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Celebrity Deaths

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flea dip

Posted: Jun 4 2005, 06:21 PM

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This may seem like a morbid thread, but I don't mean it in that way. I just thought anytime a famous person passes away, we could make mention of it here.

About a week ago, for instance, the actor who was on the old Green Acres t.v. show passed away.

Eddie Albert, star of 'Green Acres,' dead at 99 - Reuters

QUOTE

By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 28, 2005; Page B06

Eddie Albert, a versatile actor best known to '60s-era TV viewers as the befuddled lawyer-turned-farmer on the comedy "Green Acres," died of pneumonia May 26 at his home in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles. He was 99 and suffered from Alzheimer's disease.

Fans who knew Mr. Albert as Oliver Douglas, a New York lawyer who settles in a farm town with his glamorous wife, played by Eva Gabor, may not have known that the white-haired fellow with the congenial face and distinctive tenor voice was a distinguished actor with a long career in radio, on Broadway, in the movies and on TV.

Eddie Albert was nominated for Oscars for his roles in "Roman Holiday" and "The Heartbreak Kid."

He appeared in more than 100 movies, beginning with the film adaptation of the Broadway play "Brother Rat" (1938) with Ronald Reagan, a comedy about life at Virginia Military Institute. He was nominated for Academy Awards as best supporting actor in "Roman Holiday" (1953), in which he played Gregory Peck's pal with a camera, and "The Heartbreak Kid" (1972).

.... In addition to his six-year run on "Green Acres," he co-starred with Robert Wagner in "Switch" from 1975 to 1978 and was a semi-regular on "Falcon Crest" in 1988.

He was born Eddie Albert Heimberger on April 22, 1906, in Rock Island, Ill., and grew up in Minneapolis. According to his son, Mr. Albert's mother was not married when he was born and changed his birth certificate to read 1908. He attended the University of Minnesota but left before graduating to work as a "song-dance-and-patter man" with a trio called the Threesome on a Minneapolis radio station. Radio announcers kept calling him Eddie Hamburger, so he changed his name to Eddie Albert.

After the Threesome broke up, he became part of a singing duo on NBC radio in New York City with a young woman named Grace Bradt; they were known as Grace and Eddie, "The Honeymooners."

.... He joined the Navy in 1942 and saw action in the South Pacific. He was awarded the Bronze Star for his rescue of wounded Marines at Tarawa who had been abandoned under heavy fire.

Source for excerpt above: Eddie Albert, star of 'Green Acres,' dead at 99 - Washington Post

flyingpenguin	Posted: Jun 6 2005, 09:55 PM
Shanghi-ed Away Group: Member Posts: 151 Member No.: 15 Joined: 6-June 05	I saw him on The Longest Yard (the Burt Reynolds one), and Dreamscape. He seems to be a good actor. RIP.

Anna_L

Posted: Jun 7 2005, 05:11 PM

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QUOTE

June 7, 2005
Anne Bancroft, Actress Who Played Mrs. Robinson, Is Dead at 73
By ROBERT BERKVIST
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Anne Bancroft, enshrined in film history as the iconic Mrs. Robinson, the seductress who devours her daughter's nerdy boyfriend-to-be (Dustin Hoffman) in the 1967 film "The Graduate," and also remembered for her sensitive portrayal on both stage and screen of Annie Sullivan, the teacher who leads the blind and deaf Helen Keller out of darkness into light in "The Miracle Worker," died Monday at Mount Sinai Medical Center. She was 73.

The cause was uterine cancer, said John Barlow, a spokesman for the family.

Those widely dissimilar roles were emblematic of Ms. Bancroft's long career. During more than 50 years of acting in films, theater and television she played everything from Brecht's "Mother Courage" to the mother superior of a convent, and from an aging ballerina to the Prime Minister Golda Meir of Israel, and repeatedly won praise for her work. Arthur Penn, who directed her award-winning Broadway performances in "Two for the Seesaw" and "The Miracle Worker," both by William Gibson, put it this way: "More happens in her face in 10 seconds than happens in most women's faces in 10 years."

Ms. Bancroft worked hard to get beneath the surface, to inhabit a role as deeply as possible. While rehearsing for "The Miracle Worker," she put tape over her eyes to better understand what it was like to be blind like Helen Keller, learned sign language and spent time at a home for the visually impaired. Preparing for "Golda," she traveled to Israel and got to know and observe Prime Minister Meir. She was more interested in performance than theory, although she was a member of the Actors Studio early in her career. The actor Rod Steiger once gave her a copy of Stanislavsky's writings on acting. "I still have it," she said some years later, "but I've never read it."

The landmarks in Ms. Bancroft's acting life were, unquestionably, the two Gibson plays and "The Graduate." She had already accumulated a long list of credits in TV dramas when she moved to Hollywood in the early 1950's to join the crowd of young hopefuls jostling for jobs in second- or third-rate films. She was among the few who found steady work, appearing in more than a dozen grade-C features with titles like "Treasure of the Golden Condor," "Gorilla at Large" - "I played the title role" - and "Demetrius and the Gladiators." Disenchanted after five years or so, and newly divorced, she headed back to New York with the promise of an audition for a new Broadway play called "Two for the Seesaw."

It was a two-character play, with Henry Fonda starring as a depressed Midwestern lawyer with marital troubles who comes to New York and meets Gittel Mosca, an attractive, thoroughly quirky young bohemian girl from the Bronx. They are two lost souls who, though their lifestyles are worlds apart, manage to help one another. Ms. Bancroft, who happened to be not only attractive and quirky but also Bronx-born and raised, auditioned and got the job. After a rocky start - she had virtually no stage experience - she quickly settled into the role. When the play opened in 1958, Ms. Bancroft stole the show and ultimately won a Tony Award as best supporting actress.

When the next Gibson-Penn theater project took shape the following year - the story of Helen Keller and her teacher Annie Sullivan - they knew who would play Sullivan from day one. The part of the hostile, 10-year-old Helen went to Patty Duke. Between them, Ms. Bancroft and Ms. Duke tore up the stage as Sullivan struggled to communicate with and calm her raging young charge, eventually breaking through the child's defensive shell. "The Miracle Worker" was a resounding hit, and Ms. Bancroft came away with her second Tony Award, this time as best actress. Tonys also went to Mr. Penn, Mr. Gibson and the play's producer, Fred Coe. Two years, two plays, two Tonys. And when "The Miracle Worker" was made into a film in 1962, both Ms. Bancroft and Ms. Duke won Academy Awards.

Hollywood now had a new star, and Ms. Bancroft was offered scripts rather better than, say, "Gorilla at Large." She appeared with Peter Finch in "The Pumpkin Eater" (1964), Harold Pinter's adaptation of a novel by Penelope Mortimer about a woman driven into a nervous breakdown by her husband's casual philandering. Her work brought her an Oscar nomination. Next came "The Slender Thread" (1965), in which she played a housewife whose crumbling marriage leads her to attempt suicide.

By the time "The Graduate" came along, she was more than ready to play the alpha female and she got her wish with the character of Mrs. Robinson of Beverly Hills, the bored predator whose sexual binges with young Ben Braddock, the son of her husband's law partner, are mechanical but necessary props for her self-indulgent ego. Directed by Mike Nichols, with a melancholic soundtrack of songs by Simon and Garfunkel, "The Graduate" was hailed as a winning social satire. Bosley Crowther, writing in The New York Times, called it "devastating and uproarious" and hailed Ms. Bancroft's "sullenly contemptuous and voracious performance." Mr. Nichols won an Oscar, while nominations went to Ms. Bancroft, Mr. Hoffman and Katharine Ross, who played Mrs. Robinson's daughter. The still photograph that appeared in advertisements for the film, showing Mrs. Robinson slowly peeling off a nylon stocking under the glazed gaze of Mr. Hoffman's Ben Braddock, became a classic of its kind.

More good roles lay ahead, but Ms. Bancroft had definitely hit a high point.

Anna Maria Louisa Italiano was born Sept. 17, 1931, in the Bronx to Italian immigrant parents. Her father, Michael, was a patternmaker, and her mother, Mildred, a telephone operator. By the time she was 2 years old she was learning to sing and dance. "Why play with dolls," she recalled years later, "when you can sing 'I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate' on the street corner?" Even so, by the time she left high school she had decided to become a laboratory technician. Instead, her mother insisted she attend the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts. Two years later she found work in television where, as Anne Marno, she appeared in scores of dramatic shows. In 1951 she was asked to participate in another actor's screen test for 20th Century Fox, after which she, not he, was offered the contract that took her to Hollywood. At the studio she was handed a book of names and urged to choose a new one. She became Anne Bancroft. She had no illusions about that chapter of her film career, noting some years later that "20th Century Fox told me what to do and I did it. I learned nothing."

During her first stay in Hollywood she married Martin A. May, a building contractor, in 1954. They were divorced in 1957. In 1964 she married Mel Brooks, who survives her along with their son, Maximilian, and grandson.

The 1970's and 80's saw Ms. Bancroft take on a wide variety of roles, from Winston Churchill's American-born mother in "Young Winston" to the actress-wife of a hammy Polish impresario ("world famous in Poland"), played by Mr. Brooks, in the farcical "To Be or Not to Be." She also earned two more Oscar nominations, one for her portrayal of a ballerina confronting her choice of career over family in "The Turning Point," the other for her work as a mother superior in "Agnes of God." Other major roles included "'Night Mother," as a woman struggling with her daughter's decision to commit suicide, and "84 Charing Cross Road," in which she played an American writer whose correspondence with a London bookseller (Anthony Hopkins) develops into a long-distance romance.

She rarely returned to the theater, although she did win praise as the steel-willed Regina Giddens in Mr. Nichols's 1967 staging of Lillian Hellman's "Little Foxes" at Lincoln Center. In The Times, Clive Barnes characterized her performance as "a series of unforgettable visual and aural images." The following year Ms. Bancroft appeared in the Lincoln Center Repertory production of another William Gibson drama, "A Cry of Players," set in Shakespearean England. Her performance in "Golda" (1977) brought her a Tony nomination. She played a crippled violinist in the 1981 "Duet for One," which closed after a two-week run, and then was absent from the stage until the spring of 2002, when she was set to star in Edward Albee's "Occupant" as the sculptor Louise Nevelson. The play's scheduled run had to be canceled when Ms. Bancroft contracted pneumonia during previews.

In later years she continued to appear in films, although the roles grew smaller. She was briefly on screen as Nicolas Cage's mother in "Honeymoon in Vegas," trained a young woman as an assassin in "Point of No Return," scored a few points as a wily senator in "G.I. Jane" and had some campy fun in an updated version of "Great Expectations" as a loony character based on Dickens's Ms. Havisham.

She fared better in television, earning Emmy nominations playing a killer in the PBS drama "Mrs. Cage" and the title role in "Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All" on CBS.

She was resigned to the fact that age and changing times worked against her. In a 1992 interview with The Times's Bernard Weinraub she admitted to taking parts "even if they're one page," because "there are very few good scripts, even for Julia Roberts." She preferred a good bit part to a heftier bad one. She often rejected work in favor of family life - for a while. "I retire after every project," she once said. "Then somehow there's always something that pulls me out of retirement."

NY Times

The 1 Not Fooled	Posted: Jun 7 2005, 07:07 PM
Licensed & Board-certified! Group: Contributor Posts: 6,125 Member No.: 13 Joined: 6-June 05	Oh, no! Mrs. Robinson is dead? She still looked pretty feisty to me.

flyingpenguin	Posted: Jun 7 2005, 08:36 PM
Shanghi-ed Away Group: Member Posts: 151 Member No.: 15 Joined: 6-June 05	Goodbye Mrs. Robinson.

flea dip	Posted: Jun 18 2005, 11:26 PM
Card Carrying Madonna Hater Group: Admin Posts: 24,702 Member No.: 2 Joined: 2-June 05	Karl Mueller of Soul Asylum (1964-2005) ST. PAUL, Minn. - (KRT) - Karl Mueller, bass player and founding member of the Minneapolis rock band Soul Asylum, died Friday morning in his Minneapolis home, apparently due to complications from esophageal cancer. He was 41. Mueller was diagnosed in May 2004 and had spent the past year in and out of the hospital. His bandmates and wife, Mary Beth, are expected to release statements in the coming days. Funeral arrangements are pending. Please click link to read the rest of the story

Anna_L	Posted: Jun 19 2005, 01:17 AM
Ultimate Madonna Hater Group: Inactive Posts: 1,569 Member No.: 9 Joined: 5-June 05	Wow! That's terrible.

flyingpenguin	Posted: Jun 19 2005, 08:03 PM
Shanghi-ed Away Group: Member Posts: 151 Member No.: 15 Joined: 6-June 05	How sad.

flea dip	Posted: Jun 26 2005, 08:01 PM
Card Carrying Madonna Hater Group: Admin Posts: 24,702 Member No.: 2 Joined: 2-June 05	Paul Winchell, voice of Tigger, dies in Calif. Excerpts: LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Paul Winchell, a famed ventriloquist best remembered as the voice of the irrepressible Tigger in the Winnie the Pooh series, has died, an associate said on Sunday. He was 82. Winchell died on Friday in the Los Angeles area, according associate Johnny Blue Star and a Web site operated by Winchell's daughter, the actress April Winchell. Winchell was a fixture in American children's television in the 1950s and 1960s in a string of shows featuring him giving voice to the sidekicks he created and made famous, the dummies Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff. But it was his voice work on a wide range of cartoons and animated features that captivated a later generation of viewers, including turns as Gargamel of "The Smurfs," Dick Dastardly of "Wacky Races" and Fleegle on "The Banana Splits Adventure Hour." Winchell was most famous for his voicing to the hyperkinetic Tigger in a series of appearances in Walt Disney Co. Winnie the Pooh productions for over three decades beginning in 1968. He won a Grammy in 1974 for "Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too," including the movie's signature song "The Wonderful Thing about Tiggers." On the award-winning soundtrack, Winchell gives a throaty, bouncy rendition to the memorable lyric: "The wonderful thing about tiggers, is tiggers are wonderful things! Their tops are made out of rubber, their bottoms are made out of springs!" Jerry Mahoney, who began with an appearance in a 1936 radio audition, was inspired by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his sidekick, Charlie McCarthy, Winchell said.

flyingpenguin

Posted: Jun 29 2005, 09:03 PM

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QUOTE

John Fiedler, voice of Piglet, dies
Actor also starred in 'Bob Newhart Show'

Monday, June 27, 2005; Posted: 8:02 a.m. EDT (12:02 GMT)
NEW YORK (AP) -- John Fiedler, a stage actor who won fame as the voice of Piglet in Walt Disney's Winnie-the-Pooh films, died Saturday, The New York Times reported in Monday editions. He was 80.

Fiedler served in the Navy during World War II before beginning a stage career in New York. He performed in supporting roles alongside Sidney Poitier on Broadway, John Wayne in Hollywood and Bob Newhart on television.

With Newhart, on "The Bob Newhart Show," he was Mr. Peterson, the meek patient who was often a target for Jack Riley's sarcastic Mr. Carlin.

Fiedler also appeared in the films "12 Angry Men," "The Odd Couple," "True Grit," "The Fortune" and "Sharky's Machine," and was a cast member on the TV show "Buffalo Bill."

But he was best known for the squeaky voice of the ever-worrying Piglet that he landed when someone noticed his naturally high-pitched voice.

"Walt Disney heard it on a program and said, 'That's Piglet,' " his brother James Fiedler told The Times.

In addition to his brother, Fiedler is survived by a sister, Mary Dean, The Times reported. The newspaper did not report the cause or location of his death.

flea dip	Posted: Jul 1 2005, 08:08 PM
Card Carrying Madonna Hater Group: Admin Posts: 24,702 Member No.: 2 Joined: 2-June 05	Luther Vandross Passes Due To Complications From Stroke R&B crooner Luther Vandross passed away today (July 1), due to complications brought on by a stroke the singer suffered in 2003. The singer suffered a serious stroke in April of 2003, shortly before his fifteenth album, Dance With My Father hit stores. Vandross, born April 20, 1951, sold over 25 million records and influenced a whole generation of singers. During the period following his stroke, Vandross, 54, lapsed into a coma for roughly six weeks. He started to show signs of recovery, with his condition improving slightly. Vandross was checked out of New York's Weill Cornell Medical Center and moved into a private facility in New Jersey. His final studio album, Dance With My Father, hit stores in June of 2003 while Vandross was hospitalized. .... Perhaps his best known collaboration with hip-hop artists came unwittingly, when Kanye West sample Vandross' song "A House Is Not a Home" for Twista's massive hit, "Slow Jamz," which also name checks Vandross.

knightmuzic

Posted: Jul 2 2005, 12:47 AM

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QUOTE

R&B crooner Luther Vandross passed away today (July 1), due to complications brought on by a stroke the singer suffered in 2003. Vandross, born April 20, 1951, sold over 25 million records and influenced a whole generation of singers.

That's a shame. I liked him. And he was only 3 years younger than my mom... wow.

Good Day	Posted: Jul 2 2005, 12:56 AM
True Blue Newbie Group: Madonna Fan Posts: 10 Member No.: 22 Joined: 1-July 05	How sad, I was just listening to one of his songs too.

flyingpenguin	Posted: Jul 2 2005, 09:12 PM
Shanghi-ed Away Group: Member Posts: 151 Member No.: 15 Joined: 6-June 05	I had "Here and Now" stuck in my head this morning. RIP

The 1 Not Fooled	Posted: Jul 3 2005, 03:18 PM
Licensed & Board-certified! Group: Contributor Posts: 6,125 Member No.: 13 Joined: 6-June 05	54? That's too young.

Mihoshi Marie	Posted: Jul 4 2005, 03:40 PM
It's Little Miss Jackson Group: Contributor Posts: 1,212 Member No.: 6 Joined: 4-June 05	My mom and I are very sad about Luther's passing. I was flipping through the channels and stopped on E! to see some stupid show about celebrity oops, and on the scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen was the announcement of his passing. I almost cried. I was hoping that he'd pull through after his stroke.

planet_rock	Posted: Jul 5 2005, 08:42 AM
Shanghi-ed Away Group: Member Posts: 158 Member No.: 12 Joined: 6-June 05	RIP, Luther! you and your amazing voice will be missed...

Ironshadow	Posted: Jul 20 2005, 01:18 PM
#1 mandona hater Group: Contributor Posts: 3,788 Member No.: 3 Joined: 3-June 05	"Scotty" died this morning. James Doohan passed away at the age of 85. The last public appearance of the beloved character actor was last year when he recieved a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame (photo). He will be greatly missed. James Doohan passes away

The 1 Not Fooled	Posted: Jul 20 2005, 05:27 PM
Licensed & Board-certified! Group: Contributor Posts: 6,125 Member No.: 13 Joined: 6-June 05	Aw. Who will be left to beam us up?

knightmuzic	Posted: Jul 20 2005, 10:24 PM
Evil Admin Extraordinaire� Group: Admin Posts: 2,726 Member No.: 1 Joined: 31-May 05	Poor Scotty.

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