Dead Celebrity Alert

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

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