Celebrity Death Thread

[romster]

Ricardo Montalban Dies At 88

By Oliver Jones
Originally posted Wednesday January 14, 2009 05:20 PM EST

Ricardo Montablan Photo by: Mark Sullivan / WireImage


Ricardo Montalban, the velvet voiced Mexican born actor who greeted the plane as Mr. Roarke on Fantasy Island, died in his Beverly Hills home Wednesday. He was 88.

His son-in-law Gilbert Smith tells PEOPLE that Montalban had been in declining health for months and died from "complications of advancing age."

"He was in peace," said Smith, who said that the actor was surrounded by his children and grandchildren. "He will be missed," added Smith.

Born in Mexico City and partially educated in the U.S., Montalban began his career in the early '40s playing bit parts on Broadway and lead roles in films from his native country. In 1947, MGM brought him to Hollywood to be a romantic lead.

While he enjoyed a long career in film, he became an icon both as the white-suited Roarke, the star of the high rated ABC drama, and as Kahn, Captain Kirk's nemesis in the 1982 film Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn. Younger audiences know him as Grandpa Cortez in the Spy Kids films.

Montalban was proceeded in death by one year by his wife of 63 years, Gorgiana Young, the younger sister of his frequent co-star Loretta Young.

"[She is] the only love of my life," the actor said in 2004.

He is survived by four children and six grandchildren.

[romster]

Married for 63 years....wow...

[Panoptes]

"De Hearse, De Hearse!"-Tattoo

RIP

[Dan V]

May he recline in heaven in a chair of sooffffttt corrrinthian leatherrrrrr

[SeattleLionsFan]

KAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK K!

[YT]

"From Hell's heart I stab at thee"

RIP Mr. Montalban

[DanO]

"Married for 63 years....wow... "
----------------------My dad's sister and her husband have been married for 67 years now. Simply amazing.

GO LIONS "09" !!!!!!!!!

[Panoptes]

Ex-Falcons DT Dronett found dead at home (AP)

http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/news?slug=ap-falcons-dronettobit&prov=ap&type=lgns

[-Deborah-]

Sad. :( RIP

[gjdodger]

Rabbit, finally, at rest.

John Updike, prize-winning writer of 'Rabbit' novels, dead at age 76
HILLEL ITALIE
AP News
Jan 27, 2009 13:39 EST
John Updike, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, prolific man of letters and erudite chronicler of sex, divorce and other adventures in the postwar prime of the American empire, died Tuesday at age 76.
Updike, a resident of Beverly Farms, Mass., died of lung cancer, according to a statement from his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf.
A literary writer who frequently appeared on best-seller lists, the tall, hawk-nosed Updike wrote novels, short stories, poems, criticism, the memoir "Self-Consciousness" and even a famous essay about baseball great Ted Williams. He was prolific, even compulsive, releasing more than 50 books in a career that started in the 1950s. Updike won virtually every literary prize, including two Pulitzers, for "Rabbit Is Rich" and "Rabbit at Rest," and two National Book Awards.
Although himself deprived of a Nobel, he did bestow it upon one of his fictional characters, Henry Bech, the womanizing, egotistical Jewish novelist who collected the literature prize in 1999.
His settings ranged from the court of "Hamlet" to postcolonial Africa, but his literary home was the American suburb. Born in 1932, Updike spoke for millions of Depression-era readers raised by "penny-pinching parents," united by "the patriotic cohesion of World War II" and blessed by a "disproportionate share of the world's resources," the postwar, suburban boom of "idealistic careers and early marriages."
He captured, and sometimes embodied, a generation's confusion over the civil rights and women's movements, and opposition to the Vietnam War. Updike was called a misogynist, a racist and an apologist for the establishment. On purely literary grounds, he was attacked by Norman Mailer as the kind of author appreciated by readers who knew nothing about writing.
But more often he was praised for his flowing, poetic writing style. Describing a man's interrupted quest to make love, Updike likened it "to a small angel to which all afternoon tiny lead weights are attached." Nothing was too great or too small for Updike to poeticize. He might rhapsodize over the film projector's "chuckling whir" or look to the stars and observe that "the universe is perfectly transparent: we exist as flaws in ancient glass."
In the richest detail, his books recorded the extremes of earthly desire and spiritual zealotry, whether the comic philandering of the preacher in "A Month of Sundays" or the steady rage of the young Muslim in "Terrorist." Raised in the Protestant community of Shillington, Pa., where the Lord's Prayer was recited daily at school, Updike was a lifelong churchgoer influenced by his faith, but not immune to doubts.
"I remember the times when I was wrestling with these issues that I would feel crushed. I was crushed by the purely materialistic, atheistic account of the universe," Updike told The Associated Press during a 2006 interview.
"I am very prone to accept all that the scientists tell us, the truth of it, the authority of the efforts of all the men and woman spent trying to understand more about atoms and molecules. But I can't quite make the leap of unfaith, as it were, and say, `This is it. Carpe diem (seize the day), and tough luck.'"
He received his greatest acclaim for the "Rabbit" series, a quartet of novels published over a 30-year span that featured ex-high school basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom and his restless adjustment to adulthood and the constraints of work and family. To the very end, Harry was in motion, an innocent in his belief that any door could be opened, a believer in God even as he bedded women other than his wife.
"The tetralogy to me is the tale of a life, a life led an American citizen who shares the national passion for youth, freedom, and sex, the national openness and willingness to learn, the national habit of improvisation," Updike would later write. "He is furthermore a Protestant, haunted by a God whose manifestations are elusive, yet all-important."
Other notable books included "Couples," a sexually explicit tale of suburban mating that sold millions of copies; "In the Beauty of the Lilies," an epic of American faith and fantasy; and "Too Far to Go, which followed the courtship, marriage and divorce of the Maples, a suburban couple with parallels to Updike's own first marriage.
Plagued from an early age by asthma, psoriasis and a stammer, he found creative outlets in drawing and writing. Updike was born in Reading, Pa., his mother a department store worker who longed to write, his father a high school teacher remembered with sadness and affection in "The Centaur," a novel published in 1964. The author brooded over his father's low pay and mocking students, but also wrote of a childhood of "warm and action-packed houses that accommodated the presence of a stranger, my strange ambition to be glamorous."
For Updike, the high life meant books, such as the volumes of P.G. Wodehouse and Robert Benchley he borrowed from the library as a child, or, as he later recalled, the "chastely severe, time-honored classics" he read in his dorm room at Harvard University, leaning back in his "wooden Harvard chair," cigarette in hand.
While studying on full scholarship at Harvard, he headed the staff of the Harvard Lampoon and met the woman who became his first wife, Mary Entwistle Pennington, whom he married in June 1953, a year before he earned his A.B. degree summa cum laude. (Updike divorced Pennington in 1975 and was remarried two years later, to Martha Bernhard).
After graduating, he accepted a one-year fellowship to study painting at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts at Oxford University. During his stay in England, a literary idol, E.B. White, offered him a position at The New Yorker, where he served briefly as foreign books reviewer. Many of Updike's reviews and short stories were published in The New Yorker, often edited by White's stepson, Roger Angell.
By the end of the 1950s, Updike had published a story collection, a book of poetry and his first novel, "The Poorhouse Fair," soon followed by the first of the Rabbit books, "Rabbit, Run." Praise came so early and so often that New York Times critic Arthur Mizener worried that Updike's "natural talent" was exposing him "from an early age to a great deal of head-turning praise."
Updike learned to write about everyday life by, in part, living it. In 1957, he left New York, with its "cultural hassle" and melting pot of "agents and wisenheimers," and settled with his first wife and four kids in Ipswich, Mass, a "rather out-of-the-way town" about 30 miles north of Boston.
"The real America seemed to me 'out there,' too heterogeneous and electrified by now to pose much threat of the provinciality that people used to come to New York to escape," Updike later wrote.
"There were also practical attractions: free parking for my car, public education for my children, a beach to tan my skin on, a church to attend without seeming too strange."

[ghandi]

Lynyrd Skynyrd keyboardist Billy Powell dies
By Jonathan Cohen Jonathan Cohen – 2 hrs 16 mins ago
Reuters – Members of the band Lynyrd Skynyrd Gary Rossington (2nd R) and Billy Powell (2nd L) react as the band …



NEW YORK (Billboard) – Lynyrd Skynyrd keyboardist Billy Powell died Wednesday morning (January 28) at his home in Orange Park, Fla. He was 56.
According to the Associated Press, Powell called 911 around 12:55 a.m., saying he was having trouble breathing. Rescue crews arrived at the home, but Powell was pronounced dead just before 2 a.m.
Orange Park Police Lt. Mark Cornett told the AP that Powell had missed an appointment yesterday for a cardiac evaluation.
Powell, whose fluid piano runs spiced such classic Skynyrd songs as "Freebird," "Call Me the Breeze" and "Sweet Home Alabama," and founding guitarist Gary Rossington were the only two original members of the Southern rock band to survive the 1977 plane crash that killed singer Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist Steve Gaines and backup vocalist Cassie Gaines.
Since then, guitarist Allen Collins and bassist Leon Wilkeson have also died; former drummer Artimus Pyle survived the crash but no longer tours with the band, which re-formed in 1987 and still is a powerful concert draw.
Skynyrd lore has it that Powell, a former roadie for the band in its earliest incarnations, was asked to join by Van Zant when the latter heard Powell's keyboard take on "Freebird."
According to the band's publicist, as-yet-unspecified shows will be canceled as a result of Powell's death. Skynyrd was slated to perform Friday (January 30) in Kinder, La., and the following day in Biloxi, Miss. A European tour was set to begin May 20 in Finland.
Reuters/Billboard

[ghandi]

I always enjoyed his playing, he had kind of a honky tonk sound but could rock and roll with the best of them also.......At least he got a few more years after surviving the plane crash......

[Drew]

I was diggin' to Tuesday's Gone just the other day. I love the piano solo right smack in the middle of that song.
RIP Billy

[-Deborah-]

RIP

[YT]

RIP Billy.



Just an FYI folks, Ronnie Van Zant's widow has an agreement in place with the original remaining members that the band would not tour as Lynard Skynard unless 2 original members were present. So unless Gary Rossington gets Artimus Pyle back in the band, Lynard Skynard as a band is no more.