Dody Goodman, whose ditzy comic persona was well known to patrons of theatre, film and television from the 1950s on, died June 22 at the Actors Fund Home in New Jersey, a spokesperson for the Fund confirmed. Her age was thought to be 92 by many accounts, though the subject of her birthdate was something she was known to falsify throughout her career. Her agent said she was 94. …
Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture hero famed for his routines about drugs and dirty words, died of heart failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital on Sunday, a spokesman said. He was 71. …
Carlin, who had a history of heart and drug-dependency problems, died at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica about 6 p.m. local time (9 p.m. ET) after being admitted earlier in the afternoon for chest pains, spokesman Jeff Abraham told Reuters.
Known for his edgy, provocative material, Carlin achieved status as an anti-Establishment icon in the 1970s with stand-up bits full of drug references and a routine called “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television.” A regulatory battle over a radio broadcast of the routine ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court. …
NEW ORLEANS — Revius Ortique Jr., the first black justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court, [died Sunday] of complications from a stroke. He was 84. …
As a civil rights lawyer in the 1950s and ’60s, he helped integrate state labor unions and sued to get equal pay for black workers.
He held several presidential appointments, including a stint as an alternate delegate to the United Nations under President Clinton. …
February 2, 1921 - May 18, 2008
As Michelangelo was to Pope Julius II, and Bernini to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, so was Pietro Cascella to Silvio Berlusconi. Neither was perhaps in the same league as their predecessors as artist and patron respectively, but despite his many public monuments, notably that at Auschwitz, Cascella is most likely to be remembered for having sculpted the Italian Prime Minister’s colossal private mausoleum. …
The turning point in his career came when he and his brother and the architect Julio Lafuente won a competition in 1957 to build a monument at Auschwitz. …
January 12, 1908 - June 19, 2008
In the 1950s Jean Delannoy was the French film director whom the upstart talent of the Nouvelle Vague most liked to bait and wound.
François Truffaut, the future director of Jules et Jim, told the readers of Cahiers du Cinéma that he had sat through Delannoy’s 1954 Jean Gabin drama Chiens perdus sans collier three times, in order to learn how not [to] direct. …
GRAZ, Austria: Austrian media say the country’s oldest known woman has died at age 110.
Public broadcaster ORF has reported that Hermina Dunz died Saturday in the southern city of Graz.
The city’s mayor, Siegfried Nagl, said Dunz celebrated her 110th birthday Feb. 24, and that she was in remarkably good shape for a woman of her age. …
October 27, 1927 - May 16, 2008
Jimmy Slyde was the aptly named practitioner of a sinuous, slithering form of tap dance that helped to define the heyday of an ever-changing cultural phenomenon. Whereas modern tap is aggressive, sometimes even obstreperous, Slyde embodied a seemingly effortless ability to, well, slide across a stage, often letting slip the odd mot juste as he made his way past an admiring public. …
1924 - April 8, 2008
Kazuo Shiraga was a distinguished Japanese avant-garde artist noted for his unusual method: using his own body to apply paint to the canvas. Revolutionary in the 1950s, this technique now seems to anticipate later international developments in performance art and conceptual art. …
Celebrated Peregrine falcon who lived atop San Jose, California, City Hall. Suspected of crashing into the building while learning to fly.
April 16, 1964 - June 14, 2008
Few bands demonstrated that jazz is no longer an exclusively American art form better than the trio led by the Swedish pianist Esbjörn Svensson. Mixing sparkling and virtuoso performances of jazz standards by the likes of Thelonious Monk with programmes of entirely original material, EST (as the trio were known) blurred the boundaries between jazz and both rock and classical music. They were widely regarded as Europe’s leading contemporary jazz group. Performances were brilliantly tailored to their audiences so that deeply-felt romantic ballads had the grey heads nodding in approval at the Everyman Theatre in Cheltenham whereas their gritty urban funk propelled by the drumming of Magnus Öström, with howling electronic bass effects from Dan Berglund, turned the Miles Davis Hall at Montreux into a teeming, sweaty mosh-pit for 18 to 25-year-olds. …
March 29, 1915 - March 28, 2008
Novelist Helen Yglesias’s death, a day before her 93rd birthday, recalls “a contented middle-aged couple sat up in bed, seen from the waist up in neatly pressed pyjamas with the piped edge of the lapels wonderfully reproduced in stone, faint smiles upon their modeled lips, their deep-set eyes gazing pleasantly upon the prospect of their buried bodies which became a natural extension of the stone figures”. This graveyard features in Sweetsir (1981), the best-known of her five novels, the first published at fifty-seven: in these, marriage oftens proves rockier than that stone’s depiction. …
David Hooson, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and a scholar of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, national identities and the history of geographic ideas, died on May 16 at the age of 82. He drowned during his regular swim at Shell Beach in Tomales Bay, near his home in Marin County’s Inverness Park …
Cyd Charisse, the long-legged Texas beauty who danced with the Ballet Russe as a teenager and starred in MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, died Tuesday. She was 86. …
Robert “Robby” Stamps, one of 13 students shot by Ohio National Guardsmen during a Vietnam War protest May 4, 1970, at Kent State University, has died of complications from pneumonia.
Mr. Stamps, 58, died Wednesday in Tallahassee, Fla. A private funeral is scheduled for Monday at a friend’s house. A memorial service is planned in San Diego. …
Tim Russert, the host of “Meet the Press,” and NBC’s Washington bureau chief, has died. He was 58.
Mr. Russert was a towering figure in American journalism and moderated several debates during the recent presidential primary season.
Tom Brokaw, the former anchor of NBC Nightly News, came on the air at 3:39 p.m. that Mr. Russert had collapsed and died early this afternoon while at work. He had just returned from Italy with his family. …
Full obit to come.
January 6, 1928 - May 19, 2008
Vijay Tendulkar endured having one of his plays howled off the stage by an unappreciative audience; another about man-woman relationships in South Asia was banned by the Indian Government; and he was once lashed by a furious theatregoer with a bamboo rod. Such were the passions aroused by one of India’s most influential dramatists. He went on, nevertheless, to win a host of awards and to write one of the longest-running plays in the world, Ghasiram Kotwal (Ghasiram the Constable), which was performed 6,000 times in India and abroad in the original Marathi and in translation. He wrote 30 full-length plays, collections of short stories and film scripts…
October 28, 1926 - May 5, 2008
Park Kyung Ni was one of the leading South Korean novelists of her generation. In her own country and abroad, she was best known for the epic Toji (The Land), widely regarded as the greatest achievement of modern Korean literature. …
1951 - May 3, 2008
Ngugi wa Mirii was co-author of one of the most influential works in modern African literature. His play, I Will Marry When I Want, written with Ngugi wa Thiong’o, was a searing indictment of what he considered the betrayal of the hopes of ordinary Kenyans by the country’s postindependence leaders. …
December 8, 1932 - May 30, 2008
Mike Scott was one of the foremost producer-performers in commercial television, one of an elite group at Granada whose other members included Bill Grundy and Michael Parkinson. His career on the small screen involved extensive work both in front of camera and behind it. …
The oldest African elephant in an American zoo has died.
Petal, who was 52 and lived most of her life at the Philadelphia Zoo, was found lying in her stall by workers Monday morning. She usually slept standing up. …
December 23, 1916 - June 7, 2008
There is a brief but telling scene in Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso (The Easy Life, 1962) that encapsulates his vision as a film-maker. In it, Vittorio Gassman’s playboy parks his racer illegally, and then casually tucks under the windscreen wiper the parking ticket from a neighbouring car so as to avoid getting a fine himself. …
November 24, 1927 - June 4, 2008
Jonathan Routh was a supreme practical joker and hoaxer whose star reached its zenith with Candid Camera, the hugely successful Sixties television series in which unsuspecting members of the public were duped into making fools of themselves while filmed with a hidden camera, to the delight of viewers. It was one of the earliest examples of television voyeurism. …
Bob Anderson, who played the young George Bailey in the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life,” has died. He was 75. …
[H]e was best known for his role as the young Bailey in Frank Capra’s 1946 “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the same character portrayed in adulthood by James Stewart. In one scene, the story called for him to spot a potentially fatal error made by a drunken druggist, played by H.B. Warner.
Warner took the role seriously and on the day of shooting had been drinking and was “pretty ripe,” Victoria Anderson said. …
Jim McKay elegantly covered competitions from badminton to barrel jumping. Yet he may best be remembered for that grim day at the Munich Olympics when he broke the news with three simple words: “They’re all gone.” …
McKay was the one who spanned the globe to bring television viewers the constant variety of sports on ABC’s influential “Wide World of Sports,” where he told of “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.”
A far different kind of agony awaited in 1972 …
January 27, 1932 - May 30, 2008
When the Soviet Union began competing at the Olympic Games in 1952, its biggest successes came in sports with a premium on long hours of disciplined training, such as weightlifting, wrestling and particularly gymnastics, where there was a tradition of excellence. After Viktor Chukarin had won the men’s combined exercises title in the 1952 and 1956 Games, his training partner, Boris Shakhlin, maintained the dominance, collecting 13 Olympic medals, seven of them gold, including that for the combined exercises in Rome in 1960. …
You are currently browsing the Dead Celebrity Alert blog archives for June, 2008.
