The Celebrity Obituary Thread

[Lin Sunderland]

RIP  Harry.

I did not think he was 91.

[LCat]

RIP to all of the celebs who passed away this year--They just couldn't hang on for a couple more days...

[davytriumph]

RIP Gerry Anderson. 

Brought me and many others hours of joy and excitement



http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/dec/26/gerry-anderson

[Lin Sunderland]

RIP Gerry.

I loved the Thunderbirds too.  It was amazing back then and it has stood the test of time. A neighbours 8 year old was busy telling me all about it a few weeks ago. His Dad had 'found' some old Thunderbirds VHS copies.

[Jed Cooper]

Patti Page has passed away on New Year's Day.  RIP Ms. Page.

Tennessee Waltz singer Patti Page dies at 85             Patti Page/Wikipedia



Interview With Patti Page November 29, 2005 

She has charted a staggering 111 hits on pop, country and r&b charts ('Tennessee Waltz' was # 1 concurrently on all three charts), a feat no other artist in recording history can claim!

I have to correct this:  Elvis had 149 hits on the aforementioned charts and more; Billboard's Adult Contemporary, Gospel and Holiday charts.  Still, her achievements are impressive even by today's standards.

[Lin Sunderland]

RIP Pattie Page.

No matter how many hits she had she was a great singer. Tennessee Waltz was a favourite of my parents and I loved Cross over the Bridge.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5tWLyVYd4o

[LCat]

RIP, Patti Page!

[LCat]

RIP Gerry Anderson. 

Brought me and many others hours of joy and excitement



http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/dec/26/gerry-anderson

Isn't Gerry Anderson the same one who did Captain Scarlet? I used to watch that show all the time. I have to confess that as an adult, I purchased the entire Captain Scarlet series on DVD. (I don't know how I loved that show so!)

[KC]

Beate Sirota Gordon died last Sunday at the age of 89. As a 22-year-old interpreter on General MacArthur's staff in Japan after World War II, she helped write Japan's postwar Constitution. In particular, she was responsible for clauses on women's rights:

Her work — drafting language that gave women a set of legal rights pertaining to marriage, divorce, property and inheritance that they had long been without in Japan’s feudal society — had an effect on their status that endures to this day.

“It set a basis for a better, a more equal society,” Carol Gluck, a professor of Japanese history at Columbia University, said Monday in a telephone interview.

For decades, Ms. Gordon said nothing about her role in postwar Japan, at first because the work was secret and later because she did not want her youth — and the fact that she was an American — to become ammunition for the Japanese conservatives who have long clamored for constitutional revision.

But in the mid-1980s, she began to speak of it publicly. The release of her memoir, “The Only Woman in the Room,” published in Japanese in 1995 and in English two years later, made her a celebrity in Japan, where she lectured widely, appeared on television and was the subject of a stage play and a documentary film, “The Gift From Beate.”

In recent years, amid renewed attacks on the Constitution by Japanese conservatives, Ms. Gordon spoke out ardently in its defense.

Ms. Gordon was awarded the Order of the Sacred Treasure, a high honor bestowed by the Japanese government, in 1998. But perhaps the greatest accolade she received came from Japanese women themselves.

“They always want their picture taken with me,” Ms. Gordon told ABC News in 1999. “They always want to shake my hand. They always tell me how grateful they are.”

www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/world/asia/beate-gordon-feminist-heroine-in-japan-dies-at-89.html?pagewanted=all

R.I.P.

[higashimori]

R.I.P Patti Page. 

R.I.P Mme Sirota Gordon.

[KC]

Ada Louise Huxtable, architecture critic extraordinaire, R.I.P.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/08/arts/design/ada-louise-huxtable-architecture-critic-dies-at-91.html?pagewanted=all

Her very last column, published last December 3 in the Wall Street Journal, was an eloquent and reasoned put-down of the New York Public Library's plan to dismantle the heart of its central building:

Wall Street Journal link

[Lin Sunderland]

What an interesting column. So very well written.

She will be missed. I wonder if some of her column will become the basis of a book about her, if there is not already something on those lines.

RIP Ada Louise Huxtable.

[LCat]

RIP Ada Louise Huxtable.

[Jed Cooper]

Wow, sad indeed.  I remember seeing him on tv as a kid and only occasionally thereafter but he always projected a kind, friendly demeanor.  RIP Mr. Trailer, God bless.

Rex Trailer, host of ‘Boomtown’ TV show, dies at 84

Rex Trailer's Boomtown Official Website

[Jed Cooper]

More a celebrity by association but a celebrity nonetheless.  RIP Mr. Wilkinson.

Elvis Presley's rhythm guitar player, John Wilkinson, dies at age 67 in Southwest Missouri

Wilkinson first met Elvis Presley when he was 10 years old after sneaking into his dressing room before a show at the Shrine Mosque in Springfield. He amused Presley when he told him, "You can't play guitar worth a damn."

Family friend and spokesman Gary Ellison said a Springfield history museum recalled the pair's meeting in an exhibit that ran until about three weeks ago.

"John loved to tell that story," Ellison, a fellow musician, said Friday.

After the chance meeting, Wilkinson developed a name for himself as a singer and guitarist, performing with such groups as The New Christy Minstrels.

He was 23 when Presley saw him perform on a television show in Los Angeles in 1968, and asked him to join the TCB Band — not knowing he was the youngster who insulted his playing a decade earlier, Ellison recalled.

Wilkinson went on to play 1,200 shows as Presley's rhythm guitar player until the legendary singer's death in 1977.

[higashimori]

 " Nagisa Oshima, Iconoclastic Filmmaker, Dies at 80 "

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/movies/nagisa-oshima-iconoclastic-filmmaker-dies-at-80.html

Nagisa Oshima, the iconoclastic filmmaker who challenged and subverted the pieties of Japanese society and the conventions of Japanese cinema and who gained international notoriety in 1976 for the sexually explicit “In the Realm of the Senses,” died on Tuesday at a hospital near Tokyo. He was 80.

Among other later films, “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” (1983), a prisoner-of-war drama starring David Bowie and Ryuichi Sakamoto, was shot mainly in New Zealand. Mr. Oshima, collaborating with Luis Buñuel’s frequent screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, also put a twist on the French sex farce with “Max Mon Amour” (1986), which paired Charlotte Rampling and a chimpanzee.

His final film, the 19th-century samurai drama “Taboo” (1999), which he directed after suffering his first stroke, continued his late-career theme of forbidden love, bringing to the surface the homoerotic currents of “Mr. Lawrence.”

 

 I liked very much "Gohatto" ( “Taboo” 1999), it was the best for me.
 He was sick a long time .... rest in peace, Mr. Oshima...

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2013/01/15/world/asia/ap-as-obit-oshima.html?ref=news&_r=0
http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/jan/15/nagisa-oshima-dies-aged-80

[KC]

Pauline Phillips/Abigail Van Buren/Dear Abby, R.I.P.

New York Times obituary

A couple of samples quoted in the above obit:

Dear Abby: I have always wanted to have my family history traced, but I can’t afford to spend a lot of money to do it. Have you any suggestions? — M. J. B. in Oakland, Calif.

Dear M. J. B.: Yes. Run for a public office.

Dear Abby: Are birth control pills deductible? — Bertie

Dear Bertie: Only if they don’t work.

And my favorite:

Dear Abby: Two men who claim to be father and adopted son just bought an old mansion across the street and fixed it up. We notice a very suspicious mixture of company coming and going at all hours — blacks, whites, Orientals, women who look like men and men who look like women. This has always been considered one of the finest sections of San Francisco, and these weirdos are giving it a bad name. How can we improve the neighborhood? — Nob Hill Residents

Dear Residents: You could move.

[The Schofield Kid]

Conrad Bain who appeared briefly in one Clint Eastwood film and more notably the TV series Diff'rent Strokes passed away earlier in the week.

Charlotte Rae, who played Edna Garrett on both “Diff'rent Strokes,” and its spin-off “Facts of Life,” says she will “always cherish” working with her co-star Conrad Bain who passed on Monday at the age of 89.

http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/charlotte_rae_pays_tribute_to_conrad_HqzebyoyKtX3BDSbvJA4iM

[KC]

Conrad Bain who appeared briefly in one Clint Eastwood film and more notably the TV series Diff'rent Strokes passed away earlier in the week.

Bain played "Madison Avenue Man" in Coogan's Bluff. That would be Coogan's fellow passenger on the flight to New York who starts this exchange:

MAN: One of your cowboys step outta line in our fair city?

COOGAN: No, one of your boys stepped outta line in ours.

[KC]

Stan "The Man" Musial, one of the all-time baseball greats, dies at 92:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/20/sports/baseball/baseball-great-stan-musial-dies-at-92.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

A signature Musial image endures: He waits for a pitch in a left-handed crouch, his knees bent and close together, his body leaning to the left as he peers over his right shoulder, the red No. 6 on his back. The stance was likened to a corkscrew or, as the White Sox pitcher and Dodger coach Ted Lyons once described it, “a kid peeking around the corner to see if the cops are coming.”

Swinging from that stance, Musial won seven batting championships, hit 475 home runs and amassed 3,630 hits. His brilliance lay in his consistency. He had 1,860 hits at home and 1,860 on the road. He drove in 1,951 runs and scored 1,949 runs. And his power could be explosive: he set a major league record, equaled only once, when he hit five home runs in a doubleheader.

“There is only one way to pitch to Musial — under the plate,” Leo Durocher, the manager of the Brooklyn Dodger and New York Giant teams that Musial often victimized, once said.

He was renowned for his concentration at the plate, and his patience: he struck out only 696 times in 10,972 at-bats — a 6 percent ratio — in his 22 major league seasons, all as a Cardinal. A gentlemanly and sunny figure — he loved to play “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” on his harmonica — he was never ejected from a game. When admirers approached him, he chatted them up with his familiar “whattayasay, whattayasy.”

R.I.P.