Archive for April, 2008
Posted: Monday, April 28th, 2008 1:29 pm
Comedian Kenneth Keith Kallenbach, a long-running member of Howard Stern’s “Wack Pack,” has died after falling ill in jail. He was 39.
Kallenbach contracted pneumonia while in custody on a charge of attempted child abduction …
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Filed under Radio
Posted: Monday, April 28th, 2008 1:26 pm
The man who gained legendary status as commander of the ship Exodus, attempting to bring thousands of Jewish Holocaust refugees to the holy land after the Second World War, has died.
Yossi Harel, whose journey at the helm of a ship carrying 4,500 frail survivors from Germany to then-British Mandate Palestine was immortalised in the film Exodus, where he was portrayed by Paul Newman, died of a heart attack at the age of 90. …
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Filed under War & Peace
Posted: Saturday, April 26th, 2008 1:47 pm
Joy Page, the stepdaughter of Jack L. Warner, a president of the Warner Brothers studio, who made her film debut as a Bulgarian newlywed in “Casablanca,” died on April 18 in Los Angeles. She was 83. …
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Filed under Movies & Stage
Posted: Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 1:09 pm
None of the hundreds of thousands of people who benefited from Pushpa Anand’s charitable work knew her name. Nor, indeed, did many of her disciples. She was known simply as Ma, whose dedication to the poor, especially women, inspired followers from around the world. …
Pushpa Anand, Indian guru and social worker, was born on August 26, 1924. She died on April 16, 2008, aged 83 … Read full obituary
Filed under Religion
Posted: Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 1:05 pm
The actor Simon MacKenzie was best known for his leading role in the long-running Gaelic television soap, Machair, in which he played the dignified head of a further education college. …
He is survived by his long-term partner, Charlie Curran.
Simon MacKenzie, actor and activist for the Gaelic culture, was born on December 4, 1949. He died of cancer on April 8, 2008, aged 58 … Read full obituary
Filed under LGBT, Movies & Stage, Television
Posted: Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 12:43 pm
JACKSON, Mississippi (AP) — Paul Davis, a singer and songwriter whose soft rock hit “I Go Crazy” stayed on the charts for months after its release in 1977, died Tuesday. He was 60. …
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Filed under Music
Posted: Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008 12:52 am
Al Wilson, the soul singer and songwriter who had a number of 1970s hits including “Show and Tell,” has died. He was 68.
Wilson died Monday of kidney failure at Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fontana [California], according to his son, Tony Wilson of Yucaipa. …
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Filed under Music
Posted: Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008 5:07 pm
The president of the Pontifical Council for the Family, Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo died on Sunday at the age of 72.
… Cardinal Trujillo was among the most outspoken Vatican critics of the “culture of death.” He had repeatedly denounced abortion and same-sex marriage, condemned the exploitation of human embryos and the trend toward acceptance of euthanasia, and argued strenuously against the promotion of condom use as a means of curbing the spread of AIDS, Catholic World News reported. …
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Filed under Religion
Posted: Sunday, April 20th, 2008 7:53 pm
The ice skating champion Cecilia Colledge might never have set foot on an ice rink had she not attended the 1928 World Championships at the Ice Club in London as a spectator. The seven-year-old was captivated watching the vivacious jumps and spins of the Norwegian skater Sonja Henie — who won the second of her ten world titles on that occasion — and told her mother: “I should like to skate like her.” …
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Filed under Sports & Games
Posted: Sunday, April 20th, 2008 7:48 pm
Actor, writer and musician Gordon Clyde was known to radio listeners for his satirical and topical piano and song spots on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week and Woman’s Hour. He also had his own weekly show on the BBC World Service. …
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Filed under Music, Radio, Television
Posted: Sunday, April 20th, 2008 7:44 pm
Jirí Sequens built a long and successful career as a film director by wedding the dictates of Fifties-style heroic social realism to the dramatic requirements of slick, engrossing action. His location-shot thrillers and war films culminated in Assassination (1964), a vivid widescreen re-creation — five years in preparation — of the wartime assassination in occupied Prague of Czechoslovakia’s brutal Nazi overlord Reinhard Heydrich and the ferocious reprisals that followed. …
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Filed under Movies & Stage
Posted: Sunday, April 20th, 2008 7:41 pm
Actor and communist who was mostly loyal to the East German regime
The stage, film and television actor Erwin Geschonneck was one of East Germany’s most popular performers. Brought up in poverty in Berlin, he became a Communist, endured exile during the 1930s purges in the Soviet Union, spent several years in Nazi concentration camps and was one of the few survivors when a ship containing thousands of former camp prisoners was bombed by the RAF at the end of the war. …
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Filed under Movies & Stage, War & Peace
Posted: Sunday, April 20th, 2008 4:06 pm
Israeli theater persona Nissan Native was found dead in his Tel Aviv apartment Sunday night. Native was named winner of the 2008 Israel Prize earlier this year. He was 86 years old. …
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Filed under Movies & Stage
Posted: Sunday, April 20th, 2008 10:33 am
Orangeburg [SC] native and civil rights icon James E. “Jim” Sulton died Friday. He was 84. …
Sulton played host to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Russell Street residence he called home for his entire life and where many civil rights notables gathered for strategy sessions. He traveled in to the nation’s capital for the 1963 March on Washington. …
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Filed under Civil Rights
Posted: Sunday, April 20th, 2008 10:30 am
Ester Soriano, a Filipino-American civil rights activist who was the jury foreperson in the civil damages trial of Rodney King, has died. She was 61. …
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Filed under Civil Rights
Posted: Sunday, April 20th, 2008 10:26 am
Marzano, a former Major League catcher who most recently served as an engaging host of the “Leading Off” show on MLB.com, died this weekend [Saturday] at his home in South Philadelphia, apparently after taking a fall down a flight of stairs and possibly after suffering a heart attack. He was 45. …
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Filed under Sports & Games
Posted: Friday, April 18th, 2008 8:47 pm
Robin Moore’s subjects as a writer included Pope John Paul II and the notorious former call girl, Xaviera Hollander with whom he wrote The Happy Hooker. In 1969 he wrote the novel, The French Connection, on which the acclaimed film was based. …
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Filed under Literature, Movies & Stage
Posted: Friday, April 18th, 2008 8:32 pm
Thriller writer, creator of the private investigator Jacob Asch and author of a study of American satanism …
His satanic interests led to a non-fiction study, The Second Coming: Satanism in America (1970). It inspired his first Jacob Asch novel, The Dead Are Discreet (1974). …
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Filed under Forteana, Literature
Posted: Friday, April 18th, 2008 12:46 am
Veteran Labour MP Gwyneth Dunwoody, the longest-serving female member of parliament, died last night at the age of 77 after a short illness. …
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See also:
GwynethDunwoody.co.uk
Filed under Government/Politics
Posted: Friday, April 18th, 2008 12:29 am
The esteemed Martinique poet and politician Aimé Césaire, a leading figure in the movement for black consciousness, died Thursday, the French president’s office and a hospital said. He was 94. …
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Filed under Civil Rights, Literature
Posted: Friday, April 18th, 2008 12:26 am
LONDON — She was an innocent beauty working in the catering department of a wartime ministry. He was making government films by day and writing poems at night. …
A poem soon followed — and “A Subaltern’s Love Song” became the most popular work of John Betjeman, one of his generation’s most loved poets. Joan Hunter Dunn, the muse who inspired the classic poem of love and longing, died in a London nursing home last week at age 92. She changed her name after she married and was known as Joan Jackson. … Read full obituary
Filed under Literature
Posted: Thursday, April 17th, 2008 10:49 pm
Danny Federici, the longtime keyboard player for Bruce Springsteen whose stylish work helped define the E Street Band’s sound on hits from “Hungry Heart” through “The Rising,” died Thursday. He was 58. … Read full obituary
Filed under Music
Posted: Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 10:16 pm
[Bob Kames was] … the man credited with the modern-day version of “Dance Little Bird,” better known as “The Chicken Dance.” He operated his Bob Kames Wonderful World of Music stores here for 42 years. He performed professionally, including a stint with the Lawrence Welk Orchestra. He produced his own television specials and recorded more than 70 albums.
Kames, who had struggled with Alzheimer’s disease in recent years, died Wednesday [April 9, 2008] of prostate cancer. He was 82. … Read full obituary
Filed under Music
Posted: Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 9:55 pm
COLUMBIA, S.C. Former state GOP Chairman Dan Ross, the man credited with creating South Carolina’s first-in-the-South Republican presidential primary, is dead at 83.
Ross died at a Barnwell County nursing home, Barnwell County coroner Lloyd B. Ward said Wednesday.
Ross chaired the state party from 1976 to 1980 after running the 1974 campaign of former Gov. James Edwards. Edwards was the first Republican governor elected in South Carolina since the 1890s. … Read full obituary
Filed under Government/Politics
Posted: Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 9:53 pm
MIDLAND, Texas — Wally Kleine, a football standout who played defensive tackle for Notre Dame and the Washington Redskins, has died, family members said Wednesday. He was 43.
Kleine died of heart failure Sunday at a Lubbock hospital, his sister Emily Kleine said.
Kleine was an all-state player at Midland High School in 1981 and starred at Notre Dame. He was a second-round pick by the Redskins in 1987 and spent two years with the NFL team. … Read full obituary
Filed under Sports & Games