RIP

[storyspinner70]

I'll miss you Ziggy... One of the absolute best!

[Genesis]

[cricket26]

[Orema]

Alan Rickman, Harry Potter and Die Hard actor, dies aged 69

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-35313604



Actor Alan Rickman, known for films including Harry Potter, Die Hard and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, has died at the age of 69, his family has said.

The star had been suffering from cancer, a statement said.

He became one of Britain's best-loved acting stars thanks to roles including Professor Snape in the Harry Potter films and Hans Gruber in Die Hard.

Tributes have come from figures like Sense and Sensibility director Ang Lee, who called him "a great human being".

He was also a "brilliant actor [and] a soulful actor", according to Lee, who cast Rickman opposite Kate Winslet in the 1995 film.

Announcing his death on Thursday, a family statement said: "The actor and director Alan Rickman has died from cancer at the age of 69. He was surrounded by family and friends."

Sir Michael Gambon, who appeared with Alan Rickman in Harry Potter as well as on stage, told BBC Radio 4 he was "a great friend".

He added: "Everybody loved Alan. He was always happy and fun and creative and very, very funny. He had a great voice, he spoke wonderfully well.

"He was intelligent, he wrote plays, he directed a play. So he was a real man of the theatre and the stage and that's how I think of Alan."

Actor Richard E Grant wrote on Twitter: "Farewell my friend. Your kindness and generosity ever since we met in LA in 1987 and ever since is incalculable."

Harry Potter actor James Phelps, who played Fred Weasley, said on Twitter he was "shocked and sad" to hear the news. He wrote: "One of the nicest actors I've ever met. Thoughts and prayers with his family at this time."

His twin brother Oliver Phelps, who played George Weasley, added: "Terribly sad news about the passing of Alan Rickman. A funny and engaging person who put a shy young actor at ease when I was on Harry Potter."

TV star and Bafta ceremony host Stephen Fry wrote: "What desperately sad news about Alan Rickman. A man of such talent, wicked charm and stunning screen and stage presence. He'll be sorely missed."

Actor David Morrissey also paid tribute. He said: "So sad to hear the news of Alan Rickman. A wonderful actor and lovely man. Tragic news."

The London-born star began his career in theatre, including with the Royal Shakespeare Company, before winning roles in TV dramas like Smiley's People and The Barchester Chronicles in the 1980s.

His performance as the manipulative seducer Le Vicomte in Les Liaisons Dangereuses on Broadway in 1986 brought him the first of two Tony Award nominations.

It also brought him to the attention of Die Hard producer Joel Silver, who offered him his film debut as a result.

He went on to become best known for playing screen villains - including the Sheriff of Nottingham in 1991's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, for which he won a Bafta award, and Judge Turpin opposite Johnny Depp in 2007's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.

But he showed his gentler side in films like 1990's Truly Madly Deeply, in which he played Juliet Stevenson's ghost lover and which also earned him a Bafta nomination.

Further Bafta nominations came for his roles as Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility and the calculating Eamon de Valera in 1996's Michael Collins.

The following year, he won a Golden Globe for best actor in a miniseries or television film for the title role in Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny.

Meanwhile, he continued to be a major presence on the stage in London and New York.

Another Tony nomination came for Private Lives in 2002, in which he appeared opposite Lindsay Duncan on Broadway following a transfer from London.

He recently revealed he had married Rima Horton in secret last year. The couple had been together since he was just 19 and she was 18.

[Bèsame*]

René Angélil has died at the age of 73, ABC News has confirmed.

Angélil, who has been married to the famed singer since 1994, had been battling cancer for some time.

"René Angélil, 73, passed away this morning as his home in Las Vegas after a long and courageous battle against cancer," a rep for the couple told People magazine. ""The family requests that their privacy be respected at the moment; more details will be provided at a later time."

[storyspinner70]

I never missed that show when I was little



http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment...ty-dead-at-74/

[Bèsame*]

RIP

Glenn Frey, The Eagles
Founding member. 1948-2016

[cricket26]

[cinnamongrrl]

Omg....Grizzly Adams was my favoritest show as a kid and I grew up listening to the Eagles...sigh...

I'm gonna have to stop reading this thread for a while...

[Kobi]

Vigoda was known best for playing perennially grumpy Detective Sergeant Phil Fish for three seasons on "Barney Miller" and another two on its spinoff, "Fish." He was also in "The Godfather" and briefly in "The Godfather Part II," playing Salvatore Tessio, a Mafia capo. Though these were his most notable roles, Vigoda was in dozens of other movies, including "Look Who's Talking," "Joe Versus the Volcano" and "Good Burger," and he was a cast member on TV shows "Dark Shadows," "As the World Turns" and "Santa Barbara."

Perhaps as well-known as Vigoda's career was the series of erroneous reports of his death. As early as 1982, when Vigoda was barely in his 60s, he was assumed dead when a People magazine story referred to him as "the late Abe Vigoda." Vigoda handled the error well, posing in a coffin, sitting up and holding a copy of the magazine with the mistake. Just five years later, the same error was made on TV station WWOR. It became a pop culture meme, one that Vigoda himself poked fun at during talk show appearances and in movie roles.

-------------------------


I double checked. It's true. Loved this guy in Barney Miller.

[cinnamongrrl]

I totally forgot that Abe Vigoda was on Barney Miller. I grew up watching the Godfather movies with my mother and it escaped me that that was him....

Didn't he just have a great face?? There's not a lot of great faces out there. He definitely had one....

[storyspinner70]

No, Fish, noooo I loved that show and his voice.

[Jesse]

Alyce Dixon, one of the first African-American women to serve in the army and believed to be the oldest living female veteran, died Wednesday. She was 108.

Thank you for your service Alyce Dixon, RIP.

[Gemme]

Earth, Wind & Fire founder Maurice White passed away.

[Greyson]

Originally Posted by Kobi

Fiery lesbian feminist activist/author/publisher Jeanne Cordova died peacefully at around 4:30am at her home in Los Angeles Sunday morning.

Jeanne

Jeanne and I met when we were both "baby butches." There were not too many Butch Mexican American activist back then in Los Angeles or anywhere for that matter. (I digress.) We did not always agree but I had and still have much respect for her. RIP Jeanne and thank you for all you did for our community.

[Kobi]

The character actor is best known for playing Commandant Eric Lassard in all seven Police Academy films, as well as the grouchy foster parent Henry Warnimont on the 1980s sitcom Punky Brewster.

Gaynes also starred opposite Dustin Hoffman in the 1982 film Tootsie, which received 10 Academy Award nominations, although only Jessica Lange won for best supporting actress.

Gaynes’ other film credits include The Way We Were, Altered States and Wag the Dog. He appeared in hundreds of episodes on television shows, including The Defenders, Mission: Impossible, Bonanza, The Six Million Dollar Man and Hawaii Five-0, as well as the daytime soap opera General Hospital.

He was 98.

[CherryWine]

Harper Lee, whose first novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” about racial injustice in a small Alabama town, sold more than 10 million copies and became one of the most beloved and most taught works of fiction ever written by an American, has died. She was 89.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/02/20...ww.google.com/

[candy_coated_bitch]

Oh, that's a tough one. I was I in the middle of Go Set a Watchman.

[C0LLETTE]

Originally Posted by CherryWine

Harper Lee, whose first novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” about racial injustice in a small Alabama town, sold more than 10 million copies and became one of the most beloved and most taught works of fiction ever written by an American, has died. She was 89.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/02/20...ww.google.com/

I so love photos of creative beautiful transformative women that smoked and lived to be 89. RIP Harper Lee.

[Kobi]

Yolande Betbeze Fox, a convent-educated Alabamian who defied convention, and set new standards, by refusing to tour the country as Miss America of 1951 in revealing bathing suits, died on Monday in Washington. She was 87.

By the time Ms. Fox won her title on Sept. 9, 1950, in Atlantic City, pageant officials, trying to calibrate propriety and sex appeal amid changing mores, had already decided to stop crowning Miss America while she was wearing a swimsuit. That pageant staple had been confined to the swimsuit competition, an event Ms. Fox — Ms. Betbeze at the time — had already won. She began her reign in a gown.

But given that the swimsuit competition’s chief sponsor, Catalina, manufactured swimwear, Ms. Fox was still expected to model bathing suits as the reigning Miss America.

What the organizers did not expect was her response. “Yolande declared, ‘I’m an opera singer, not a pinup!’ and refused posing in a bathing suit again,” according to her official biography on the pageant’s website.

As a result, Catalina withdrew as the pageant sponsor and began the rival Miss USA contest.

“In Yolande’s words, she made a stand for ‘propriety’ that has gone down as a significant flash of pageant history and altered the course of its future,” the official biography says.

Ms. Fox put it another way in an interview with The Washington Post in 1969: “There was nothing but trouble from the minute that crown touched my head.”

Ms. Fox never fulfilled her goal of becoming a professional opera singer, though she belted out “Caro Nome” from “Rigoletto” in the talent competition. But she used her newfound fame to become a model, theatrical producer and social activist.

She participated in a vigil in 1953 at Sing Sing prison to protest the impending execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Manhattan couple convicted of conspiring to commit espionage. She joined civil rights protesters in picketing a Woolworth’s in Times Square in 1960 to support black sit-ins at the store’s lunch counters in the South. (“I’m a Southern girl, but I’m a thinking girl,” she said.) And she joined demonstrations against nuclear weapons.

In a 2006 profile, Smithsonian magazine said Ms. Fox’s “exotic Basque looks” — she was of Basque ancestry — and her rebellious streak may have made her “the most unconventional Miss America ever.”

Yolande Betbeze (her mother picked her given name from a book of medieval history) was born in Mobile, Ala., on Nov. 29, 1928, the daughter of William and Ethel Betbeze. Her father was a butcher.

She was educated in Roman Catholic convent schools and the extension division of the University of Alabama. She began her beauty contest career in 1949, when she won Spring Hill College’s Miss Torch pageant. She entered the Miss Alabama competition hoping to win a scholarship to study singing in New York.

After her one-year reign, she studied philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York; married Matthew Fox, a movie executive (they had a daughter, Yolande Fox Campbell, who survives her, along with a granddaughter); and produced theater in a playhouse on East Houston Street.

She later moved to Washington, where she bought the Georgetown mansion formerly owned by Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and became a fixture of the capital’s social scene.

In the 1960s, Ms. Fox criticized the Miss America pageant for its lack of ethnic and racial diversity. “ ‘How could we say it’s Miss America,’ I asked, ‘if it’s not open to all Americans?’ ” she was quoted saying in “Alabama Afternoons: Profiles and Conversations,” a 2011 book by Roy Hoffman. In the 1970s, she said the pageant perpetuated sexist attitudes.

“Today,” the Miss America website says, “Yolande feels her actions have been pivotal in directing pageant progress towards recognizing intellect, values and leadership abilities, rather than focusing on beauty alone.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/us...ies-at-87.html

-----------------------

Love the brave women who had the courage to speak up, stand by their values, and pave the way for the rest of us.