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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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 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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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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. …

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