Dead Celebrity Alert

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, although he never took up offers to write screenplays for mainstream popular cinema. That, he asserted, was work for hacks.

The dominant theme of his writings was violence, a subject that fascinated and repelled him. … Read full obituary

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.

Born in the city of Tongyeong in South Gyeongsang province at the southernmost tip of the Korean peninsula, Park graduated from Jinju Girls High School in 1946. During the Korean War, which broke out in 1950, she suffered a personal tragedy; her husband Kim Haeng Do, whom she had married shortly after leaving school, went missing in action. This sorrow, and the larger traumas of the war became the subject of much of Park’s early fiction, the author herself observing that she would not have written novels if she had been happy. … Read full obituary

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. First performed in 1977, its brilliant use of song helped the play to become an immediate popular hit across Kenya, leading to a government ban and the persecution of the authors which, eventually, forced wa Miiri into exile in Zimbabwe.

There, over the course of two decades, Ngugi wa Mirii was a pioneering force in community theatre, founding a national organisation, which supported more than 300 theatre groups across the country. While his focus remained pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist, his concept of theatre was always rooted in the concerns of ordinary people, and his work played an important role in raising popular consciousness of womens’ rights and the dangers of HIV/Aids. … Read full obituary

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. In both capacities, he was regarded as exceptionally skilled at presenting complex and superficially unattractive subjects — of all sorts — in a simple and appealing way. Perhaps his finest achievement in this regard was Nuts and Bolts of the Economy, which he presented and produced from 1975 until 1978; though he will probably be better remembered for presenting ITV’s networked morning-discussion programme The Time . . . The Place, in the late Eighties and early Nineties. … Read full obituary

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — 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.

The elephant had been in excellent health recently. A zoo official says she was showing no signs of illness or decline. … Read full story

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.

The gesture’s mix of elegance, bravado and cunning are for Risi both the best and worst of his fellow Italians’ characteristics, and emblematic too of the country’s postwar transformation from the values of a traditional society to those of consumerism.

This theme supplied the material for the most successful of his 50-odd films, and customarily led Risi to be hailed as one of the chief creators, both as director and screenwriter, of the commedia all’italiana, at once funny and tragic. … Read full obituary

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. …

Candid Camera — a concept imported from America and the forerunner of Game for a Laugh and Beadle’s About — was presented by Bob Monkhouse, with the lugubrious, beetle-browed Routh and Arthur Atkins as the pranksters who would spook hapless participants with talking pillar boxes and cars without engines. Jennifer Paterson, who later found success in the cookery show Two Fat Ladies, would sometimes nudge victims into shot while disguised as a cleaner. … Read full obituary

Bob Anderson, who played the young George Bailey in the Christmas classic “It’s a Wonderful Life,” has died. He was 75.

Anderson died Friday of cancer at his home in Palm Springs, his wife, Victoria, said Saturday. …

He was 7 when he appeared in the 1940 Shirley Temple film “Young People” and went on to play roles in such films as 1945’s “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”

But he 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. … Read full obituary

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.”

The groundbreaking sportscaster died Saturday of natural causes at his farm in Monkton, Md. He was 86.

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 when word came down in Munich that Palestinian terrorists had kidnapped 11 Israeli athletes. McKay was summoned from a day off, hurriedly putting clothes over a bathing suit to anchor ABC’s coverage of the drama as the games stood still. …

The New York Yankees paused to remember McKay before their game Saturday. He died hours before Big Brown attempted to earn a Triple Crown at the Belmont Stakes in McKay’s favorite sport of all, horse racing. … Read full obituary

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. … Read full obituary

September ?, 1939 - May 31, 2008

Glamorous and scandal-prone newspaper columnist who confessed to being the long-term mistress of the Irish Prime Minister

Terry Keane, the mistress of the former Taoiseach Charles Haughey, created a sensation in May 1999 when she went on Irish television giving details of their affair, which had gone on for 27 years and had long been the subject of speculation, much of it fanned by herself. She followed on with extracts from a forthcoming book in The Sunday Times containing rather intimate photographs for which she received £50,000. The book never appeared. … Read full obituary

June 2, 1915 - May 7, 2008

Margaret Yelding was a circus artiste born and bred to the travelling world, and one of the longest serving trapeze artistes in the world.

She was born Margaret Fossett in 1915, into one of the oldest circus families in the world. She was one of the four children of John Fossett, the original clown Comical Jacko, who was one of eleven children of the original circus proprietor “Sir” Robert Fossett. John Fossett’s mother Maria was one of the twelve children of George and Annie Proctor, from a family of circus and fairground folk. … Read full obituary

Former Tottenham Hotspur goalkeeper who went on to have a successful career as a police officer, receiving two commendations

As well as being a popular figure at Tottenham Hotspur, Newport County and Wolverhampton Wanderers, and playing both at Wembley and in Europe, Mark Kendall was also a much-respected police officer who once prevented a chain-saw attack. …

Mark Kendall, footballer and policeman, was born on September 20, 1958. He died of a heart attack on May 1, 2008, aged 49 … Read full obituary

March 19, 1913 - February 14, 2008

Country and Western singer and entertainer dubbed ‘Australia’s first cowboy’, who became the world’s oldest recording artist

Smoky Dawson was one of Australia’s most enduringly popular entertainers. He was a western singer before it was coupled with country and was dubbed Australia’s first cowboy. He went on to become the world’s oldest recording artist. He made his first record, I’m a Happy Go Lucky Cowhand, in 1941 and his last, Homestead of My Dreams, in 2005, when he was 92, although a DVD featuring new performances was completed just before his death. … Read full obituary

July 24, 1900 - May 27, 2008

Veteran who survived the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian armies in 1918

Franz Künstler was not overimpressed with the sudden attention he attracted at the very end of his extraordinarily long life. Living quietly in the small German town of Niederstetten, in Baden-Württemberg, he was discovered to be one of the very few former First World War soldiers still alive, and the only one who had fought in the armies of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

This brought him visitors, inquisitive interviewers and letters from around the world. But he confessed that was “anything but proud, to be the last soldier of the Emperor”. “I was no Hurrah soldier and simply did what I had to do,” he told the German magazine Cicero. “Young people had to kill each other. Is that somehow justified?” was his bitter reflection on what the war had meant. … Read full obituary