Dead Celebrity Alert

D. August 18, 2008

Author Ralph M. Kovel, known best for his pricing guides for collectibles and antiques, has died in Cleveland at the age of 88, his wife says.

The man behind such published works as “Kovels’ American Silver Marks” and “Kovels’ Bid, Buy and Sell Online” died last month of complications of a broken hip, The New York Times reported Sunday.

Working with his wife Terry, Kovel created 96 published guides to collectibles and antiques that have become invaluable sources of information for collectors and hobbyists alike. … 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

BEIJING, China (AP) — A man in southern China appears to have died of exhaustion after a three-day Internet gaming binge, state media said Monday.

The 30-year-old man fainted at a cyber cafe in the city of Guangzhou Saturday afternoon after he had been playing games online for three days, the Beijing News reported.

Paramedics tried to revive him but failed and he was declared dead at the cafe, it said. The paper said that he may have died from exhaustion brought on by too many hours on the Internet. …

The report said that about 100 other Web surfers “left the cafe in fear after witnessing the man’s death.” … Read full obituary

Lady Nancy Fairfax died on Saturday, aged 90, after a long illness.

Lady Fairfax was the wife of late businessman, pastoralist, benefactor and charitable worker Sir Vincent, and mother of John B. Fairfax, a director of Fairfax Media. … Read full obituary

BEAUFORT, S.C. — A Navy Blue Angel jet crashed during an air show Saturday, plunging into a neighborhood of small homes and trailers and killing the pilot, the county coroner said.

Witnesses said the planes were flying in formation during the show at the Marine Corps Air Station and one dropped below the trees and crashed, sending up clouds of smoke. At least one home was on fire.

Raymond Voegeli, a plumber, was backing out of a driveway when the plane ripped through a grove of pine trees, dousing his truck in flames and debris. He said wreckage hit “plenty of houses and mobile homes.” …

County Coroner Curt Copeland said the pilot was killed, but did not release an identification. Copeland said there was a lot of debris at the crash site and described the scene as horrific. … Read full obituary

Nikki Bacharach, daughter of songwriter Burt Bacharach and actress Angie Dickinson, committed suicide, Bacharach and Dickinson said in a statement Friday.

Nikki Bacharach, 40, suffered from Asperger’s Disorder, a form of autism. She killed herself Thursday night at her condo in Thousand Oaks, said Linda Dozoretz, a spokeswoman for the family. …

Nikki Bacharach died of suffocation using a plastic bag and helium, said Mike Feiler of the Ventura County coroner’s office. …

Nikki Bacharach was the only child of Burt Bacharach, 77, and Dickinson, 75, who were married from 1965 to 1981.

It was the second marriage for both Bacharach, the Oscar-winning composer of “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” and “What the World Needs Now is Love,” and Dickinson, star of the film “Dress to Kill” and the TV show “Police Woman.” … Read full obituary

LOS ANGELES — Spoony Singh, who once said he founded the world famous Hollywood Wax Museum to give tourists who couldn’t find any real celebrities in Hollywood the next best thing, has died. He was 83.

Singh died Wednesday at his Malibu home of congestive heart failure, his family announced Friday.

It was while touring Hollywood looking for famous faces in 1964 that Singh thought of the museum. The closest he came to spotting a celebrity was seeing stars’ footprints in the courtyard of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. …

Singh, who handed over day-to-day operation of the museum to family members in 1990, shrugged off critics who called the museum cheesy over the years.

“Look, I know other museums are more stately and artistic,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1970. “But on Hollywood Boulevard, dignity kind of gets lost in the shuffle.” … Read full obituary

Related:
Movieland Wax Museum creator Allen Parkinson

Patricia Kennedy Lawford, sister of President John F. Kennedy and widow of actor Peter Lawford; in New York.

Robert C. Baker, an agricultural scientist who looked at chickens and envisioned chicken nuggets, not to mention chicken hotdogs, helping transform what is now a $29 billion poultry industry, died on Monday at his home in North Lansing, N.Y. He was 84. …

Cornell University hired Dr. Baker in 1957 as a professor and as a liaison to growers and marketers. His mission was to find ways to persuade people to eat more poultry, rather than viewing chickens as just egg-laying machines or Sunday luxuries. He took them to places no bird had been before, including the sausage department.

It was part of a fundamental transformation of the poultry business. … Read full obituary

Joseph Waksberg, who helped invent a widely used method of conducting phone surveys so they efficiently reach people with unlisted as well as listed phone numbers, has died. He was 90. …

With Mitofsky, Waksberg developed methods that improved the efficiency in drawing a representative sample of the population using random digit dialing, a crucial technique in telephone polling. …

He served for 30 years as a consultant on election night predictions for CBS and later for a cooperative of news media. … Read full obituary

Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman whose condition ignited a protracted legal struggle and a national debate over end-of-life issues, died today at a Florida hospice, 13 days after her feeding tube was removed under a court order.

Representatives of both sides in a dispute over her fate confirmed the death shortly before 10 a.m. EST.

The death of Schiavo, 41, ended the court battle that had pitted her husband, who wanted to take her off artificial life support, against her parents and siblings, who sought to keep her alive at all costs. But the death appeared unlikely to quell the broader controversy fueled by the Schiavo case, one that set right-to-life, antiabortion and conservative religious groups — with backing from President Bush and Republican leaders in Congress — against advocates of a “right to die” when the brain no longer functions. …

Her husband and guardian, Michael Schiavo, was with her at her bedside when she died. …

The feud between Terri Schiavo’s husband and her parents, Robert and Mary Schindler, persisted until the end. …

Schiavo’s death, at the Woodside Hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla., came 15 years after she suffered cardiac arrest, experienced a loss of oxygen to the brain and slipped into a coma as a result of an eating disorder. She later emerged from the coma, but she never regained consciousness and remained in what doctors said was a “persistent vegetative state.” … Read full story

Richard Coleman, a founder of the Florida chapter of the Sierra Club who was as passionate an outdoorsman as he was a protector of the outdoors, died Friday in a head-on airboat collision. He was 59.

Mr. Coleman, of Winter Haven, worked for nearly 20 years fighting for restoration of the Kissimmee River and then watching the project’s progress hawk-like once it started.

He was reportedly piloting an airboat in the Dead River, a serpentine waterway in Central Florida, when he collided with another airboat. … Read full obituary

Sydney Omarr, the astrologer to the stars who came to write horoscopes that appear in more than 200 newspapers, has died. He was 76.

Omarr, who was blinded and paralyzed from the neck down by multiple sclerosis, died Thursday at St. John’s Health Center in Santa Monica of complications from a heart attack, the Los Angeles Times reported. His ex-wife, assistants and several close friends were by his side.

Born Sidney Kimmelman in Philadelphia, Omarr decided to change his name at age 15 after watching a movie called “Shanghai Gesture”… Read full obituary

Shirley Nolan, who became world-famous for establishing an international bone marrow registry after losing her seven-year-old son to a rare disease 22 years ago, has committed suicide.

Incapacitated with Parkinson’s disease, Ms Nolan, 60, killed herself at home in Adelaide on Sunday night. She was alone.

A member of the South Australian Voluntary Euthanasia Society, Ms Nolan wanted her death to be used to bolster the campaign for national euthanasia legislation.

“I hope today I can end the horror my life has become,” she wrote in a letter released the day after her death. “Here today, my last day, I am an advocate of death.”

In the late 1970s, Ms Nolan won massive international support for her tireless efforts to save her son Anthony’s life. The boy had been diagnosed with a rare and debilitating condition that left his immune system unable to fight infection. … Read full obituary

Ann Landers, who was reputedly the most widely read columnist in the world and famously urged her readers to “wake up and smell the coffee,” died Saturday at the age of 83, the Chicago Tribune reported.

The Tribune, which had been her home base since 1987, said she died in her Chicago home of multiple myeloma — a malignant tumor of the bone marrow.

Her real name was Esther “Eppie” Pauline Friedman Lederer, and according to the Tribune her column was for 40 years the world’s best read and most widely syndicated — carried by 1,200 newspapers. …

Dispensing guidance that ranged from the practical to the expert and covering topics stretching from sex to religion, her column reached an estimated 90 million people daily.

Lederer along with twin sister Pauline Phillips writing as “Abigail Van Buren” under the “Dear Abby” flag, dominated the advice-giving genre in U.S. newspapers during most of the last half of the 20th century and beyond. … Read full obituary