Dead Celebrity Alert

July 16, 1929 - July 9, 2008

An influential manager of comic talent, Charles Joffe was, in partnership with Jack Rollins, the producer of almost all of Woody Allen’s films, most notably Annie Hall, which beat Star Wars to the Best Picture Oscar in 1977. In addition Joffe and Rollins fostered the careers of Billy Crystal, David Letterman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and had been among the first to promote Lenny Bruce. The actor Robin Williams good-naturedly called the cigar-brandishing Joffe “the Beast” in tribute to his tenacity in wresting worthwhile payment from studios. … Read full obituary

Chester-born comedian and actor Hugh Lloyd MBE, famed for co-starring with the legendary Tony Hancock, has died aged 85. …

He went on to star in 25 episodes of ‘Hancock’s Half Hour’ from 1957-61 as the comedy great’s sidekick, including the classic ‘Blood Donor’ episode.

Following that great success, he got the title role in ‘Hugh and I’ with Terry Scott. Other TV credits included ‘The Gnomes of Dulwich’, ‘Lollipop Loves Mr Mole’, ‘Jury’ and ‘You Rang M’Lord’. He also starred in and devised the series ‘Lord Trump’. … Read full obituary

One of the country’s top track announcers, and for the last 10 years the voice of Ellis Park, Luke Kruytbosch, has died.

The 46-year-old Kruytbosch, who had called the last 10 Kentucky Derby’s, and was beginning his tenth season at Ellis Park, was found dead in his Evansville apartment Monday morning.

The Vanderburgh County Coroner, Don Erk, said the cause of death appears to be natural, and possibly coronary related. …

Ironically, in a talk last week with 14 News sports reporter Chris Goodman, Kurytbosch expressed how much he already missed Cliff Guilliams, the Courier and Press reporter who passed away during the offseason. … Read full obituary

Radio host and one-time Johnny Carson talk show rival Les Crane, who found later success as a software developer and publisher, has died at the age of 74.

Crane died Sunday of natural causes at a hospital north of San Francisco, according to his daughter, Caprice.

The New York-born Crane rose to fame in the 1960s as a late-night radio talk show host. For a time, he also hosted a TV talk show that rivaled The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. …

In 1964, he welcomed the Rolling Stones for the band’s first U.S. TV appearance and, the following year, had a rare TV visit from Bob Dylan. However, his guest list also included notable figures of the day such as civil rights leader Malcolm X and pro-segregation former Alabama governor and one-time presidential candidate George Wallace. … Read full obituary

October 4, 1917 - July 11, 2008

Roy M. Huffington was a struggling Texan wildcatter who struck it rich in the oil and gas reserves of Indonesia. He went on to become US Ambassador to Austria under President George H. W. Bush.

Bush, himself a former Texan oilman, was a long-time friend of Huffington who had been a significant sponsor of his political campaigns, and he succeeded where President Ronald Reagan had failed in persuading Huffington to become Ambassador to Austria in 1990 after he had sold his company for an estimated $600 million, according to Huffington. … Read full obituary

May 18, 1940 - May 10, 2008

Alan Brooks was a lifelong campaigner against injustice who played a pivotal role in Britain’s Anti-Apartheid Movement in the 1970s and 1980s.

Alan Keith Brooks was born in Bristol in 1940 and emigrated to Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, with his family at the age of 7. Having secured a Beit Trust scholarship at the University of Cape Town, he studied law and later lectured in the African Studies department.

He joined the South African Liberal Party and was recruited into the secretive, mostly white, African Resistance Movement. Brooks became a member of the South African Communist Party (SACP) in 1962. In 1964, after a brief campaign of sabotage, ARM activists were arrested. Brooks was imprisoned for two years.

After his release he was deported to Britain. At Sussex University — which was also attended by his SACP colleague, later President, Thabo Mbeki — Brooks studied international politics. By 1969 he was the secretary of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, in which role he organised protests against South Africa’s Springbok rugby team during the successful Stop the 70 Tour campaign. … Read full obituary

December 31, 1916 - May 25, 2008

Ítalo Luder was a Peronist politician who became interim president of Argentina for 34 days during the turbulent 1970s. During his month in power he signed controversial decrees that authorised the repression of left-wing guerrilla groups. In 1983 he became the first Peronist presidential candidate to lose a democratic election. …

In 1949 Luder was appointed to the constituent assembly for the Peronist party and played a leading role in drawing up a new constitution under the recently-elected president, Juan Domingo Perón.

When Perón was overthrown by a military coup in 1955 and forced into exile, he was tried by the new regime for “betraying the Fatherland”. The party chose Luder to defend their leader in court. However, Peronism was subsequently banned in Argentina for almost two decades. … Read full obituary

January 29, 1916 - May 22, 2008

The Czech actress Hana Pravda was a survivor of both the Theresienstadt and Auschwitz concentration camps. She was a leading light in Prague theatre and later, from the 1960s, enjoyed a successful career in British television and films. Then, when she might have expected to move into quiet retirement, her moving wartime diary of her escape from a Nazi death march was rediscovered. Published in Czech and in English as I Was Writing This Diary for You, Sasha, it was broadcast by BBC Radio 4 in 2000, and was recognised as one of the most vivid memoirs of the Holocaust. … Read full obituary

May 12, 1933 - April 12, 2008

David Kirby was, along with the first Sir Robert Reid, one of a distinguished group of able managers who ran British Rail during its most successful period in the 1980s and 1990s. A period commonly described nowadays in the professional, and sometimes even in the national press, as the Golden Age of the railways in this country. …

His fluency in French and German were to make him, at several stages of his career, a formidable ambassador and negotiator for British Rail in continental Europe. When president of the Railway Study Association he quickly learned sufficient Italian to give his speech at the conference dinner in Florence in the language of his hosts. … Read full obituary

July 12 (Bloomberg) — Michael DeBakey, the Texas cardiovascular surgeon who developed heart-bypass procedures that improved the lives of millions of patients and prolonged life for others, died yesterday in Houston of natural causes.

He died at age 99, two years and five months after himself becoming among the world’s oldest survivor of an operation he had devised, Baylor College of Medicine and The Methodist Hospital confirmed in a statement.

During seven decades, DeBakey’s advances helped prevent heart attacks and strokes as he developed surgical methods that later became widespread. He also designed dozens of medical devices, such as the heart pump, and trained thousands of surgeons, mostly at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, which posted a memorial of DeBakey on the home page of its Web site. … Read full obituary

Tony Snow, a former White House spokesman and veteran radio and television journalist, has died following a long battle with colon cancer, his former employers said Saturday. He was 53.

Snow was a commentator on the Fox News network when he was named President George W. Bush’s chief spokesman in May 2006. He stepped down in September after 16 months on the job. …

Snow worked as a speechwriter under Bush’s father, president George H.W. Bush, in the early 1990s. …

Snow joined Fox in 1996 as the first anchor of “Fox News Sunday,” a weekend morning talk show, and hosted “Weekend Live” and a radio program, “The Tony Snow Show,” before leaving for the White House. … Read full obituary

Rocky Aoki, 69, a flamboyant businessman who parlayed his savings from an ice-cream truck into the international chain of Benihana Japanese steakhouses, known for the showmanship of their knife-tossing chefs, died July 10 in New York. In recent years, he said he had suffered from diabetes, hepatitis C and cirrhosis of the liver.

Mr. Aoki was an improbable success story who came to the United States from Japan on a wrestling scholarship and got his start in business by renting an ice-cream truck in Harlem, N.Y. He saved $10,000 from his ice-cream sales to open the first Benihana on New York’s West 56th Street in 1964. He quickly built it into an international corporation that, at its peak, had about 100 restaurants worldwide. …

Mr. Aoki led a complicated personal life, with multiple mistresses and illegitimate children. He once boasted that he had three children the same age, born to three different women. … Read full obituary

Evelyn Keyes, 91, a leading lady of dozens of Hollywood films who wryly dismissed much of her career, noting that she was most remembered for a bit part as Scarlett O’Hara’s younger sister Suellen in “Gone With the Wind,” died July 4 at a care facility in Montecito, Calif. She had uterine cancer.

Ms. Keyes wrote two memoirs that brushed by her appearances in more than 40 movies. Instead, she spoke at length about her marriages to director John Huston and bandleader Artie Shaw, as well as sexual conquests that included Kirk Douglas, David Niven and Anthony Quinn. …

Her light touch graced comedies (”Here Comes Mr. Jordan”) and musicals (”The Jolson Story,” “A Thousands and One Nights”), and she could convincingly adapt to the required accent, whether Georgia peach (”Gone With the Wind”) or English cockney (”Ladies in Retirement”). … Read full obituary

Don S. Davis, a college professor who found a second career as a character actor, gaining notice for his roles in TV’s “Stargate: SG-1″ and “Twin Peaks,” died of a heart attack June 29 at his home in Gibsons, Canada. He was 65. …

A native of the Missouri Ozarks who had served in the U.S. Army, Davis drew upon those experiences in his frequent portrayals of authority figures on television and film. He had a regular role as Gen. George S. Hammond on the science-fiction TV series “Stargate: SG-1″ from 1997 to 2006 and a recurring role as Maj. Garland Briggs on the quirky “Twin Peaks” in the early ’90s. He also appeared periodically as Scully’s father in “The X-Files” TV series about FBI agents investigating unsolved cases. … Read full obituary

Science fiction writer and poet Thomas Disch has committed suicide. Disch died July 4 and his body was discovered July 5, according to the New York City Police Department. He was 68.

The author of popular sci-fi novels Camp Concentration and 334, Disch had been openly gay since 1968. Following the 2004 death of his partner, poet Charles Naylor, Disch reportedly began suffering from depression.

Awarded many honors for his fiction, including two O. Henry awards, the genre-bending Disch also published more than a half dozen books of poetry, a whimsical Child’s Garden of Grammar (1997); a history of speculative fiction, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (1998); and the Brave Little Toaster series for children. … Read full obituary