers brought in Frank Bender, a forensic sculptor, and Richard Walter, a criminal psychologist. …

Mr. List was convicted of murder and sentenced to five life terms in prison. He appealed, unsuccessfully, on grounds that his judgment had been impaired by post-traumatic stress disorder from military service in World War II and Korea and that his letter to the pastor should have been kept confidential.

In a 2002 television interview on ABC with Connie Chung, Mr. List was asked why he did not take his own life if he felt so overwhelmed. Mr. List said that he thought suicide would have barred him from heaven and that he had hoped to be reunited there with his family. … Read full obituary

Also:
John List at Conservative Babylon

America’s Most Wanted on John List

LONDON, England (AP) — Neil Aspinall, a longtime friend and business associate of The Beatles, has died in New York City at age 66.

Aspinall’s death was announced in a statement from surviving Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, the widows of John Lennon and George Harrison, and the band’s Apple Corps Ltd. company.

Aspinall died at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where he had been receiving treatment. A British newspaper reported Sunday that McCartney had flown out to see him just before his death. …

Aspinall stepped down last year as chief executive of Apple Corps, the guardian of the Beatles’ commercial interests. …

As head of Apple Corps, Aspinall was executive producer of the hugely successful “Beatles Anthology” album and was behind other successes, including the “Beatles One” album. … Read full obituary

Also:

Surviving members and Yoko Ono pay tribute …

Aspinall was a childhood friend of Beatles’ Paul McCartney and John Lennon starting his career as the band’s road manager and personal assistant. …

Aspinall sang on the chorus of the band’s classic “Yellow Submarine” as well as playing various instruments on ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ and ‘Within You Without You’. … Read full story

The number of US troops to die in Iraq since the invasion began five years ago hit 4,000 last night after a roadside bomb in Baghdad killed four soldiers. …

A US military spokesman played down the significance of the 4,000th death, which followed a day of bombings and rocket fire across the country that killed at least 60 Iraqis and left many more wounded. …

As well as 4,000 dead, at least 29,000 US servicemen and women have been injured in the Iraq war, which entered its sixth year last week, according to the independent Web site www.icasualties.org. Underscoring the brutality of an insurgency that flared in the aftermath of the invasion, the majority of American casualties occurred after George Bush announced the end of “major combat” in Iraq on May 1, 2003. …

The 1,000th US soldier to die was in September 2004, in the midst of a presidential election that returned Mr Bush to office for a second term.

The toll climbed to 2,000 in October 2005 as Sunni Arab insurgents battled to oust the Iraqi Government, and 3,000 in December 2006, before the US President unveiled a plan to send 30,000 more troops to Iraq to quell violence that has killed tens of thousands of Iraqis and displaced millions more. … Read full story

The husband of British singer Corinne Bailey Rae has been found dead of a suspected drug overdose, sources said today.

Jason Rae, 31, was discovered dead in an apartment in the Hyde Park area of Leeds in northern England. Bailey Rae, 29, is said to have not been at the property at the time. …

Jason Rae was a saxophonist with the Haggis Horns, who have performed with Bailey Rae as well as Amy Winehouse, Mark Ronson and the band Nightmares on Wax. … Read full obituary

MIAMI (AP) — Cuban bassist and composer Israel “Cachao” Lopez, who is credited with pioneering the mambo style of music, died Saturday. He was 89.

Known simply as Cachao, the Grammy-winning musician had fallen ill in the past week and died surrounded by family members at Coral Gables Hospital, spokesman Nelson Albareda said.

Cachao left communist Cuba and came to the United States in the early 1960s. He continued to perform into his late 80s, including a performance after the death of trombonist Generoso Jimenez in September 2007.

Cuban-American actor Andy Garcia, who made a 1993 documentary about the bassist’s career, credited Cachao with being a major influence in Cuban musical history and said his passing marked the end of an era. … Read full obituary

LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — Bill Hayward, the associate producer of “Easy Rider,” has died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He was 66.

The Los Angeles County coroner’s office said Hayward shot himself in the heart with a handgun on March 9 in Castaic. The suicide occurred in the trailer where he was living.

Hayward was the son of agent Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan, all part of a Hollywood family whose talent and beauty was often outshone by its demons.

Sullavan and her daughter Bridget Hayward both died of drug overdoses in 1960. … Read full obituary