Dead Celebrity Alert

Voiceover Master Don LaFontaine has died. He was 68.

LaFontaine, known as the “King of Voiceovers,” died Monday afternoon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. LaFontaine’s agent, Vanessa Gilbert, tells ET that he passed away following complications from Pneumothorax, the presence of air or gas in the pleural cavity, the result of a collapsed lung. The official cause of death has not yet been released.

Over the past 25 years, LaFontaine cemented his position as the “King of Voiceovers.” Aside from being the preeminent voice in the movie trailer industry, Don also worked as the voice of Entertainment Tonight and The Insider, as well as for CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox and UPN, in addition to TNT, TBS and the Cartoon Network. … Read full obituary

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

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

Robert Mondavi, the pioneering vintner who put California wine country on the global map, has died. He was 94.

Mondavi died peacefully at his home in Yountville, Calif., on Friday, said Mia Malm, spokeswoman for the Robert Mondavi Winery.

An enthusiastic ambassador for the health benefits of moderate consumption of wine, and of California wine in particular, Mondavi had travelled the world into his 90s, promoting the cultural and social benefits of wine.

Born in Virginia, Minn., Mondavi got an economics degree from Stanford University in California in the 1930s and went to work at the Charles Krug Winery, which his Italian-born parents had bought after moving to California from Minnesota. … Read full obituary

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Car-building legend Boyd Coddington, whose testosterone-injected cable TV reality show “American Hot Rod” introduced the nation to the West Coast hot rod guru, has died. He was 63. …

Coddington, who started building cars when he was 13 and once operated a gas station in Utah, set a standard for his workmanship and creativity, with his popular “Cadzilla” creation considered a design masterpiece. The customized car based on a 1950s Cadillac was built for rocker Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top. …

Coddington was a machinist by trade, working at Disneyland during the day and tinkering with cars in his home garage at night and on weekends. His rolling creations captured the imagination of car-crazy Southern Californians and soon he was building custom cars and making money.

Most often, he customized 1932 Ford “little deuce coupes.” … Read full obituary

NEW YORK (AP) — William F. Buckley Jr., the erudite Ivy Leaguer and conservative herald who showered huge and scornful words on liberalism as he observed, abetted and cheered on the right’s post-World War II rise from the fringes to the White House, died Wednesday. He was 82.

His assistant Linda Bridges said Buckley was found dead by his cook at his home in Stamford, Conn. The cause of death was unknown, but he had been ill with emphysema, she said. …

“For people of my generation, Bill Buckley was pretty much the first intelligent, witty, well-educated conservative one saw on television,” fellow conservative William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, said at the time the show ended. “He legitimized conservatism as an intellectual movement and therefore as a political movement.” …

Buckley founded the biweekly magazine National Review in 1955… Not only did he help revive conservative ideology, especially unbending anti-Communism and free market economics, his persona was a dynamic break from such dour right-wing predecessors as Sen. Robert Taft. … Read full obituary

WASHINGTON (AP) — Rep. Tom Lantos, who as a teenager twice escaped from a Nazi-run forced labor camp in Hungary and became the only Holocaust survivor to win a seat in Congress, has died. He was 80. …

Lantos, a Democrat who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee, disclosed last month that he had been diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. He said at the time that he would serve out his 14th term but would not seek re-election in his Northern California district, which takes in the southwest portion of San Francisco and suburbs to the south including Lantos’ home of San Mateo. …

Lantos, who referred to himself as “an American by choice,” was born to Jewish parents in Budapest, Hungary, and was 16 when Adolf Hitler occupied Hungary in 1944. He survived by escaping from the labor camp and coming under the protection of Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who used his official status and visa-issuing powers to save thousands of Hungarian Jews.

Lantos’ mother and much of his family perished in the Holocaust. … Read full obituary

Johnny Grant, the avuncular honorary mayor of Hollywood, died Wednesday at his suite in the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. He was 84.

Grant, who died of apparently natural causes, was perhaps best known as the jolly host of the ceremonies in which he inducted more than 500 celebrities into the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The lifelong bachelor lived in a 14th-floor suite at the hotel.

Grant’s mission in life was bringing the Hollywood story to everyone. He hosted red-carpet Oscar arrivals and Walk of Fame festivities, appeared in bit parts in movies and produced Hollywood’s annual Christmas Parade. …

Over the years he emceed numerous premieres with Daily Variety’s Army Archerd, and he presented Archerd with his own star in front of the Chinese Theater in 1984. On Jan. 3, he told Archerd that he recently helped arrange a star ceremony for Suzanne Pleshette, skedded for Jan. 31. … Read full obituary

CLEARWATER, Fla. — Evel Knievel, the hard-living motorcycle daredevil whose jumps over Greyhound buses, live sharks and Idaho’s Snake River Canyon made him an international icon in the 1970s, died Friday. He was 69.

Knievel’s death was confirmed by his granddaughter, Krysten Knievel. He had been in failing health for years, suffering from diabetes and pulmonary fibrosis, an incurable condition that scarred his lungs.

Knievel had undergone a liver transplant in 1999 after nearly dying of hepatitis C, likely contracted through a blood transfusion after one of his bone-shattering spills.

Immortalized in the Washington’s Smithsonian Institution as “America’s Legendary Daredevil,” Knievel was best known for a failed 1974 attempt to jump Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered cycle and a spectacular crash at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. He suffered nearly 40 broken bones before he retired in 1980. … Read full obituary

Obit to come.

Hilly Kristal, whose dank Bowery rock club CBGB served as the birthplace of the punk rock movement and a launching pad for bands like the Ramones, Blondie and the Talking Heads, has died. He was 75.

Kristal, who lost a bitter fight last year to stop the club’s eviction from its home of 33 years, died Tuesday at Cabrini Hospital after a battle with lung cancer, his son Mark Dana Kristal said Wednesday. …

While the club’s glory days were long past when it shut down, its name transcended the venue and become synonymous with the three-chord trash of punk and its influence on generations of musicians worldwide. …

Besides the Ramones and the Talking Heads, many of the other sonically defiant bands that found frenzied crowds at CBGB during those years became legendary — including Smith, Blondie and Television.

Smith said at the venue’s last show that Kristal “was our champion and in those days, there were very few.” … Read full obituary

NEW YORK — Leona Helmsley, the cutthroat hotel magnate whose title as the “queen of mean” was sealed during a tax evasion case in which she was quoted as snarling “only little people pay taxes,” died Monday at age 87.

Helmsley died of heart failure at her summer home in Greenwich, Conn., said her publicist, Howard Rubenstein.

Already experienced in real estate before her marriage, Helmsley helped her husband Harry run a $5 billion empire that included managing the Empire State Building. She became a household name in 1989 when she was tried for tax evasion. The sensational trial included testimony from disgruntled employees who said she terrorized both the menial and the executive help at her homes and hotels.

That image of Helmsley as the “queen of mean” was sealed when a former housekeeper testified that she heard Helmsley say: “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.” …

Helmsley clearly enjoyed the luxury of the couple’s private fortune… Their money supported charities, including NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital and its affiliated Weill Cornell Medical College, which received tens of millions of dollars, including a $25 million gift in 2006 to improve its treatment of digestive diseases.

Yet Helmsley nickel-and-dimed merchants on her personal purchases, stiffed contractors who worked on her Connecticut home and terrorized both menial and executive help at her homes and hotels, detractors say. … Read full obituary

Brooke Astor, who by night reigned over New York society with a decided disdain for pretension and by day devoted her time and considerable resources to New York’s unfortunate, died Monday afternoon at her weekend estate, Holly Hill, in Briarcliff Manor, New York. She was 105. …

The attending physician listed the cause of death as pneumonia, Warner said.

Astor’s image as a benevolent society matron was overshadowed last year by that of a victimized dowager at the center of a very public family battle over her care and fortune. Yet for decades she had been known as the city’s unofficial first lady, one who moved effortlessly from the sumptuous apartments of Fifth Avenue to the ragged barrios of East Harlem, deploying her inherited millions to help the poor help themselves.

Among the rich of New York, she was perhaps the last bridge to the Gilded Age, when “society” was a closed world of old-money families, the so-called Four Hundred.

But it was a changing social order that Brooke Astor oversaw. Hers was a society defined more by balance sheets than bloodline. … Read full obituary

AUSTIN, Texas — Lady Bird Johnson, the former first lady who championed conservation and worked tenaciously for the political career of her husband, Lyndon B. Johnson, died Wednesday, a family spokeswoman said. She was 94.

Johnson, who suffered a stroke in 2002 that affected her ability to speak, returned home late last month after a week at Seton Medical Center, where she’d been admitted for a low-grade fever.

She died at her Austin home of natural causes and she was surrounded by family and friends, said spokeswoman Elizabeth Christian.

Even after the stroke, Johnson still managed to make occasional public appearances and get outdoors to enjoy her beloved wildflowers. But she was unable to speak more than a few short phrases, and more recently did not speak at all, Anne Wheeler, spokeswoman for the LBJ Library and Museum, said in 2006. She communicated her thoughts and needs by writing, Wheeler said.

Lyndon Johnson died in 1973, four years after the Johnsons left the White House.

The longest-living first lady in history was Bess Truman, who was 97 when she died in 1982.

Other former first ladies remembered Johnson on Wednesday as deeply devoted to her family and the environment. … Read full obituary

Obit to come.