Dead Celebrity Alert

A female singer was found dead in her house in southern Seoul, Sunday, with the exact cause of her death remaining unknown. …

Eom, who released her debut album “The Story of 12 Love” last year, had worked as a flight attendant for more than a year. She started singing professionally following a recommendation from an entertainment agent who was on a flight she was working on.

Her agent said Eom suffered from depression and anthropophobia — a pathological fear of people — last year after her debut was not as successful as she hoped. They said she had started working on her second album two months ago. … Read full obituary

September 19, 1919 - July 5, 2008

The Supreme Patriarch of the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam (UBCV), Thich Huyen Quang, was a symbol of the fight for human rights and religious freedom. Campaigning against the religious controls imposed by his country’s communist governments, Quang achieved international renown in 1982 when two laureates nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. … Read full obituary

October 2, 1925 - July 1, 2008

Clay Felker was a pioneering editor whose New York magazine became a template for what became known as the “new journalism” adopted by urban weeklies in America. A sometimes bitchy but always stylish glossy that included Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin and Gloria Steinem in its stable of writers, New York reported on the mixture of ambition, money, culture and fashion that obsessed the city then and now. …

New York had begun life as a supplement to the New York Herald Tribune newspaper. Felker and the graphic designer Milton Glaser reintroduced it as a separate publication in 1968 several years after the closure of its parent paper. …

In 1984 he married his third wife, the journalist Gail Sheehy, author of Passages and other well-received books. … Read full obituary

November 29, 1930 - June 13, 2008

The appointment in 1990 of Dennis Weatherstone as chairman and chief executive of J P Morgan, the largest bank in the US by market value, signalled not only radical change for the blue-blooded Wall Street institution but also the start of a new era for financial services.

He remained influential after stepping down as head of J P Morgan in 1994. Weatherstone acted as an independent adviser to the Bank of England and sat on the boards of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), General Motors and Merck among others. … Read full obituary

January 9, 1931 - June 9, 2008

Algis Budrys was one of the writers who made his name alongside such luminaries as Arthur C. Clarke and Philip K. Dick in the early-1950s boom in science-fiction magazines. …

Budrys’s first novel, False Night, published by the small New York firm Lion Books in 1954, tells of the slow recovery of the world after it has been devastated by a plague. In his second novel, Man of Earth (1958), circumstances force the weedy businessman protagonist, Allen Sibley, to buy himself a new, much-improved body and then light out for Pluto, but he ends up with a mind that does not belong to him or his alter ego.

Budrys’s Who? (1958) was greeted as one of the science-fiction genre’s most humane studies of dehumanisation. … Read full obituary

December 29, 1953 - June 17, 2008

Mark Sacks, the founding editor of the European Journal of Philosophy (EJP), was one of the leading philosophers of his generation, and played an important role in changing the shape of philosophy in Britain. He was an integral figure in a group of young philosophers, many of them trained at Cambridge in the 1980s, who were determined to broaden the range of philosophical discourse in Britain by engaging across the divide between continental European philosophy and the analytic tradition that predominated in the English-speaking world during the 20th century. … Read full obituary

December 9, 1914 - May 9, 2008

A leader of the Jewish militia force that bombed Jerusalem’s King David Hotel in 1946, Samuel Katz went on to become one of the most prominent figures to claim that since the late 1970s the Israeli Right had become too soft.

A one-time Fleet Street journalist, Katz moved to British Mandate Palestine after the war and spent his life fighting for his right-wing Zionist principles, first through the Irgun underground militia, then as a parliamentarian, and subsequently as a writer and ideologue. … Read full obituary

Glencairn Balfour-Paul, CMG, soldier, colonial administrator, diplomat, traveller, writer and poet, was born on September 23, 1917. He died on July 2, 2008, aged 90

When Glen Balfour-Paul was appointed British Ambassador to Baghdad in 1969 a friend remarked: “How clever of the Foreign Office to send someone to Iraq who doesn’t look like an ambassador.” Saddam Hussein was then plotting his way to the presidency but meanwhile had to be content with running the Baath party’s security apparatus. Later Balfour-Paul had to confront the tyrant, but he had come up through the Army and the Sudan Political Service (SPS), so was accustomed to taking the rough with the smooth. …Read full obituary

March 26, 1923 - July 4, 2008

The doyen of BBC foreign correspondents, Charles Wheeler earned a permanent niche in television history through his coverage of the Watergate scandal during his years as the corporation’s chief correspondent in the United States. Often ahead of the American press corps, he exploited the contacts he had built up during seven years in Washington to provide the fullest and most comprehensive reporting available in the British media — and more than matching in quality, though not in quantity, that of the American networks. …

He enjoyed a particular triumph at the 1972 Republican convention which renominated President Nixon, getting hold of the convention chairman’s teleprompter script which covered everything down to the meticulously timed pauses for “spontaneous applause” — and resisting all the efforts from the party high command to make him surrender it. It was just the kind of coup that Wheeler enjoyed. It was not at all that he disliked politicians — merely that he thought it was a journalist’s duty to expose humbug whenever it surfaced.

That made him particularly qualified to cover the Watergate scandal. … Read full obituary

September 18, 1929 - July 2, 2008

A large, jolly woman with an ample bosom and twinkling eyes, Elizabeth Spriggs was one of Britain’s best and most cherished character actresses, equally at home in Shakespeare and Dickens as in contemporary television drama. Superb in comic roles, she could also give her characters depth and gravitas. …

She served a long apprenticeship in regional theatre, crowned with spells at the Bristol Old Vic and Birmingham Repertory, where she played Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra and Madame Ranevsky in The Cherry Orchard. But she was well into her thirties before she achieved national recognition. This came in 1962 when she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company under Peter Hall, and stayed for 14 years, appearing regularly at Stratford and the RSC’s London homes, the Aldwych Theatre and later the Barbican. … Read full obituary

Actor Clive Hornby who played Jack Sugden has died aged 63.

Clive joined Emmerdale in 1980 and was the longest serving cast member in the history of the show. …

Clive was born and grew up in Liverpool and started out as an accounts clerk before enjoying success as a drummer with pop group The Dennisons in the 1960s. The band were compared to and played on the same bill as The Beatles at Liverpool’s famous Cavern Club. … Read full obituary

During the first week of the war in Iraq, a Military Times photographer captured the arresting image of Army Spc. Joseph Patrick Dwyer as he raced through a battle zone clutching a tiny Iraqi boy named Ali.

The photo was hailed as a portrait of the heart behind the U.S. military machine, and Doc Dwyer’s concerned face graced the pages of newspapers across the country. …

On June 28, Dwyer, 31, died of an accidental overdose in his home in Pinehurst, N.C., after years of struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder. During that time, his marriage fell apart as he spiraled into substance abuse and depression. He found himself constantly struggling with law, even as friends, Veterans Affairs personnel and the Army tried to help him. … Read full obituary

Jesse Helms, the former North Carolina senator whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art, died early Friday. He was 86.

Helms’s former chief of staff, James Broughton, said the senator died at the Mayview Convalescent Center in Raleigh, where he had lived for several years. Helms had been in “a period of declining health,” Broughton said.

In a 52-year political career that ended with his retirement from the Senate in 2002, Helms became a beacon for the right wing of American politics, a lightning rod for the left and, often, a mighty pain for presidents whatever their political leaning. … Read full obituary

Irina Baronova, the last of the three “baby ballerinas” whose international careers were launched by choreographer George Balanchine, has died. She was 89.

Ms. Baronova died in her sleep Saturday at her home in Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia, according to the Australian News.

She came to fame at the age of 12 when Balanchine cast her in a 1931 Paris staging of composer Jacques Offenbach’s operetta “Orpheus in the Underworld.” French critic Andre Levinson wrote, “The sensation of the evening was the tiny child Baronova, who went through the final galop (gallop) like a whirlwind.” … Read full obituary

On what should have been one of the happiest days of their musical careers, Fort Collins band Tickle Me Pink was mourning the loss of one of its own.

Tuesday morning TMP bassist Johnny Schou, 22, was found dead of unknown causes at the band’s Fort Collins home just hours before the group was to appear at a Denver in-store event celebrating Tuesday’s release of its major-label debut CD, “Madeline.” …

An autopsy Tuesday was inconclusive, and there was no obvious cause of death, said Larimer County Chief Deputy Coroner Diane Fairman. Further examination, including toxicology and microbiology tests, will be necessary, but it could be weeks before a cause of death is known.

Those in the Colorado music scene were stunned and saddened by the loss. … Read full obituary