Dead Celebrity Alert

WASHINGTON (AP) — The man whose parents’ battle to save him from a nerve disease was told in the movie “Lorenzo’s Oil” died Friday at his home in Virginia, having lived more than 20 years longer than doctors had predicted.

Lorenzo Odone, who doctors had predicted would die in childhood, died one day after his 30th birthday…

Lorenzo Odone had come down with aspiration pneumonia recently after getting food stuck in his lungs, his father said. …

Odone was found at age 6 to have adrenoleukodystrophy, or ALD. His doctors told his parents the disease — caused by a genetic mutation that causes the neurological system to break down — would lead to death in two years. …

Susan Sarandon and Nick Nolte starred as Michaela and Augusto Odone in 1992’s “Lorenzo’s Oil,” which recounted their efforts to formulate the oil they said helped their son fight the neurological disease, despite lacking scientific backgrounds. …

[Augusto] Odone plans to take his son’s ashes to New York to mix them with those of his wife, who died in 2000. Then, Odone said, he will sell his home in Fairfax, Va., and move back to his native Italy. … Read full obituary

Alexander “Sandy” Courage, an Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated arranger, orchestrator and composer who created the otherworldly theme for the classic “Star Trek” TV show … died May 15 at the Sunrise assisted-living facility in Pacific Palisades…

Over a decades-long career, Courage collaborated on dozens of movies and orchestrated some of the greatest musicals of the 1950s and 1960s, including “My Fair Lady,” “Hello, Dolly!” “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” “Gigi,” “Porgy and Bess” and “Fiddler on the Roof.”

But his most famous work is undoubtedly the “Star Trek” theme, which he composed, arranged and conducted in a week in 1965. …

He and Lionel Newman shared Academy Award nominations for their adapted scores for 1964’s “The Pleasure Seekers” and 1967’s “Doctor Dolittle.”

A friend and colleague of movie composers John Williams and Jerry Goldsmith, he also provided the orchestration for such movies as “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Jurassic Park,” “Basic Instinct” and “The Mummy” and supplied arrangements for the Boston Pops while Williams was conductor in the 1980s and early 1990s. … Read full obituary

“Carol Burnett” star Harvey Korman dies at 81

1 hour ago

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Harvey Korman, the tall, versatile comedian who won four Emmys for his outrageously funny contributions to “The Carol Burnett Show” and played a conniving politician to hilarious effect in “Blazing Saddles,” died Thursday. He was 81.

Korman died at UCLA Medical Center after suffering complications from the rupture of an abdominal aortic aneurysm four months ago, his family said. He had undergone several major operations. …

A natural second banana, Korman gained attention on “The Danny Kaye Show,” appearing in skits with the star. He joined the show in its second season in 1964 and continued until it was canceled in 1967. That same year he became a cast member in the first season of “The Carol Burnett Show.” …

Burnett was devastated by Korman’s death, said her assistant, Angie Horejsi. …

His most memorable film role was as the outlandish Hedley Lamarr (who was endlessly exasperated when people called him Hedy) in Mel Brooks’ 1974 Western satire, “Blazing Saddles.” …

He also appeared in the Brooks comedies “High Anxiety,” “The History of the World Part I” and “Dracula: Dead and Loving It,” as well as two “Pink Panther” moves, “Trail of the Pink Panther” in 1982 and “Curse of the Pink Panther” in 1983. … Read full obituary

No Internet news links yet; just announced on KGO-AM radio at approximately 4:02 p.m. PDT.

PALM DESERT, California (AP) — Joseph Pevney, who directed some of the best-loved episodes of the original “Star Trek” television series, has died. He was 96.

Pevney died May 18 at his home in Palm Desert, said his wife, Margo.

Pevney directed 14 episodes of the 1960s series, including “The City on the Edge of Forever,” in which Capt. Kirk and Spock travel back in time to the Depression, and “The Trouble With Tribbles,” in which the starship Enterprise is infested with cute, furry creatures. …

Pevney had made his movie debut playing a killer in 1946’s “Nocturne.” As an actor, he made several other film noir appearances but then turned to directing with 1950’s “Shakedown.”

Pevney went on to direct more than 35 films, including two memorable movies from 1957: “Man of a Thousand Faces,” which starred James Cagney as silent star Lon Chaney, and “Tammy and the Bachelor,” a romantic comedy starring Debbie Reynolds that spawned her No. 1 hit record, “Tammy.” … Read full obituary

Sydney Pollack, the Academy Award-winning director of “Out of Africa” who achieved acclaim making popular, mainstream movies with A-list stars, including “The Way We Were” and “Tootsie,” died Monday. He was 73. Pollack, who also was a producer and actor, died of cancer at his home in Pacific Palisades, according to Leslee Dart, his publicist and friend.

“Sydney Pollack has made some of the most influential and best-remembered films of the last three decades,” film scholar Jeanine Basinger told The Times recently.

In looking at Pollack’s films, she said, “what you see is how he kept in step with the times. He doesn’t get locked into one decade and left there. He had a very sharp political sensibility and a keen sense of what the issues of his world were, and he advanced and changed as the times advanced and changed.”

After launching his show-business career as an actor and acting teacher in New York City in the 1950s, Pollack moved west in the early ’60s and began directing episodic television before turning to films. … Read full obituary

WESLEY CHAPEL [FL] — A former player for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers was found dead inside a home in Wesley Chapel Sunday morning.

A friend found 46 year old Thomas McHale dead just after 9 am this morning inside the friend’s home on Ambrose Court. Detectives do not suspect foul play, but are investigating his death. … Read full story

Dick Martin, the zany half of the comedy team whose “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” took television by storm in the 1960s, making stars of Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin and creating such national catch-phrases as “Sock it to me!” has died. He was 86.

Martin, who went on to become one of television’s busiest directors after splitting with Dan Rowan in the late 1970s, died Saturday night of respiratory complications at a hospital in Santa Monica, family spokesman Barry Greenberg said. …

“Laugh-in,” which debuted in January 1968, was unlike any comedy-variety show before it. Rather than relying on a series of tightly scripted song-and-dance segments, it offered up a steady, almost stream-of-consciousness run of non-sequitur jokes, political satire and madhouse antics from a cast of talented young actors and comedians that also included Ruth Buzzi, Arte Johnson, Henry Gibson, Jo Anne Worley and announcer Gary Owens.

Presiding over it all were Rowan and Martin, the veteran nightclub comics whose standup banter put their own distinct spin on the show. … Read full obituary

A teenage actor who appears in the next Harry Potter film was stabbed to death trying to protect his younger brother from a knifeman yesterday.

Robert Knox, 18, who acted alongside Daniel Radcliffe in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, became the 28th teenager killed in Britain this year, and the 10th in London to die from stab wounds. …

Mr Knox, a grammar school boy, is understood to have been fatally stabbed after trying to save his 16-year-old brother, Jamie, from a man armed with two knives.

The man began attacking drinkers outside the Metro bar, next to Sidcup railway station, south-east London. Witnesses said that the attacker had earlier been thrown out by bouncers, but returned in the early hours with several friends.

Tarik Ozresberoglu, 17, a trainee steel worker, described how he tried to stem the flow of blood from Mr Knox’s wounds then rugby-tackled the attacker into submission.

He said that he was chatting to Rob when the attacker appeared. “He pulled out two wooden kitchen knives at least 6in long from his waistband, and said ‘Who’s going to make my day then?’ … Read full story

A former state senator who had failed to return her friends’ phone calls was found dead in her Adams County house Thursday after the sheriff’s office was asked to do a check.

Friends of Joan Johnson, both Democrat and Republican, are mourning her her death. She was 64. …

Friends say Johnson got sick with what seemed like respiratory flu after a trip to Las Vegas earlier this month. …

Johnson was born Dec. 4, 1943, in Denver, and graduated in 1965 from the University of Colorado. She served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Tehran, Iran, in 1966. The Adams County Democrat was twice elected to the state Senate, in 1990 and 1994. … Read full obituary

197? - May 1, 2008

Aden Hashi Ayro was one of the most feared and notorious figures in Somalia whose powerful influence in the country showed most starkly the depths of anarchy and brutality to which it has sunk.

Tall, painfully thin and with what local journalists who had met him described as anger-filled eyes, Ayro’s brief life — he is believed to have been in his early thirties when he was killed by an American air strike — was one of unremitting violence.

With little formal education, Ayro became an Islamist fighter as a teenager in the early 1990s after the overthrow of the veteran Somali dictator Mohammed Siad Barre. He is said to have taken part in every major battle involving Islamist militias since then. …

Aden Hashi Ayro is reported to have received military training in Afghanistan, where he almost certainly came into contact with senior al-Qaeda figures, possibly including Osama bin Laden himself. … Read full obituary

June 1, 1923 - May 8, 2008

Inventor of the nicotine patch who first become known in medical circles for his studies in psychopharmacology

The invention of the nicotine patch was partly the work of Murray Jarvik, who first become known in medical circles for his studies in psychopharmacology — in particular, the effect of LSD on memory and addiction. Always pragmatic, he was, in the Eighties, to follow up what was literally field research to create the patch. … Read full obituary

November 5, 1915 - May 5, 2008

Physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project and invented the neoprene wetsuit

Neither time nor tide has eroded the debate around who invented the wetsuit — since the mid-1950s, when the neoprene outfits became common among divers, argument has raged over who was the originator. However, Hugh Bradner, a physicist who worked on atomic bomb testing in the Pacific, has the strongest claim to the title.

Hugh Bradner was born in 1915, in Tonopah, Nevada. His father, Donal Byal Bradner, was briefly director of the Chemical Warfare Service at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland and in 1918 taught his son to swim by throwing him into the Gunpowder River. Bradner graduated from Miami University in 1936 and received a PhD in physics from the California Institute of Technology in 1941. … Read full obituary

April 18, 1911 - May 19, 2008

Sybaritic heir to a grocery business fortune who squandered millions on doomed projects and was rescued from squalor

Huntington Hartford began life as one of the richest men in America but he wanted to be remembered for more than his money. In this he succeeded only insofar as he became celebrated for the ways he lost it — an extravagantly glamorous life with the stars of Hollywood’s golden age, a disastrous investment in the Bahamas and a much mocked attempt, through his own magazine and museum, to establish himself as a leader of the American art world.

George Huntington Hartford II was named after his grandfather, who co-founded the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Co in 1869. By the time of Hartford’s birth in 1911, A&P was one of the most successful retailers in America. … Read full obituary

She smuggled out the children in suitcases, ambulances, coffins, sewer pipes, rucksacks and, on one occasion, even a tool box.

Those old enough to ask knew their saviour only by her codename “Jolanta”.

But she kept hidden a meticulous record of all their real names and new identities — created to protect the Jewish youngsters from the pursuing Nazis — so they might later be re-united with their families.

By any measure, Irena Sendler was one of the most remarkable and noble figures to have emerged from the horrors of World War II. But, until recently, her extraordinary compassion and heroism went largely unrecorded.

When the Germans finally caught her, the Roman Catholic social worker had managed to save 2,500 Jewish babies and toddlers from deportation to the concentration camps. …

She was beaten, tortured and sentenced to death by the Gestapo — who even announced her execution. But Irena survived, her spirit unbroken, her secrets untold. … Read full obituary