Dead Celebrity Alert

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

Dody Goodman, whose ditzy comic persona was well known to patrons of theatre, film and television from the 1950s on, died June 22 at the Actors Fund Home in New Jersey, a spokesperson for the Fund confirmed. Her age was thought to be 92 by many accounts, though the subject of her birthdate was something she was known to falsify throughout her career. Her agent said she was 94. …

Her airhead persona, buttressed by curly hair, wide childlike blue eyes and a long, loopy grin, attracted the attention of Jack Paar, then the host of “The Tonight Show.” …

Fame and good fortune returned in the late ’70s when she took on the role of Martha Shumway in the widely praised, if short-lived, mock soap opera “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,” and made a much-commented-upon supporting turn in the film of “Grease.” A semi-regular role on “Diff’rent Strokes” followed. She was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for her performance in an 1984 revival of Ah, Wilderness!. She also spent a great deal of time in productions of Nunsense and its sequels. … Read full obituary

LOS ANGELES — Comedian George Carlin, a counter-culture hero famed for his routines about drugs and dirty words, died of heart failure at a Los Angeles-area hospital on Sunday, a spokesman said. He was 71.

Carlin, who had a history of heart and drug-dependency problems, died at Saint John’s Health Center in Santa Monica about 6 p.m. local time (9 p.m. ET) after being admitted earlier in the afternoon for chest pains, spokesman Jeff Abraham told Reuters.

Known for his edgy, provocative material, Carlin achieved status as an anti-Establishment icon in the 1970s with stand-up bits full of drug references and a routine called “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television.” A regulatory battle over a radio broadcast of the routine ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court. … Read full obituary

NEW ORLEANS — Revius Ortique Jr., the first black justice on the Louisiana Supreme Court, [died Sunday] of complications from a stroke. He was 84. …

As a civil rights lawyer in the 1950s and ’60s, he helped integrate state labor unions and sued to get equal pay for black workers.

He held several presidential appointments, including a stint as an alternate delegate to the United Nations under President Clinton. … Read full obituary

February 2, 1921 - May 18, 2008

As Michelangelo was to Pope Julius II, and Bernini to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, so was Pietro Cascella to Silvio Berlusconi. Neither was perhaps in the same league as their predecessors as artist and patron respectively, but despite his many public monuments, notably that at Auschwitz, Cascella is most likely to be remembered for having sculpted the Italian Prime Minister’s colossal private mausoleum. …

The turning point in his career came when he and his brother and the architect Julio Lafuente won a competition in 1957 to build a monument at Auschwitz. … Read full obituary

January 12, 1908 - June 19, 2008

In the 1950s Jean Delannoy was the French film director whom the upstart talent of the Nouvelle Vague most liked to bait and wound.

François Truffaut, the future director of Jules et Jim, told the readers of Cahiers du Cinéma that he had sat through Delannoy’s 1954 Jean Gabin drama Chiens perdus sans collier three times, in order to learn how not [to] direct.

His sins, in Truffaut’s eyes, included the academic precision of his images, the coolness of his temperament — both undoubted characteristics — and something much harder to prove: insincerity. … Read full obituary

GRAZ, Austria: Austrian media say the country’s oldest known woman has died at age 110.

Public broadcaster ORF has reported that Hermina Dunz died Saturday in the southern city of Graz.

The city’s mayor, Siegfried Nagl, said Dunz celebrated her 110th birthday Feb. 24, and that she was in remarkably good shape for a woman of her age. … Read full obituary

October 27, 1927 - May 16, 2008

Jimmy Slyde was the aptly named practitioner of a sinuous, slithering form of tap dance that helped to define the heyday of an ever-changing cultural phenomenon. Whereas modern tap is aggressive, sometimes even obstreperous, Slyde embodied a seemingly effortless ability to, well, slide across a stage, often letting slip the odd mot juste as he made his way past an admiring public.

An early acolyte of such African-American tap legends as Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, Slyde in turn helped pave the way for the likes of Savion Glover, who transformed Slyde’s vaunted rhythmic ease into something deliberately rougher and more raw. The two generations of performer were both seen on Broadway in the elaborate 1989 revue Black and Blue, which began in Paris in 1985 before settling into a two year run in New York, where it won three Tony Awards. … Read full obituary