The actor, who had had Alzheimer's disease for about five years, entered Sunrise in early summer. The increased socialization had helped improve his father's mental capacity, his son said. "He was a very loving and generous father," he said, "and he was handsome, charming and funny until the end."
Gene Barry, a genial actor of theatre, film and television, who made his most lasting mark on the stage as Georges, half of the mature gay couple at the center of Jerry Herman's musical La Cage Aux Folles, died Dec. 9 in Woodland Hills, CA. He was 90.
Barry's wife died in 2003, after 58 years of marriage. He is survived by two sons, one daughter, three grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.
Foote was 92. Foote died in his apartment in Hartford where he was preparing work on a production for next fall at the nonprofit theater.He wrote the screenplays for To Kill a Mockingbird, The Trip to Bountiful, and Tender Mercies, jewels all three.
chronicled America’s wistful odyssey through the 20th century in plays and films mostly set in a small town in Texas and left a literary legacy as one of the country’s foremost storytellers
Science fiction author Philip Jose Farmer died this morning at his home. He was 91.
He died in Los Angeles after a short illness, his film producer son-in-law Cleve Landsberg told Associated Press.
Number Six's famous cry, "I am not a number, I am a free man!" became both a counterculture catchphrase as well as an anguished plea for freedom.
He won two Emmy Awards for his work on detective drama Colombo with long-term friend Peter Falk, and appeared in the 1995 Mel Gibson film Braveheart as King Edward Longshanks. Fansites across the internet paid tribute to the cult star today.
As the star of Danger Man and The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan was the face of British cult television in the 1960s and the highest paid TV actor of his time. Orson Welles once said of McGoohan that he could have been one of the major stars of his generation: he had the looks and the intensity and painted most of the roles he played with a wryness and a satirical edge that made him a compelling actor to watch. Yet this complicated man, highly-strung, unpredictable and irascibly enigmatic, seemingly threw away his career while at the height of his fame and influence and was never again to fully recapture it.
died today of leukemia at her home in Bel-Air at the age of 76. She went peacefully and was surrounded by her son Eugene “Rod” Roddenberry Jr and family friends.
In a more enlightened age, Majel Barrett Roddenberry might have rated a Federation command. As it was, she helped rule the Star Trek universe.
There is very sad news today in the Star Trek world. Majel Barrett-Roddenberry, widow of Gene and known to fans as Nurse Chapel, the original Number One, Lwaxana Troi, and of course the voice of just about every Federation computer in every show and movie, has passed away at age 76.
Memphis broadcasting legend Fred Cook died this morning of heart failure. He was 83. Cook was best known for a 50-year career in Memphis radio
For those of us of a certain age, his is a deep loss, and a sign that radio as we once knew it is gone forever.
"He thought of radio as an art form," said John Powell, the long-time co-host with Mr. Cook of the popular WREC shows "Zero Hour" and "The Cook and Powell Show," which helped inform and entertain audiences with everything from news to music to scripted comedy skits to urbane banter.
Some might say he was a bit of a curmudgeon. Maybe it’s a trait of all former newspeople. Anyway, Mr. Cook left his mark on the news business in Memphis
Fred Cook had the voice for radio and the believability for television. But more than anything else, he had the humor, the style and the sheer likability that made him an authentic Memphis media legend.
Michael Crichton, the bestselling author behind the fictional world of Jurassic Park, died today at the age of 66 after a battle with cancer that he hid from the public eye.
One of the trademarks of Crichton's style is clean prose, fast pacing, and impeccably-researched biotech speculation.
His family said that he died after a "courageous and private battle against cancer"
His books have sold more than 150m copies. He also created the long-running US hospital TV drama ER.
"I'm not an everyday writer," Crichton told Time in 1995, "and I never have been." But he was a dedicated writer, producing more than two dozen novels and nonfiction books. He was also a publishing phenomenon and a fixture on Forbes' wealthiest-people lists.
Crichton was a distinctive figure in the entertainment business, a trained physician whose interests included writing, filmmaking and television. (He was physically distinctive as well, standing 6 feet 9 inches.)
Spielberg added: "Michael was a gentle soul who reserved his flamboyant side for his novels. There is no one in the wings that will ever take his place."
Crichton considered himself an a storyteller, not an educator or polemicist ("What I do is entertain people," he told EW in 1994, comparing himself to Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson, masters of narrative only later inducted into the literary canon), but he still wanted you to learn something, and he was adept at sneaking the spinach in there with the cotton candy.
The tragedy in losing a voice like this so relatively young seems magnified by the fact that he was trained in science, and struggling with cancer that all his training and studying couldn't cure. But his early work was substantial, and succeded in altering the shape of popular culture--part of a scientific, pop cultural, and literary legacy. His fans will miss him.
Mark V. Rosenker, the acting chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board, confirmed the finding, saying that while the remains were “very little,” he believed that Mr. Fossett’s identity could be confirmed genetically.
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