German filmmaker Wim Wenders on the passing of his friend, choreographer Pina Bausch

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Karl Malden has died at age 97.

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Pop star Michael Jackson has been reported dead following a cardiac arrest in Los Angeles

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Assorted outlets are reporting that Farrah Fawcett has succumbed to her long battle with cancer.
Best known for her TV appearances (Charlie’s Angels) and this poster which hung on the wall next to my bed throughout the late ’70s, she also had a film career comprised of many movies that won’t be making a lot of [...]

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I woke up this morning to news on the radio that David Carradine had been found dead in a hotel in Bangkok. Speculation as to the circumstances and cause of his death are spreading around the Internet, but the only important fact is that Caine walks the earth no more.
Let this space be a remembrance [...]

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Dom DeLuise made me laugh and there are few finer things a man can do in my book.

According to the AP (via Variety), Mr. DeLuise passed away Monday night after a long illness. He was 75.

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Try to imagine Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago or Passage to India without the scores by Maurice Jarre. You can’t do it. Now we have to imagine a world without Maurice Jarre.
RIP.

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I was saddened to read yesterday that Natasha Richardson had died following Monday’s ski accident in Montreal. There are dozens of obituaries out there that sum up her too-short life much better than I can. Here’s one.
Her biggest successes may have been on the stage, but I will always remember her best for a film [...]

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Ricardo Montalban died today at age 88.
It seems wrong somehow to sum up an entire man’s career by one TV commercial, one TV role and one movie role, but having grown up in the ’70s and early ’80s, Ricardo Montalban will always be the Chrysler Cordoba guy, Mr. Roarke from Fantasy Island and of course [...]

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Best known in the United States for directing 1986’s Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, Claude Berri died Monday at the age of 84 of unspecified causes.
The Frenchman’s film career spanned 50 years as an actor, writer, director and producer. He won an Oscar for best short film with Le Poulet in 1965.
Berri [...]

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Fix You
Fred Knittle who survived World War II to gain late-life fame as a member of the Young@Heart Chorus, lost a brief battle with cancer on Thursday. Central to some of the most memorable moments in Stephen Walker’s documentary on the group, the 83-year-old is survived by his wife, 4 children and 12 grandchildren.
The above [...]

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Opening credits of To Kill A Mockingbird directed by Robert Mulligan (1925 – 2008)
A number of Hollywood notables have passed away in the last few weeks. LiC has been taking a break from regular news items but I didn’t want the year to with these losses going unmentioned.
Forrest J. Ackerman, Sci-Fi Legend: 1916 – 2008. [...]

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Gérard and Guillaume Depardieu
Sad news arrives from France that Guillaume Depardieu, 37-year-old son of Gérard Depardieu, died suddenly in a Paris hospital of pneumonia contracted while working on a film in Romania
Though they had been estranged in recent years, the father and son worked several times on French television (The Count of Monte Cristo and [...]

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Legend, icon, hero, anti-hero. Pick your adjective. Actor Paul Newman finally succumbed to cancer at his Westport Connecticut home on Friday. He was 83 years old.
In so many ways, Newman was a bridge. He represented a link between old Hollywood and new Hollywood. He had the classic star’s charisma, but he practiced the modern Method. [...]

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Jerry Reed died Monday of complications due to emphysema. He was a huge part of a certain period of my movie-going eduction: the 1970s drive-in years. Primarily I remember him from Gator, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings, Hot Stuff and of course, his turn as trucker Cledus “Snowman” Snow in the immortal Smokey and the [...]

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You might not recognize the name or the face, but if you’ve seen a trailer in the last 20 years or so, you recognize the voice. Don LaFontaine died today in Los Angeles apparently due to complications from a collapsed lung. After experiencing shortness of breath, he was admitted to the hospital on Friday where [...]

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Isaac Hayes, the Academy and Grammy award-winning icon of the music industry has died of unspecified causes.
Redefining popular music throughout the 60’s and 70’s both as a songwriter (he co-wrote the hits Soul Man and Hold On I’m Coming) and solo performer, the purveyor of the Memphis soul sound helped lay the groundwork for disco [...]

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Bernie Mac in Bad Santa
Bernie Mac died today at a Chicago hospital due to complications from pneumonia. He was 50 years old.
Star of his own sitcom The Bernie Mac Show  and part of the Ocean’s Eleven ensemble (plus its two sequels), the comedian will be best remembered at LiC for his part in Terry Zwigoff’s [...]

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French filmmaker Jean Delannoy died on Wednesday at the age of 100. Though his film career lasted more than 60 years, he will always be inextricably intertwined with the French New Wave because he exemplified everything its proponents were fighting against.
François Truffaut famously said that even the worst of Jean Renoir’s films would be more [...]

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Dancer, actress, movie star Cyd Charisse died in Los Angeles today after apparently suffering a heart attack on Monday.
I didn’t really grow to love movie musicals until later in life, so my first real memory of her was in college. A couple of friends and I drove up to catch an all night screening of [...]

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Ain’t it Cool News is reporting that Stan Winston, the 4-time Oscar winner for makeup and visual effects, died in Los Angeles on Sunday.
[UPDATE: Winston suffered mutiple myeloma for seven years, a treatable but incurable form of cancer of the blood plasma cells]
You might not have been able to pick Stan out of a police [...]

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Though I remember him best cracking up on The Carol Burnett Show on television for 10 seasons, comedian Harvey Korman earned his place in cinema history for his role as Hedley Lamarr in Mel Brooks’ classic Blazing Saddles, a film I just finished re-watching earlier in the week (”That’s Hedley!”).
According to an AP report, he [...]

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Where do you begin to talk about the long and varied career of Sydney Pollack?
Sure, he was an actor and an Oscar winning producer/director in a career that spanned nearly 50 years, but that only seems to scratch the surface.
Though I had been aware of his work since the 1970s – Jeremiah Johnson was a [...]

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John Phillip Law, best remembered by me as Pygar the blind angel in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella, died May 13 of cancer. He was 70 years old.
His first Hollywood role was as Alexei, a boyish Russian sailor in Norman Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming! He also played the title character in the [...]

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Best known for her role as the beautiful Bulgarian bride who was willing to do anything to secure letters of transit for her husband and herself in the classic film Casablanca, actress Joy Page died April 18 of complications from stroke and pneumonia. She was 83.
Though her stepfather was studio head Jack L. Warner (her [...]

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Horror queen Hazel Court has died of a heart attack at age 82.
Trained at the London Academy of Dramatic Art, the redhead got her start in films with a one line part in Ealing’s Champagne Charlie in 1944. However, beginning with Hammer Films’ The Curse of Frankenstein in 1957, Court made a name for herself [...]

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Disney Animator Ollie Johnston Immortalized in The Incredibles 
Ollie Johnston, the last of Walt Disney’s “Nine Old Men” has died of natural causes at age 95.
Johnston was a part of the core of the Disney animating team from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in 1937 until his retirement following 1977’s The Rescuers. The other 8 [...]

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Charlton Heston died at his home in Beverly Hills Saturday with Lydia, his wife of 64 years, at his side. The legendary actor who won an Academy Award for his role in 1959’s Ben-Hur was 84 years old.
Heston’s career spanned six decades with notable films including The Ten Commandments (1956), Touch of Evil (1958), Planet of [...]

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Blacklisted writer/director Jules Dassin died Monday in Athens at the age of 96. A cause of death hasn’t been given.
Some will remember him best for his post-exile works starring future wife Melina Mercouri, Never on Sunday (1960) and Topkapi (1964). Others will treasure his earlier noir films Brute Force (1947) the prison escape drama with [...]

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Actor Richard Widmark died Monday at age 93. Nominated for an Academy Award and winner of a Golden Globe for his first screen performance as the revenge-seeking psychopathic killer, Tommy Udo, in Kiss of Death in 1947, Widmark may be best remembered for the scene where he pushes the mother of his victim down the stairs in her [...]

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