Literotica Cemetary

[JennyOHill2]

Don Grady, one of TV’s ‘My Three Sons,’ dies at 68

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Don Grady, who was one of television’s most beloved big brothers as Robbie Douglas on the long-running 1960s hit “My Three Sons,” died June 27. He was 68.

His “My Three Sons” co-star Barry Livingston, who played youngest brother Ernie, confirmed the death to the Associated Press. Livingston said that Mr. Grady had been suffering from cancer and was receiving hospice care at his home in Thousand Oaks, Calif., but the exact cause and place of death were not immediately clear.

Born Don Louis Agrati on June 8, 1944, in San Diego, Mr. Grady had a brief stint singing and dancing on “The Mickey Mouse Club,” beginning at age 13.

But he was best known as one of Fred MacMurray’s “My Three Sons” on the series that ran on ABC and later CBS from 1960 to 1972.

The popular show, which featured MacMurray as a widowed aeronautical engineer struggling to raise three boys, was among the longest running family sitcoms, with 380 episodes.

In the show’s earlier years, Mr. Grady was the middle brother, with Tim Considine playing the oldest, Mike, and Stanley Livingston playing the youngest brother, Chip. When Considine left the show, Barry Livingston became the adopted “third” son, and Mr. Grady became the cool, handsome and assured eldest brother.

“It’s the oldest cliche in the world when TV brothers start referring to each other like biological brothers,” Barry Livingston said, “but he was the oldest, and somebody I looked up to and learned from a great deal about life.”

A musical prodigy from a young age, Mr. Grady appeared with a band, the Greefs, in the series, and he played drums for the Yellow Balloon, a group that had a minor hit with a self-titled song in 1967.

He made a handful of guest appearances on TV series in the 1970s and 1980s but worked primarily as a musician and composer. Mr. Grady wrote the theme for “The Phil Donahue Show” and music for the Blake Edwards movie “Switch” and the popular Las Vegas show “EFX,” a showcase for “Phantom of the Opera” star Michael Crawford.

“The one real through-line in his life was music,” Barry Livingston said. “I would think Don would love to be remembered for his great music as much as a teen idol and television icon.”

 

[JennyOHill2]

'I Love Lucy' actress Doris Singleton has died.

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Doris Singleton, an actress on "I Love Lucy" who played one of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo's neighbors and called her character "Lucy's nemesis," has died. She was 92.

Singleton died Tuesday in Los Angeles from complications of cancer, according to her nephew Henry Isaacs.

Lucie Arnaz, the daughter of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, posted on Facebook that Singleton died the same day that writer-director Nora Ephron passed away, according to the Associated Press.

"A day of saying hasta luego to two great ladies, Nora Ephron and Doris Singleton. May they both fly swiftly heavenward and enjoy a blissful rest for jobs well done down here. They were loved and appreciated and will be missed," she wrote.

Singleton appeared in 10 episodes between 1953 and 1957 and originally played Lillian Appleby. Her name was changed to Caroline Appleby in later episodes.

She called her bespectacled character "Lucy's nemesis" because the two housewives competed with their two sons, Singleton told the Archive of American Television of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Foundation in 2005.

"There was a rivalry there but she had to be nice, Lucy had to be nice to Caroline, because her husband owned the radio station."

Born Dorothea Singleton on Sept. 29, 1919, in Brooklyn, N.Y., she spent her childhood in New York and trained as a ballet dancer. She later moved with her family to Long Beach, where she attended high school.

As a singer and radio actress, she worked with Bob Hope. She met Ball in the 1940s while performing on the radio show "My Favorite Husband," Variety reported. Ball later invited her to join "I Love Lucy."

One of her last acting roles was in a 1982 episode of "Dynasty," but she later appeared on screen for the "American Masters" documentary "Finding Lucy" in 2000 and an "E! True Hollywood Story" about "I Love Lucy" in 2005.

The actress had stints on "Here's Lucy," "The Munsters," "The Dick Van Dyke Show," "Perry Mason," "All in the Family" and "Days of Our Lives" during her career. She also played Margaret Williams in "My Three Sons" in the 1960s. Don Grady, who played Robbie on the popular family sitcom, died Wednesday. He was 68.

Singleton was married for 61 years to the late comedy writer Charlie Isaacs, who died in 2002.

 

[Johnny_Ray_Wilson]

Andy Griffith, Dead at 86

Say the name Andy Griffith, and you've said something about America.

Griffith, who, as Sheriff Andy Taylor on the actor's namesake 1960s TV comedy, kept the peace, and represented a heartland ideal, died Tuesday, the actor's friend Bill Friday told WITN News. He was 86.

In addition to The Andy Griffith Show, Griffith created a darkly iconic character in the 1957 film, A Face in the Crowd, and won fans in the long-running whodunit series, Matlock. But, in the end, it was Mayberry that put him on the map.

From 1960 to 1968, Griffith's kindly sheriff raised a son, Opie, played by Ron Howard, and a high-strung deputy, Barney Fife, played by Don Knotts. That Taylor, a white lawman in the Civil Rights-era South, became a model of fairness was a tribute to the series. And to Griffith.

"We—everyone one on the show—have a real sense of community, of kindness, toward one another," Griffith told The New York Times in 1965. "The basic rule by which we live comes through...the kindness comes through."

Born June 1, 1926, in no place else but North Carolina, Griffith tapped his country roots for laughs in a popular 1950s comedy monolog which begat TV appearances, which begat Broadway and film work, via the Army comedy No Time for Sergeants.

Griffith traded on his aw-shucks persona as two-faced populist Lonesome Roads in Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd. Now considered a classic, the film "didn't make a dime" back in the day, its star once recalled.

"I'd struck out on Broadway, and I'd struck out in the movies, so I kinda had to go to television," Griffith said in 2008.

From the start, The Andy Griffith Show, with its classic, catchy whistling theme, was an audience and critical favorite. Griffith, however, never won an Emmy for the series, nor was he ever nominated for it. Knotts, who won five straight Emmys as the fumbling Fife, would say people thought, mistakenly, that Griffith wasn't acting, that he was just acting natural. Griffith would return the compliment, saying the show owed its early success to Knotts, who died in 2006.

The Andy Griffith Show went out on top. Griffith himself pulled the plug: Knotts, after all, had left the show for the movies a couple years earlier, and he wanted to try film, too.

But the film thing didn't work out for Griffith. And when he returned to TV, that didn't work out, either, as he starred in one failed series after another after another. A crippling bout with the viral Guillan-Barre syndrome, in the early 1980s, was yet another blow.

"I thought I was hot stuff, and I'd be able to anything I wanted," Griffith recalled in 1986. "I couldn't."

Then Griffith went back home. To Mayberry.

The 1986 TV-movie Return to Mayberry, reuniting survivors of Andy Griffith's original cast, was a hit. That fall, Matlock premiered. The rejuvenated Griffith went on to play the Southern defense attorney for more than a decade.

Among latter-day roles, Griffith rated Oscar buzz for playing the sage, if exacting diner owner in 2007's Waitress, and stumped for President Barack Obama in a 2008 campaign ad directed by Howard, his TV son turned Oscar-winning filmmaker. (More controversially, he appeared in a 2010 TV ad that promoted the Obama-backed health-care law.)

In 2005, on the occasion of the actor receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom, then-President George W. Bush neatly defined the man and where he stood in the collective American consciousness: "TV shows come and go, but there's only one Andy Griffith."

 

[JennyOHill2]

Seems there's a run on TV stars right now! Thank goodness for reruns of "My Three Sons", "I Love Lucy" and "The Andy Griffith Show".

 

[JennyOHill2]

Oscar-winning star Ernest Borgnine dies at 95

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LOS ANGELES—Ernest Borgnine, the beefy screen star known for blustery, often villainous roles, but who won the best-actor Oscar for playing against type as a lovesick butcher in "Marty" in 1955, died Sunday. He was 95.

His longtime spokesman, Harry Flynn, told The Associated Press that Borgnine died of renal failure at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with his wife and children at his side.

Borgnine, who endeared himself to a generation of Baby Boomers with the 1960s TV comedy "McHale's Navy," first attracted notice in the early 1950s in villain roles, notably as the vicious Fatso Judson, who beat Frank Sinatra to death in "From Here to Eternity."
Then came "Marty," a low-budget film based on a Paddy Chayefsky television play that starred Rod Steiger. Borgnine played a 34-year-old who fears he is so unattractive he will never find romance. Then, at a dance, he meets a girl with the same fear.

"Sooner or later, there comes a point in a man's life when he's gotta face some facts," Marty movingly tells his mother at one point in the film. "And one fact I gotta face is that, whatever it is that women like, I ain't got it. I chased after enough girls in my life. I-I went to enough dances. I got hurt enough. I don't wanna get hurt no more."
The realism of Chayefsky's prose and Delbert Mann's sensitive direction astonished audiences accustomed to happy Hollywood formulas. Borgnine won the Oscar and awards from the Cannes Film Festival, New York Critics and National Board of Review.

Mann and Chayefsky also won Oscars, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hailed the $360,000 "Marty" as best picture over big-budget contenders "The Rose Tattoo," "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing," "Picnic" and "Mister Roberts."
"The Oscar made me a star, and I'm grateful," Borgnine told an interviewer in 1966. "But I feel had I not won the Oscar I wouldn't have gotten into the messes I did in my personal life."

Those messes included four failed marriages, including one in 1964 to singer Ethel Merman that lasted less than six weeks.

But Borgnine's fifth marriage, in 1973 to Norwegian-born Tova Traesnaes, endured and brought with it an interesting business partnership. She manufactured and sold her own beauty products under the name of Tova and used her husband's rejuvenated face in her ads.

During a 2007 interview with The Associated Press, Borgnine expressed delight that their union had reached 34 years. "That's longer than the total of my four other marriages," he commented, laughing heartily.

Although still not a marquee star until after "Marty," the roles of heavies started coming regularly after "From Here to Eternity." Among the films: "Bad Day at Black Rock," "Johnny Guitar," "Demetrius and the Gladiators," "Vera Cruz."

Director Nick Ray advised the actor: "Get out of Hollywood in two years or you'll be typed forever." Then came the Oscar, and Borgnine's career was assured.
He played a sensitive role opposite Bette Davis in another film based on a Chayefsky TV drama, "The Catered Affair," a film that was a personal favorite. It concerned a New York taxi driver and his wife who argued over the expense of their daughter's wedding.
But producers also continued casting Borgnine in action films such as "Three Bad Men," "The Vikings," "Torpedo Run," "Barabbas," "The Dirty Dozen" and "The Wild Bunch."
Then he successfully made the transition to TV comedy.

From 1962 to 1966, Borgnine—a Navy vet himself—starred in "McHale's Navy" as the commander of a World War II PT boat with a crew of misfits and malcontents. Obviously patterned after Phil Silvers' popular Sgt. Bilko, McHale was a con artist forever tricking his superior, Capt. Binghamton, played by the late Joe Flynn.

The cast took the show to the big screen in 1964 with a "McHale's Navy" movie.
Borgnine's later films included "Ice Station Zebra," "The Adventurers," "Willard," "The Poseidon Adventure," "The Greatest" (as Muhammad Ali's manager), "Convoy," "Ravagers," "Escape from New York," "Moving Target" and "Mistress."

More recently, Borgnine had a recurring role as the apartment house doorman-cum-chef in the NBC sitcom "The Single Guy." He had a small role in the unsuccessful 1997 movie version of "McHale's Navy." And he was the voice of Mermaid Man on "SpongeBob SquarePants" and Carface on "All Dogs Go to Heaven 2."

"I don't care whether a role is 10 minutes long or two hours," he remarked in 1973. "And I don't care whether my name is up there on top, either. Matter of fact, I'd rather have someone else get top billing; then if the picture bombs, he gets the blame, not me."

Ermes Efron Borgnino was born in Hamden, Conn., on Jan. 24, 1917, the son of Italian immigrant parents. The family lived in Milan when the boy was 2 to 7, then returned to Connecticut, where he attended school in New Haven.

Borgnine joined the Navy in 1935 and served on a destroyer during World War II. He weighed 135 pounds when he enlisted. He left the Navy 10 years later, weighing exactly 100 pounds more.

"I wouldn't trade those 10 years for anything," he said in 1956. "The Navy taught me a lot of things. It molded me as a man, and I made a lot of wonderful friends."

For a time he contemplated taking a job with an air conditioning company. But his mother persuaded him to enroll at the Randall School of Dramatic Arts in Hartford. He stayed four months, the only formal training he received.

He appeared in repertory at the Barter Theater in Virginia, toured as a hospital attendant in "Harvey" and played a villain on TV's "Captain Video."

His first marriage was to Rhoda Kenins, whom he met when she was a Navy pharmacist's mate and he was a patient. They had a daughter, but the marriage ended in divorce after his "Marty" stardom.

Borgnine married Mexican actress Katy Jurado in 1959, and their marriage resulted in headlined squabbles from Hollywood to Rome before it ended in 1964.

In 1963, he and Merman startled the show business world by announcing, after a month's acquaintance, that they would marry when his divorce from Jurado became final. The Broadway singing star and the movie tough guy seemed to have nothing in common, and their marriage ended in 38 days after a fierce battle.

Next came one-time child actress Donna Rancourt, with whom Borgnine had a daughter, and finally his happy union with Tova.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Richard D. Zanuck, producer of 'Jaws,' 'Alice in Wonderland,' dies at 77

Oscar-winning film producer Richard D. Zanuck — who, over a 53-year career, marshaled everything from mass-market popcorn movies like Jaws and Planet of the Apes, to prestige pictures like Driving Miss Daisy and Road to Perdition – died Friday, of a heart attack. He was 77.

Zanuck was born into Hollywood royalty; his father Darryl F. Zanuck ran 20th Century Fox, and the younger Zanuck was named president of production at the studio when he was 28. In 1971, he formed the Zanuck/Brown Co. with David Brown (who passed away in 2010), where he produced Steven Spielberg’s first two films, The Sugarland Express and Jaws, as well as The Verdict and Cocoon.

In 1990, Zanuck won an Oscar for Best Picture with wife Lili Fini Zanuck for Driving Miss Daisy. One year later, the Academy bestowed Zanuck with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, the highest honor the Academy can give a creative film producer. (In 2000, Zanuck and his wife produced the Oscar telecast, to wide acclaim.) Over the last two decades, Zanuck has produced six of director Tim Burton’s films, most recently Dark Shadows.

Zanuck is survived by his wife Lili, sons Harrison and Dean, and nine grandchildren.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Oscar-winning actress Celeste Holm dies at 95

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NEW YORK (AP) — Celeste Holm, a versatile, bright-eyed blonde who soared to Broadway fame in Oklahoma! and won an Oscar in Gentleman's Agreement but whose last years were filled with financial difficulty and estrangement from her sons, died Sunday, a relative said. She was 95.

Holm had been hospitalized about two weeks ago with dehydration. She asked her husband on Friday to bring her home and spent her final days with her husband, Frank Basile, and other relatives and close friends by her side, said Amy Phillips, a great-niece of Holm's who answered the phone at Holm's apartment on Sunday.

Holm died around 3:30 a.m. at her longtime apartment on Central Park West, located in the same building where Robert De Niro lives and where a fire broke out last month, Phillips said.

"I think she wanted to be here, in her home, among her things, with people who loved her," she said.

In a career that spanned more than half a century, Holm played everyone from Ado Annie— the girl who just can't say no in Oklahoma!— to a worldly theatrical agent in the 1991 comedy I Hate Hamlet to guest star turns on TV shows such as Fantasy Island and Love Boat II to Bette Davis' best friend in All About Eve.

She won the Academy Award in 1947 for best supporting actress for her performance in Gentlemen's Agreement and received Oscar nominations for Come to the Stable (1949) and All About Eve (1950).

Holm was also known for her untiring charity work — at one time she served on nine boards — and was a board member emeritus of the National Mental Health Association.

She was once president of the Creative Arts Rehabilitation Center, which treats emotionally disturbed people using arts therapies. Over the years, she raised $20,000 for UNICEF by charging 50 cents apiece for autographs.

President Ronald Reagan appointed her to a six-year term on the National Council on the Arts in 1982. In New York, she was active in the Save the Theatres Committee and was once arrested during a vigorous protest against the demolition of several theaters.

But late in her life she was caught up in a bitter, multi-year legal family battle that pitted her two sons against her and her fifth husband — former waiter Basile, whom she married in 2004 and was more than 45 years her junior. The court fight over investments and inheritance wiped away much of her savings and left her dependent on Social Security. The actress and her sons no longer spoke, and she was sued for overdue maintenance and legal fees on her Manhattan apartment.

The future Broadway star was born in New York on April 29, 1917, the daughter of Norwegian-born Theodore Holm, who worked for the American branch of Lloyd's of London, and Jean Parke Holm, a painter and writer.

She was smitten by the theater as a 3-year-old when her grandmother took her to see ballerina Anna Pavlova. "There she was, being tossed in midair, caught, no mistakes, no falls. She never knew what an impression she made," Holm recalled years later.

She attended 14 schools growing up, including the Lycee Victor Duryui in Paris when her mother was there for an exhibition of her paintings. She studied ballet for 10 years.

Her first Broadway success came in 1939 in the cast of William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life. But it was her creation of the role of man-crazy Ado Annie Carnes in the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II's musical Oklahoma! in 1943 that really impressed the critics.

She only auditioned for the role because of World War II, she said years later. "There was a need for entertainers in Army camps and hospitals. The only way you could do that was if you were singing in something."

Holm was hired by La Vie Parisienne, and later by the Persian Room at the Plaza Hotel to sing to their late-night supper club audiences after the Oklahoma! curtain fell.

The slender, blue-eyed blonde moved west to pursue a film career. "Hollywood is a good place to learn how to eat a salad without smearing your lipstick," she would say.

"Oscar Hammerstein told me, 'You won't like it,'" and he was right, she said. Hollywood "was just too artificial. The values are entirely different. That balmy climate is so deceptive." She returned to New York after several years.

Her well-known films included The Tender Trap and High Society but others were less memorable. "I made two movies I've never even seen," she told an interviewer in 1991.

She attributed her drive to do charity work to her grandparents and parents who "were always volunteers in every direction."

She said she learned first-hand the power of empathy in 1943 when she performed in a ward of mental patients and got a big smile from one man she learned later had been uncommunicative for six months.

"I suddenly realized with a great sense of impact how valuable we are to each other," she said.

In 1979 she was knighted by King Olav of Norway.

In the 1990s, Holm and Gerald McRainey starred in CBS TV's Promised Land, a spinoff of Touched by an Angel. In 1995, she joined such stars as Tony Randall and Jerry Stiller to lobby for state funding for the arts in Albany, New York. Her last big screen role was as Brendan Fraser's grandmother in the romance Still Breathing.

Holm was married five times and is survived by two sons and three grandchildren. Her marriage in 1938 to director Ralph Nelson lasted a year but produced a son, Theodor Holm Nelson. In 1940, she married Francis Davies, an English auditor. In 1946, she married airline public relations executive A. Schuyler Dunning and they had a son, Daniel Dunning.

During her fourth marriage, to actor Robert Wesley Addy, whom she married in 1966, the two appeared together on stage when they could. In the mid-1960s, when neither had a project going, they put together a two person show called Interplay — An Evening of Theater-in-Concert that toured the United States and was sent abroad by the State Department. Addy died in 1996.

 

[blobfish]

American Originality

American Originality died yesterday after 236 years of life. During its final years, it seemed as though things were looking up, after television programs such as "Walking Dead" and "Mad Men" began airing. Unfortunately, "Cajun Pawn Stars" was the final death blow. American Originality is survived by its cousin, British Originality.

 

[JennyOHill2]

'7 Habits' author Stephen Covey dead at 79

(CNN) -- Author Stephen Covey, whose "The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" sold more than 20 million copies, died Monday at Eastern Idaho Regional Medical Center, a hospital spokeswoman said. He was 79.

Covey's family issued a statement, reported by CNN affiliate KSL, saying he died from residual effects of an April bicycle accident.

"In his final hours, he was surrounded by his loving wife and each one (of) his children and their spouses, just as he always wanted," the statement said, according to KSL.
Covey was "one of the world's foremost leadership authorities, organizational experts and thought leaders," according to a biography posted on the website of his 2011 book, "The 3rd Alternative."

Other best-sellers by Covey include "First Things First," "Principle-Centered Leadership," and "The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness," according to the biography.
"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People" has been named one of the most influential management books by several organizations, including Time and Forbes magazines. The audio book is the best-selling nonfiction audio in history, according to the website.

Once named one of Time magazine's 25 most influential Americans, according to the biography, Covey "made teaching principle-centered living and principle-centered leadership his life's work."

Covey held a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Utah, a master's in business administration from Harvard and a doctorate from Brigham Young University. He also received 10 honorary doctorate degrees, his biography said.

He founded Covey Leadership Center, which in 1997 merged with Franklin Quest to create FranklinCovey Co. The company is a "global consulting and training leader in the areas of strategy execution, leadership, customer loyalty, sales performance, school transformation and individual effectiveness," with 44 offices in 147 countries, according to the website.

In 2010, Covey joined Utah State University's Jon M. Huntsman School of Business faculty as a tenured full professor, the biography said.

Covey and his wife, Sandra, lived in Provo, Utah. He was a father of nine, a grandfather of 52 and a great-grandfather of two, according to the website.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Sylvester Stallone's Son Sage Dead at 36

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Filmmaker Sage Moonblood Stallone's lawyer says the 36-year-old son of film star Sylvester Stallone was found dead Friday in his Los Angeles home.

The younger Stallone's attorney, George Braunstein, confirmed his death to the New York Post, but did not disclose the cause.

The newspaper quoted sources it identified only as being close to the case as saying a prescription drug overdose is suspected, but it was unclear whether it was accidental or a suicide.

"I have just gotten a report that he was found dead at his home," Braunstein told the Post of Sylvester Stallone's child with his ex-wife Sasha Czack.

"He was in good spirits, and working on all kinds of projects," said Braunstein. "He was planning on getting married. I am just devastated. He was an extremely wonderful, loving guy. This is a tragedy."

A Los Angeles Police Department representative told the Post there was "no suspicion of foul play or criminal activity."

Police discovered Stallone's body after someone asked them to check on him because he hadn't been in touch.

Sage Stallone made his big-screen debut alongside his father in "Rocky V."

Sylvester Stallone's publicist, Michelle Bega, told TMZ the action star is "devastated and grief-stricken over the sudden loss of his son, Sage Stallone."

"His compassion and thoughts are with Sage's mother, Sasha," Bega said. "Sage was a very talented and wonderful young man. His loss will be felt forever."

 

[JustSkye]

American Originality

American Originality died yesterday after 236 years of life. During its final years, it seemed as though things were looking up, after television programs such as "Walking Dead" and "Mad Men" began airing. Unfortunately, "Cajun Pawn Stars" was the final death blow. American Originality is survived by its cousin, British Originality.

Excellent.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Martin Pakledinaz, Costume Designer, Dies at 58

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Martin Pakledinaz, a costume designer who was nominated 10 times for Tony Awards in the last 15 years and won twice, and whose work in opera, dance and regional theater made him one of the most prolific stage craftsmen of his generation, died at his home in Manhattan. He was 58.

The cause was brain cancer, his agent, Patrick Herold, said.

Mr. Pakledinaz (pronounced pack-leh-DEEN-ehz) received Tonys for the 1999 revival of “Kiss Me, Kate,” starring Marin Mazzie and Brian Stokes Mitchell, and for “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” a 2002 musical based on the 1967 movie with Julie Andrews.

Sutton Foster, who won a Tony Award for her performance in the title role of ‘Millie,’ said Mr. Pakledinaz’s costume designs were integral to her characterization of Millie, a small-town girl who comes to New York in the early 1920s hoping to marry a rich man. Her costumes tell her story, evolving from Kansas City high-necked Sunday-best to New York-girl-Friday attire and then to a series of progressively skimpier outfits designed for the free-spirited dancing of an ever more modern Millie, the flapper.

“My characters were defined from the fabric, the seams, the details of his work, his eye,” Ms. Foster said in a statement on Monday.

Mr. Pakledinaz also designed Ms. Foster’s costumes in the revival last year of “Anything Goes,” for which she won another Tony. He was nominated for a Tony for that production and for seven others, including “Lend Me a Tenor,” “Gypsy,” “The Pajama Game,” “Golden Child” and the 2009 revival of “Blithe Spirit.”

He received his first nomination for “The Life,” a 1997 musical about Times Square prostitutes, and his last for this season’s “Nice Work if You Can Get It,” with Matthew Broderick.

Mr. Pakledinaz also designed costumes for the San Francisco Ballet, the Mark Morris Dance Group, a Metropolitan Opera production of “Iphigénie en Tauride,” the 2011 Radio City Music Hall Christmas Spectacular and “My Week With Marilyn,” the sumptuous 2011 film about Marilyn Monroe’s moviemaking sojourn in Britain in 1956; it earned Michelle Williams, as Monroe, an Academy Award nomination.

Martin Philip Pakledinaz was born in Sterling Heights, Mich., on Sept. 1, 1953, one of eight children of James and Dorothy Pakledinaz. After graduating from Wayne State University and receiving his master’s in drama at the University of Michigan, he moved to New York in 1977. His survivors include his sister and brothers.

Mr. Pakledinaz had a long professional relationship with the director Peter Sellars, with whom he collaborated at the Santa Fe Opera and at performance halls in Paris, Spain and Salzburg, Austria. He recently worked with the director Stephen Wadsworth in his production of “The Bartered Bride,” a joint effort of Juilliard School and the Metropolitan Opera.

In accepting the 2002 Tony Award for best costume design for his work in “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” Mr. Pakledinaz choked up as he thanked “the three Millies in my life” — his mother and two costume-design mentors, Theoni V. Aldredge and Barbara Matera. Speaking of his craft, he said, “Costumes have to tell you in a moment what that person is feeling, what they’re going through — what changes are happening.”

 

[JennyOHill2]

Sally Ride, first U.S. woman in space, dies at 61

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Sally Ride, the first U.S. woman to travel into space, died on Monday after a 17-month battle with pancreatic cancer, according to her organization, Sally Ride Science. She was 61.

Ride broke new ground for American women in 1983 when at the age of 32 she and four crewmates blasted off aboard space shuttle Challenger. She returned to space for a second mission a year later.

Ride grew up in Los Angeles and attended Stanford University, where she earned degrees in physics and English. She joined NASA's astronaut corps in 1978.

She was assigned to a third shuttle flight, but training for the mission was cut off after the fatal 1986 Challenger accident that claimed the lives of six colleagues and a schoolteacher.

Ride served as a member of the presidential commission that investigated the accident, then assisted the agency as an administrator with long-range and strategic planning.

She left NASA in 1989 and joined Stanford as a professor. Ride's interest in education extended to younger students, particularly women whom she targeted with her science education startup Sally Ride Science in San Diego.

The company creates science programs and publications for elementary and middle school students and educators.

Ride also authored five science books for children and served on dozens of NASA, space and technology advisory panels, including the board that investigated the second fatal space shuttle accident in 2003.

Ride, who was also a science writer, is survived by her mother, her partner, Tam O'Shaughnessy, a sister, a niece and a nephew.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Sherman Hemsley Dies at 74

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Sherman Hemsley, the hot-tempered, upwardly mobile, janitor-turned-dry-cleaner-owner George Jefferson in TV's iconic The Jeffersons, has died at 74.

Hemsley died at his home in El Paso, Texas, police say. A cause of death was not immediately known.

Introduced each week with the gospel Movin' On Up theme song, Norman Lear's show gave Hemsley a larger-than-life character who delivered a brand of comedy all his own.

Zingers like "If I paid you to think, you could cash your check at the penny arcade!" paired with over-the-top gestures left audiences across the country in stitches. The show has lived on for years in reruns on cable.

The actor, who first played the role in All in the Family – going head to bigoted head with Carroll O'Connor's Archie Bunker – went on to embody a softer character, Deacon Ernest Frye on TV's Amen.

Born in South Philadelphia, Hemsley dropped out of high school to join the Air Force. He returned to Philadelphia and worked for the U.S. Postal Service, while taking acting classes at night.

After performing with local groups in Philadelphia, Hemsley moved to New York to make his Broadway debut as Gitlow in Purlie.

While touring with the production, television writer and producer Lear contacted Hemsley to play the role of Jefferson on his new sitcom, All in the Family. Hemsley hesitated to accept but Lear held the role open for him and two years later, Hemsley joined the cast.

Less than two years after Hemsley made his television debut, he and All in the Family costar Isabel Sanford were given their own spin-off in The Jeffersons. The series earned Hemsley Emmy and Golden Globe nominations in 1984 and 1985 respectively.

Sanford died in 2004 at age 86.

In 1986, Hemsley was cast as Deacon Ernest Frye in the NBC series, Amen. The role would last five seasons, ending in 1991.

He was also a professional singer and released a single on Sutra Record called "Ain't That a Kick in the Head" in 1989. In 1992, he released Dance, an R&B album.

Although he retired from television acting, Hemsley joined Sanford through the late '90s and early 2000's to reprise their roles as George and Louise "Weezy" Jefferson on guest spots. The duo appeared on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and in commercials for Old Navy, Gap and Denny's.

Hemsley had no wife or children.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Tom Davis, Comedian and ‘SNL’ Sketch Writer, Dies at 59

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In 2004, contestants on “Jeopardy!” were stumped by the clue “He was the comedy partner of Al Franken.”

Tom Davis, that comedy partner, sighed as he watched. He was so inured to playing second fiddle to Mr. Franken, now a Democratic senator from Minnesota, that he called himself Sonny to Mr. Franken’s Cher.

But the fact is that Mr. Davis helped shape Mr. Franken’s comedy, and vice versa, from the time they entertained students with rebellious, razor-edged humor at high school assemblies in Minnesota.

In 1975, Mr. Davis, brilliant at improvisational comedy, and Mr. Franken, a whiz at plotting funny sequences, became two of the first writers on a new show called “Saturday Night Live,” which has lasted 37 years. (The two should actually be called one of the show’s first writers: they accepted a single salary of $350 a week. Each, singly, was called “the guys.”)

Mr. Davis never lost the quirky, original tone that helped shape the show, and in his last months he referred to death as “deanimation.” He deanimated at his home in Hudson, N.Y., at age 59. The cause was throat and neck cancer, his wife, Mimi Raleigh, said.

With Mr. Franken and others, Mr. Davis helped create the clan of extraterrestrials known as the Coneheads, who attributed their peculiarities to having come from France. He and Dan Aykroyd collaborated on Mr. Aykroyd’s impersonation of Julia Child, in which the television chef cuts herself and bleeds to death after grabbing a phone to dial 911, only to find it’s a prop. As she collapses she bids her audience “Bon appétit!”

In an interview on Thursday, Mr. Aykroyd spoke of Mr. Davis’s “massive contribution” to the show, characterizing him as “very disciplined” and able to herd less focused writers toward something concrete. “There was no frivolous waste of time,” he said.

Mr. Davis was present at the creation of Irwin Mainway (played by Mr. Aykroyd), head of a company that made “Bag o’ Glass” and other dangerous toys. He midwifed Theodoric of York, a medieval barber-surgeon, played by the guest host Steve Martin, who believed bloodletting cured everything. A famous sketch about a drunken President Richard M. Nixon stumbling around the White House conversing with past presidents’ portraits and spouting anti-Semitism? Mr. Davis and Mr. Franken wrote it.

They flirted with the margins of taste: a sketch about the Holocaust was rejected, but others about child abuse and the murder of lesbians made it onto the air.

In the early years of “Saturday Night Live,” Mr. Davis and Mr. Franken also appeared as a comic duo. One Franken and Davis routine was “The Brain Tumor Comedian,” in which Mr. Franken, his head bandaged, tried to tell jokes but kept forgetting the punch line. Mr. Davis fought tears as he implored the audience to applaud.

Mr. Davis shared three Emmys for his writing on the show and another for “The Paul Simon Special” in 1977.

Thomas James Davis was born in Minneapolis on Aug. 13, 1952, and attended the private Blake School, where he and Mr. Franken bonded over comedians like Jack Benny and Bob and Ray. Their announcements of school events at the morning assembly were peppered with sarcasm, and soon they were performing at a local comedy club.

After graduating, Mr. Franken headed for Harvard, while Mr. Davis chose the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., because, he said, he had heard that it had a foreign study program in India, where he hoped to smoke opium. (They did, and he did.)

After a year of college, Mr. Davis returned to Minneapolis to work in improvisational comedy. And after Mr. Franken graduated, the two convened in Los Angeles to do stand-up and caught the attention of Lorne Michaels, the creator of “Saturday Night Live.” Mr. Michaels summoned them to New York, where he negotiated with the writers’ union to offer the two a single apprentice job.

In a recent interview, Senator Franken said he and Mr. Davis had complemented each other, with Mr. Davis bringing his improvisational experience to the act and Mr. Franken contributing his skill at structuring a routine. Mr. Davis’s humor had a sardonic, even cynical, sting, Mr. Franken said, but retained “sweetness and a Minnesota outlook.”

Mr. Davis lived a defiantly unconventional life. In his 2009 memoir, “Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL From Someone Who Was There,” he wrote that he first used LSD while watching “2001: A Space Odyssey” at a Minneapolis drive-in. At the peak of the Vietnam War, he decided to join the Marines, he said, then decided against it after undergoing a revolution in consciousness at a Jimi Hendrix concert.

Mr. Davis worked for “Saturday Night Live” from 1975 to 1980, and again from 1986 to 1994. In addition to writing, he produced shows in his second stint. He also collaborated with Mr. Aykroyd and Bonnie and Terry Turner to write the film “Coneheads” (1993). (The “Conehead” characters, he wrote in his memoir, were inspired by a trip Mr. Davis and Mr. Aykroyd took to Easter Island, famous for its towering stone statues.) With Mr. Franken he wrote and starred in the film “One More Saturday Night” (1986).

Mr. Davis retired in the mid-1990s but returned to “SNL” as a writer as recently as 2003.

He and Mr. Franken were so close that Mr. Franken named his daughter Thomasin Davis Franken. But the two broke up as a team in 1990 when Mr. Franken tired of his friend’s drug abuse. They reconciled a decade later, and Mr. Davis obliged his friend by publishing his all-too-candid autobiography only after Senator Franken was elected. In his book, Mr. Davis wrote, “I love Al as I do my brother, whom I also don’t see very much.”

In addition to his wife and his brother, Robert, Mr. Davis is survived by his mother, Jean Davis.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Chad Everett, Dashing Dr. Gannon of ‘Medical Center’, Dies at 75

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Chad Everett, the lean, handsome actor who mended broken hearts as well as broken bones as Dr. Joe Gannon on the television drama “Medical Center” in the 1970s, died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 75.

The cause was lung cancer, his daughter Kate Thorp said.

Tall and chisel-cheeked with crystal-blue eyes, Mr. Everett acted in more than three dozen television series and films, including having leading roles in two other prime-time series in the 1980s and ’90s, “The Rousters” and “McKenna.”

But he was best known as the soft-spoken surgeon who soothes the worries of his patients, their families and his colleagues in “Medical Center,” set in a fictitious teaching hospital in Los Angeles. It was broadcast on CBS from 1969 to 1976.

“Understatement is apparently a highly salable commodity on TV,” The Washington Post wrote in a 1975 article about male stars. “Chad Everett, a big-city type, seldom stoops to histrionics as he lethargically makes his rounds on ‘Medical Center.’ ”

In a 1969 episode, O. J. Simpson played a bedeviled college football star who Dr. Gannon suspects suffers from serious mental problems. The doctor persists in his efforts to determine the cause of the player’s erratic behavior.

“Mr. Everett was effective as the surgeon, neither drooling in excessive compassion nor being argumentatively tough,” the critic Jack Gould wrote of the episode in The New York Times.

Mr. Everett was far less reserved in other roles. In the 1983 NBC series “The Rousters,” set in a carnival that travels around the West, he played a rough-and-tumble bouncer and peacekeeper. His character had a difficult time convincing strangers that he was called Wyatt Earp (named for his great-grandfather, the famous gunfighter). That year Mr. Everett also appeared in the ABC mini-series “Malibu,” as a fading tennis professional.

In “McKenna,” on ABC in the 1994-95 season, he played Jack McKenna, who runs an outdoor tour business for often troublesome customers.

“He did his own stunts — horseback riding, river rafting ” Mr. Everett’s daughter said. “At one point they were rafting with a live bobcat on the raft.”

In 2006, Mr. Everett portrayed a closeted gay police officer in an episode of “Cold Case” on CBS.

His movie career included small roles in the 1998 remake of “Psycho” and David Lynch’s “Mulholland Dr.” (2001). He had a leading role in “Airplane II: The Sequel” (1982), playing a dotty engineer who builds the first commercial space shuttle to the moon, a spacecraft so flimsy its terrified passengers are doomed.

Raymon Lee Cramton was born in South Bend, Ind., on June 11, 1937, to Ted and Virdeen Hopper Cramton. (He changed his professional name, his sister said, because he was tired of explaining, “Raymon, no ‘D’, Cramton, no ‘P’.”) The family later moved to Dearborn, Mich., where his father worked as an auto parts salesman.

After graduating from high school, Mr. Everett attended Wayne State University, where he began acting in stage productions. He then went to Hollywood, where, after securing several small roles, he signed a contract with MGM.

Mr. Everett married Shelby Grant, an actress, in 1966; she died last year. Besides his daughter Kate, he is survived by another daughter, Shannon Everett; his sister, Deannie Elliott; and six grandchildren.

 

[RobDownSouth]

RIP George Jefferson
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[JennyOHill2]

Geoffrey Hughes, English film and TV actor, dies at 68

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Geoffrey Hughes was an English actor who died at 68 on Friday, July 27, 2012. He is survived by his wife, Susan. The Hughes' resided on The Isle of Wight, a county and the largest island in England.

Fans remember Hughes the best in his comedic roles such as Onslow from "Keeping Up Appearances" starring Katherine Routledge.

With an extensive background in stage acting, Hughes also made a wide range of television and film appearances. He, too, was known for a series of supporting roles in popular UK television dramas.

This actor kept busy with the British drama series, "Heartbeat" (2001–05, 2007), "The Royle Family" (1998–2000, 2006, 2008), "Keeping Up Appearances," as Onslow, from 1990-1995, and he was Eddie Yeats in the soap opera "Coronation Street" (1974–83, 1987).

Hughes had considerable acting experiences even before Coronation Street. Whereas some actors find that a problem when they depart from a long-running series.

A few of Geoffrey's film credits include Till Death Us Do Part (1969), The Bofors Gun (1969) and Carry On at Your Convenience (1971).

Hughes was also the voice of Paul McCartney in The Beatles' cartoon film Yellow Submarine (1968).

Prostate cancer is what took the life of Geoffrey Hughes. He had been receiving treatment at Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth, near his Isle of Wight home.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Titans WR O.J. Murdock dies from self-inflicted gunshot wound

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According to police, 25-year-old Titans wide receiver O.J. Murdock has died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound outside of his high school in Tampa, Florida.

Murdock, who was twice excused from Titans practice over the weekend for "personal reasons," was found in his car outside of his high school on Monday morning, police said, and transported in his car to a local hospital while in critical condition.

"At approximately 8:30 a.m., officers discovered the victim's body in his car in front of Middleton High School with an apparent self inflicted gunshot wound," the Tampa police report reads. "He was transported to Tampa General Hospital in critical condition where he died at 10:43 a.m. He is a Tennessee Titans football player."

The Titans confirmed Murdock's passing on Monday afternoon.

"We are shocked and saddened to hear of O.J. Murdock's death this morning," the Titans said in a statement released by the team. In his brief time here, a number of our players, coaches and staff had grown close to O.J., and this is a difficult time for them. He spent the last year battling back from an Achilles injury as he prepared for this year's training camp. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and friends as they try to cope with this tragedy."

Murdock signed with the Titans as an undrafted free agent out of Fort Hays State after transferring from South Carolina where he played for two years. At one point in his tenure with the Gamecocks, Murdock was teammates with Kenny McKinley, who committed suicide in September of 2010.

 

[Bacigalupo]

Mary Tamm. Actress; Time Lady

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British actress Mary Tamm, known for playing the first incarnation of Romana during Doctor Who’s “Key To Time” season in 1978 and 1979, has died of cancer. She was 62.

 

[CaptainKirk]

Norman Alden, famous character actor.

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The respected character actor Norman Alden, has died age 87. Alden appeared in the films ‘Back to the Future’ and ‘Ed Wood’.

Norman Alden was born in September 13, 1924 in Fort Worth, Texas. He was sent to Europe in World War II and then, in peacetime, attended the Texas Christian University. After University he moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. His fist significant role was ‘The Bob Cummings Show’ in 1957.

From this break, he provided the voice of Kay in ‘The Sword in the Stone’ film in 1963.

Alden was perhaps best known as the voice of Aquaman in 1970s cartoon Super Friends, although he also appeared, as Hollywood Gossip summaries, in several movies, most notably ‘Back to the Future’ (as the owner of Lou's Café), ‘The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp’ and Tim Burton’s ‘Ed Wood’.

His television work included ‘Charlie's Angels’, ‘Mary Hartman’, ‘JAG’ and the 1960s series of ‘Batman’.

As well as acting roles, the BBC notes, Norman Alden appeared as Lou the mechanic in the commercials for AC Delco.

In his later years Alden was staying at an assisted living residence in Los Angeles, having retired in 2006 aged 82. Alden died of natural causes. He leaves behind, as Hollywood com notes, his partner Linda Thieben and his children Brent and Ashley, as well as his ex-wife Sharon Hayden.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Gore Vidal, celebrated author, playwright, dies

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LOS ANGELES (AP) - Gore Vidal, the author, playwright, politician and commentator whose novels, essays, plays and opinions were stamped by his immodest wit and unconventional wisdom, died Tuesday at age 86, his nephew said.

Vidal died at his home in the Hollywood Hills at about 6:45 p.m. of complications from pneumonia, Burr Steers said. Vidal had been living alone in the home and had been sick for "quite a while," he said.

Along with such contemporaries as Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, Vidal was among the last generation of literary writers who were also genuine celebrities - fixtures on talk shows and in gossip columns, personalities of such size and appeal that even those who hadn't read their books knew who they were.

His works included hundreds of essays; the best-selling novels "Lincoln" and "Myra Breckenridge"; the groundbreaking "The City and the Pillar," among the first novels about openly gay characters; and the Tony-nominated play "The Best Man," revived on Broadway in 2012.

Tall and distinguished looking, with a haughty baritone not unlike that of his conservative arch-enemy William F. Buckley, Vidal appeared cold and cynical on the surface. But he bore a melancholy regard for lost worlds, for the primacy of the written word, for "the ancient American sense that whatever is wrong with human society can be put right by human action."

He was widely admired as an independent thinker - in the tradition of Mark Twain and H.L. Mencken - about literature, culture, politics and, as he liked to call it, "the birds and the bees." He picked apart politicians, living and dead; mocked religion and prudery; opposed wars from Vietnam to Iraq and insulted his peers like no other, once observing that the three saddest words in the English language were "Joyce Carol Oates." (The happiest words: "I told you so").

Vidal had an old-fashioned belief in honor, but a modern will to live as he pleased. He wrote in the memoir "Palimpsest" that he had more than 1,000 "sexual encounters," nothing special, he added, compared to the pursuits of such peers as John F. Kennedy and Tennessee Williams.

Vidal was fond of drink and alleged that he had sampled every major drug, once. He never married and for decades shared a scenic villa in Ravello, Italy, with companion Howard Austen.

Vidal would say that his decision to live abroad damaged his literary reputation in the United States. In print and in person, he was a shameless name dropper, but what names! John and Jacqueline Kennedy. Hillary Clinton. Tennessee Williams. Mick Jagger. Orson Welles. Frank Sinatra. Marlon Brando. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon.

Vidal formed his most unusual bond with Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. The two exchanged letters after Vidal's 1998 article in Vanity Fair on "the shredding" of the Bill of Rights and their friendship inspired Edmund White's play "Terre Haute."

"He's very intelligent. He's not insane," Vidal said of McVeigh in a 2001 interview.

Vidal also bewildered his fans by saying the Bush administration likely had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks; that McVeigh was no more a killer than Dwight Eisenhower and that the U.S. would eventually be subservient to China, "The Yellow Man's Burden."

Christopher Hitchens, who once regarded Vidal as a modern Oscar Wilde, lamented in a 2010 Vanity Fair essay that Vidal's recent comments suffered from an "utter want of any grace or generosity, as well as the entire absence of any wit or profundity." Years earlier, Saul Bellow stated that "a dune of salt has grown up to season the preposterous things Gore says."

A longtime critic of American militarism, Vidal was, ironically, born at the United States Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., his father's alma mater. Vidal grew up in a political family. His grandfather, Thomas Pryor Gore, was a U.S. senator from Oklahoma. His father, Gene Vidal, served briefly in President Franklin Roosevelt's administration and was an early expert on aviation. Amelia Earhart was a family friend and reported lover of Gene Vidal.

Vidal was a learned, but primarily self-educated man. Classrooms bored him. He graduated from the elite Phillips Exeter Academy, but then enlisted in the Army and never went to college. His first book, the war novel "Williwaw," was written while he was in the service and published when he was just 20.

Unable to make a living from fiction, at least when identified as "Gore Vidal," he wrote a trio of mystery novels in the 1950s under the pen name "Edgar Box" and also wrote fiction as "Katherine Everard" and "Cameron Kay." He became a playwright, too, writing for the theater and television. The political drama "The Best Man" was later made into a movie, starring Henry Fonda, was revived on Broadway in 2000 and again in 2012. Paul Newman starred in "The Left-Handed Gun," a film adaptation of Vidal's "The Death of Billy the Kid."

Vidal also worked in Hollywood, writing the script for "Suddenly Last Summer" and adding a subtle homoerotic context to "Ben-Hur." The author himself later appeared in a documentary about gays in Hollywood, "The Celluloid Closet." His acting credits included "Gattaca," ''With Honors" and Tim Robbins' political satire, "Bob Roberts."

Thanks to his friendship with Jacqueline Kennedy, with whom he shared a stepfather, Hugh Auchincloss, he became a supporter and associate of President Kennedy, and wrote a newspaper profile on him soon after his election. With tragic foresight, Vidal called the job of the presidency "literally killing" and worried that "Kennedy may very well not survive."

Before long, however, he and the Kennedys were estranged, touched off by a personal feud between Vidal and Robert Kennedy apparently sparked by a few too many drinks at a White House party. By 1967, the author was an open critic, portraying the Kennedys as cold and manipulative in the essay "The Holy Family." Vidal's politics moved ever to the left and he eventually disdained both major parties as "property" parties - even as he couldn't help noting that Hillary Clinton had visited him in Ravello.

Meanwhile, he was again writing fiction. In 1968, he published his most inventive novel, "Myra Breckenridge," a comic best seller about a transsexual movie star. The year before, with "Washington, D.C.," Vidal began the cycle of historical works that peaked in 1984 with "Lincoln."

The novel was not universally praised, with some scholars objecting to Vidal's unawed portrayal of the president. The author defended his research, including suggestions that the president had syphilis, and called his critics "scholar-squirrels," more interested in academic status than in serious history. But "Lincoln" stands as his most notable and sympathetic work of historical fiction, vetted and admired by a leading Lincoln biographer, David Herbert Donald, and even cited by the conservative Newt Gingrich as a favorite book. Gingrich's praise was contrasted by fellow conservative Rep. Michele Bachmann, who alleged she was so put off by Vidal's "Burr" that she switched party affiliation from Democrat to Republican.

In recent years, Vidal wrote the novel "The Smithsonian Institution" and the nonfiction best sellers "Perpetual War For Perpetual Peace" and "Dreaming War: Blood for Oil and the Cheney-Bush Junta." A second memoir, "Point to Point Navigation," came out in 2006. In 2009, "Gore Vidal: Snapshots in History's Glare" featured pictures of Vidal with Newman, Jagger, Johnny Carson, Jack Nicholson and Bruce Springsteen.

Vidal and Austen chose cemetery plots in Washington, D.C., between Jimmie Trimble and one of Vidal's literary heroes, Henry Adams. But age and illness did not bring Vidal closer to God. Wheelchair-bound in his 80s and saddened by the death of Austen and many peers and close friends, the impious author still looked to no existence beyond this one.

"Because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy's edge," he once wrote, "all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. "Because there is nothing else. Nothing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all."

Vidal is survived by his half-sister Nina Straight and half-brother Tommy Auchincloss.

 

[JennyOHill2]

Tony-Winning Producer Joan Stein Passes Away

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Joan Stein, who produced both theatre on the West and East Coasts and television in Los Angeles, died today from appendceal cancer, a family spokesperson announced. She was 59.

She graduated in 1974 with a B.A. in Theater and English at the State University of New York at Albany. After graduating, she began her illustrious theatre career producing and/or general managing over 80 plays and musicals.

In 1980, she began producing Off-Broadway with James Lapine’s Table Settings (1980), The Middle Ages (1983), The Miss Firecracker Contest (1984) and Tent Meeting (1987).

Joan Stein made her Broadway debut as a producer with Larry Shue’s The Nerd in 1987. Additional Broadway productions include: Catch Me If You Can, Legally Blonde, Butley, Nine to Five.

In 1982, she began a five-year tenure as the Managing Director of the historic Berkshire Theatre Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where she partnered with Artistic Director Josie Abady.

In 1990, she moved to Los Angeles, where she became the Executive Director of The Canon Theatre, producing and general managing productions that included Love Letters, Forever Plaid, Ruthless The Musical, Bermuda Avenue Triangle, Last Night At Ballyhoo and Nude, Nude Totally Nude starring Andrea Martin. Ms. Stein was also the theatre producer of the HBO Comedy Festival in Aspen.

In 1994, Ms. Stein partnered with producer Stephen Eich to present the Los Angeles premiere of Steve Martin’s Award-winning Picasso at the Lapin Agile at the Westwood Playhouse. The production later moved to Off Broadway’s Promenade Theatre and received the Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Production. Picasso then moved to San Francisco’s Theatre on the Square and continued to play both nationally and internationally.

Ms. Stein also produced Warren Leight’s Sideman on Broadway in 1998 and in 1999 she received the Tony Award for Best Play.

She partnered in 2002 with Steve Martin and created Martin/Stein Productions, a television company that developed and produced scripted and reality television programming for all broadcast networks, HBO and Showtime. Martin/Stein was a division of Carsey-Werner Productions. Productions include The Downer Channel and The Scholar with partners, Elizabeth Williams and Jon Murray.

Other television producing credits include: My Brother’ Wife starring John Ritter and Mel Harris for ABC and Crazy in Love starring Holly Hunter, Gena Rowlands and Bill Pullman for TNT.

Joan Stein’s most recent projects include Motherhood Out Loud with Susan Rose(Co-Conceivers/Producers), which opened at Primary Stages in New York City in September 2011; Standing On Ceremony - The Gay Marriage Plays; Mad Hot Ballroom, a new musical based on the Award winning documentary; and Baby It’s You!

In addition to producing, she created and manages two theatrical investment funds, was a co-founder and served on the Board of Directors of New York Theatre Workshop, and Women in Film, helped launch Broadway Cares and was a member of The Broadway League for 22 years.

Joan Stein is survived by her adoring husband of 35 years, director and landscape architect Ted Weiant. She is the daughter of Florence and the late David Stein. She is also survived by her sisters Marcia Stein Kirschner and Emily Stein and by her beloved nephew Keith Moscowitz his wife Michele and niece Traci Sacks her husband John and her great nieces and nephew Lily, Jacob and Marley Rae.

 

[Lorilei]

Composer Marvin Hamlisch Dies at 68

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"Marvin Hamlisch, who composed the scores for dozens of movies including The Sting and won a Tony for A Chorus Line, has died in Los Angeles at the age 68," The Associated Press reports.

According to the wire service:

"Family spokesman Jason Lee says Hamlisch died Monday after a brief illness. Other details aren't being released. Hamlisch's career included composing, conducting and arranging music from Broadway to Hollywood. His movies included The Way We Were and Sophie's Choice. He won three Academy Awards, four Emmys and a Tony."

As Hamlisch's website says:

"As composer, Hamlisch has won virtually every major award that exists: three Oscars, four Grammys, four Emmys, a Tony and three Golden Globe awards."

Playbill is also reporting his death.

Our colleagues at NPR Music will have much more. As they reported in 2000, A Chorus Line was the composer's first Broadway show.

Update at 10:07 a.m. ET. More Confirmation:

The Music Desk tells us that Hamlisch's death has now also been reported "by multiple orchestras he was associated with" as well as family spokesman Lee.

 

[JennyOHill2]

'Hairspray' co-writer Mark O'Donnell dies at 58

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NEW YORK — Mark O'Donnell, the Tony Award-winning writer behind such quirky and clever Broadway shows as "Hairspray and "Cry-Baby," died, his agent said. He was 58.

Jack Tantleff, O'Donnell's agent at the Paradigm agency, said the writer collapsed in the lobby of his apartment complex on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

"He was a huge talent, and a warm, witty and wonderful man who marched to his own drummer," Tantleff said.

O'Donnell won the 2003 Tony for best book of a musical for co-writing "Hairspray" with Thomas Meehan, and the pair earned Tony nominations in 2008 for doing the same for another John Waters work, "Cry-Baby."

O'Donnell was picked to help write the musical version of the 1988 Waters movie "Hairspray" because producer Margo Lion felt he "could appreciate Waters' voice but was idiosyncratic enough to inject his own personality into the piece."

The story centers on an overweight white teenager who lives to dance on "The Corny Collins Show," Baltimore's version of "American Bandstand." She also wants to integrate its all-white environs, and, along the way, be accepted for her full-figured self.

"The structure I had in mind was: Girl does Mash Potato, girl charms Baltimore, girl integrates nation," O'Donnell told The Associated Press in 2002. "My script was like a great Mad magazine article."

His other plays include "That's It, Folks!" ''Fables for Friends," ''The Nice and the Nasty," ''Strangers on Earth," ''Vertigo Park" and the musical "Tots in Tinseltown."

He wrote two novels, "Getting Over Homer" and "Let Nothing You Dismay," and published two collections of comic stories, "Elementary Education" and "Vertigo Park and Other Tales."

He also adapted Georges Feydeau's "Private Fittings" for the La Jolla Playhouse in California and a symphonic version of "Pyramus and Thisbe" for the Kennedy Center.

He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the George S. Kaufman Award.