Obituaries of Note... 2008

Eartha Kitt, 81; sultry singer, dancer, actress; was 'Cat Woman'

THURSDAY, December 25, 2008 - (Associated Press) - NEW YORK CITY - Eartha Kitt, a sultry singer, dancer and actress who rose from South Carolina cotton fields to become an international symbol of elegance and sensuality, has died. She was 81. KITT, WHOSE SAUCY RENDITION of "Santa Baby" became a holiday pop music classic, died in Connecticut on Christmas Day. Family spokesman Andrew Freedman said Kitt was recently treated at New York's Columbia Presbyterian Hos- pital for colon cancer.

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A SELF-PROCLAIMED "SEX KITTEN," famous for her catlike purr, Kitt was one of America's most versatile performers, winning two Emmys and nabbing a third nomination. She also was nominated for several Tonys and two Grammys. HER CAREER SPANNED six decades, from her start as a dancer with the famed Katherine Dunham troupe to cabarets and acting and singing on stage, in movies and on television. She persevered through an unhappy childhood as a mixed-race daughter of the South and made headlines in the 1960s for denouncing the Vietnam War during a visit to the White House. ONCE dubbed the "most exciting woman in the world" by Orson Welles, she spent much of her life single, though brief romances with the rich and famous peppered her younger years. After garnering notice for singing "Monotonous" in the Broadway revue "New Faces of 1952," Kitt appeared in "Mrs. Patterson" in 1954-55. (Some references say she earned a Tony nomination for "Mrs. Patterson," but only winners were publicly announced at that time.) She also made appearances in "Shinbone Alley" and "The Owl and the Pussycat." Her first album, "RCA Victor Presents Eartha Kitt," came out in 1954, featuring such songs as "I Want to Be Evil," "C'est Si Bon" and the gold digger's theme song "Santa Baby," which is revived on radio each Christmas. The next year, the record company released the follow-up album "That Bad Eartha," which featured "Let's Do It," "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "My Heart Belongs to Daddy." In 1996, she was nominated for a Grammy in the category of traditional pop vocal performance for her album "Back in Business." She also had been nominated in the children's recording category for the 1969 record "Folk Tales of the Tribes of Africa." Kitt also acted in movies, playing the lead female role opposite Nat King Cole in "St. Louis Blues" in 1958 and more recently appearing in "Boomerang" and "Harriet the Spy" in the 1990s. On television, she was the sexy Catwoman on the popular "Batman" series in 1967-68, replacing Julie Newmar, who originated the role. A guest appearance on an episode of "I Spy" brought Kitt an Emmy nomination in 1966. Kitt was plain-spoken about causes she believed in. Her antiwar comments at the White House came as she attended a luncheon held by Lady Bird Johnson. "You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed," she told the group of about 50 women. "They rebel in the street. They don't want to go to school because they're going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam." For four years afterward, Kitt performed almost exclusively overseas. She was investigated by the FBI and CIA. "The thing that hurts, that became anger, was when I realized that if you tell the truth -- in a country that says you're entitled to tell the truth -- you get your face slapped and you get put out of work," Kitt told Essence magazine two decades later. In 1978, Kitt returned to Broadway in the musical "Timbuktu!" -- which brought her a Tony nomination -- and was invited back to the White House by President Carter. In 2000, Kitt earned another Tony nod for "The Wild Party." She played the fairy godmother in Rodgers and Hammerstein's "Cinderella" in 2002. As recently as October 2003, she was on Broadway after replacing Chita Rivera in a revival of "Nine." She also gained new fans as the voice of Yzma in the 2000 Disney animated feature "The Emperor's New Groove." For years, Kitt was unsure of her birthplace or birth date. In 1997, a group of students at historically black Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., located her birth certificate, which showed she was born Jan. 17, 1927, in North, S.C. In one of her three autobiographies, she wrote that her mother was black and Cherokee and her father was white, and she was left to live with relatives after her mother's new husband objected to taking in a mixed-race girl. An aunt eventually brought her to live in New York, where she attended the High School of Performing Arts, later dropping out to take various odd jobs. By chance, she dropped by an audition for the dance group run by Dunham, a pioneering African American dancer. In 1946, Kitt was one of the Sans-Souci Singers in Dunham's Broadway production "Bal Negre." Kitt's travels with the Dunham troupe landed her a gig in a Paris nightclub in the early 1950s. She was spotted by Welles, who cast her in his Paris stage production of "Faust." That led to a role in "New Faces of 1952," which featured such stars-to-be as Carol Lawrence, Paul Lynde and, as a writer, Mel Brooks. Over the years, Kitt had liaisons with wealthy men, including Revlon founder Charles Revson, who showered her with lavish gifts. In 1960, she married Bill McDonald but divorced him after the birth of their daughter. Her daughter, Kitt Shapiro, and two grandchildren survive her. While on stage, Kitt was daringly sexy and always flirtatious. Offstage, however, she described herself as shy and almost reclusive, remnants of feeling unwanted and unloved as a child. She referred to herself as "that little urchin cotton-picker from the South, Eartha Mae."

Bettie Page,  85;  1940s & '50s brunet sexy photo pinup queen

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FRIDAY, Dec. 12, 2008 - (Los Angeles Times) - LOS ANGELES - Bettie Page, the brunet pinup queen with a shoulder-length pageboy hairdo and kitschy bangs whose saucy photos helped usher in the sexual revolution of the 1960s, has died.   She was 85. PAGE, WHOSE LATER LIFE was marked by depression, violent mood swings and several years in a state mental institution, died Thursday night at Kindred Hospital in Los Angeles, where she had been on life support since suffering a heart attack Dec. 2, according to her agent, Mark Roesler.

A CULT FIGURE, Page was most famous for the estimated 20,000 4-by-5-inch black-and-white glossy photographs taken by amateur shutterbugs from 1949 to 1957. The photos showed her in high heels and bikinis or negligees, bondage apparel -- or nothing at all. DECADES LATER, those images inspired biographies, comic books, fan clubs, websites, commercial products -- Bettie Page playing cards, dress-up magnet sets, action figures, Zippo lighters, shot glasses -- and, in 2005, a film about her life and times, "The Notorious Bettie Page." THEN there are the idealized portraits of her naughty personas -- Nurse Bettie, Jungle Bettie, Voodoo Bettie, Banned in Boston Bettie, Maid Bettie, Crackers in Bed Bettie -- memorialized by such artists as Olivia de Berardinis. "I'll always paint Bettie Page," De Berardinis said Thursday night . "But truth be told, it took me years to understand what I was looking at in the old photographs of her. Now I get it. There was a passion play unfolding in her mind. What some see as a bad-girl image was in fact a certain sensual freedom and play-acting - it was part of the fun of being a woman." "The origins of what captures the imagination and creates a particular celebrity are sometimes difficult to define," Playboy magazine founder Hugh Hefner said Thursday night. "Bettie Page was one of Playboy magazine's early Playmates, and she became an iconic figure, influencing notions of beauty and fashion. Then she disappeared. . . . Many years later, Bettie resurfaced and we became friends. Her passing is very sad." In an interview 2 1/2 years ago, Hefner described Page's appeal as "a combination of wholesome innocence and fetish-oriented poses that is at once retro and very modern." According to her agents at CMG Worldwide, Page's official website, www.BettiePage.com, has received about 600 million hits over the last five years. "Bettie Page captured the imagination of a generation of men and women with her free spirit and unabashed sensuality," said Roesler, chairman of the Indianapolis-based CMG Worldwide, who was at Page's side when she died. "She was a dear friend and a special client and one of the most beautiful and influential women of the 20th century." A religious woman in her later life, Page was mystified by her influence on modern popular culture. "I have no idea why I'm the only model who has had so much fame so long after quitting work," she said in an interview with The Times in 2006. She had one request for that interview: that her face not be photographed. "I want to be remembered," she said, "as I was when I was young and in my golden times. . . . I want to be remembered as the woman who changed people's perspectives concerning nudity in its natural form." Bettie Mae Page was born April 22, 1923, in Nashville. She was the oldest girl among Roy and Edna Page's six children. Her father, an auto mechanic, "molested all three of his daughters," Page said in the interview. Her parents divorced in 1933, but life didn't get any easier for Bettie. "All I ever wanted was a mother who paid attention to me," Page recalled. "She didn't want girls. She thought we were trouble. When I started menstruating at 13, I thought I was dying because she never taught me anything about that." After high school, Page earned a teaching credential. But her career in the classroom was short-lived. "I couldn't control my students, especially the boys," she said. She tried secretarial work and marriage. But by 1948 she had divorced a violent husband and fled to New York City, where she enrolled in acting classes. She was noticed on the beach at Coney Island by New York police officer and amateur photographer Jerry Tibbs, who introduced her to camera clubs. Page quickly became a sought-after model, attracting the attention of Irving Klaw and his sister, Paula, who operated a mail-order business specializing in cheesecake and bondage poses. Under contract with the Klaws, Page was photographed prancing around with a whip, spanking other women, even being hog-tied. She also appeared in 8-millimeter "loops" and feature-length peekaboo films with titles like "Betty Page in High Heels." "I had lost my ambition and desire to succeed and better myself; I was adrift," Page recalled. "But I could make more money in a few hours modeling than I could earn in a week as a secretary." Her most professional photographs were taken in 1955 by fashion photographer Bunny Yeager. They included shots of Page nude and frolicking in waves and deep-sea fishing, and a January 1955 Playboy centerfold of her winking under a Santa Claus cap. At 35, Page walked away from it all. She quit modeling and moved to Florida, where she married a much younger man whose passions, she later learned, were watching television and eating hamburgers. Page fled from her home in tears after a dispute on New Year's Eve in 1959. Down the street, she noticed a white neon sign over a little white church with its door open. After quietly taking a seat in the back, she had a born-again experience. Page immersed herself in Bible studies and served as a counselor for the Billy Graham Crusade. In 1967, she married for a third time. After that marriage ended in divorce 11 years later, Page plunged into a depression marked by violent mood swings. She argued with her landlady and attacked her with a knife. A judge found her innocent by reason of insanity but sentenced her to 10 years in a California mental institution. She was released in 1992 from Patton State Hospital in San Bernardino County to find that she had unwittingly become a pop-culture icon. A movie titled "The Rocketeer" and the comic book that inspired it contained a Bettie-esque character, triggering a revival, among women as well as men, that continues unabated. With the help of admirers including Hefner, Page finally began receiving a respectable income for her work. In an interview published in Playboy magazine in 2007, Page expressed mixed feelings about her achievements. "When I turned my life over to the lord Jesus I was ashamed of having posed in the nude," she said. "But now, most of the money I've got is because I posed in the nude. So I'm not ashamed of it now. But I still don't understand it." She spent most of her final years in a one-bedroom apartment, reading the Bible, listening to Christian and country tunes, watching westerns on television, catching up on diet and exercise regimens or sometimes perusing secondhand clothing stores. Occasionally, however, Page was persuaded to visit the Sunset Boulevard penthouse offices of her agents at CMG Worldwide to autograph pinups of herself in the post-World War II years of her prime. The agency controls her image and those of Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana, among others. During one such event in early 2006, Page needed about 10 minutes to get through the 10 letters of her name. As she pushed her pen over a portrait of her in a negligee with an ecstatic smile, she laughed and said, "My land! Is that supposed to be me? I was never that pretty." She is survived by her brother Jack Page of Nashville and sister Joyce Wallace of Blairsville, Ga.

HE WAS A NATIVE NEW YORKER who moved to Chicago as a child and came to embrace and embody his adopted town, with all its "carbuncles and warts," as he recalled in his 2007 memoir, "Touch and Go." He was a cigar and martini man, white-haired and elegantly rumpled in his trademark red-checkered shirts, an old rebel who never mellowed, never retired, never forgot, and "never met a picket line or petition I didn't like."

"A LOT OF PEOPLE feel, 'What can I do, (it's) hopeless,'" Terkel told The Associated Press in 2003. "Well, through all these years there have been the people I'm talking about, whom we call activists ... who give us hope and through them we have hope."

THE TOUGHER the subject, the harder Terkel took it on. He put out an oral history collection on race relations in 1992 called "Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About The American Obsession," and, in 1995, "Coming of Age," recollections of men and women 70 and older.

He cared about what divided us, and what united us: death--in his 2001 "Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith," and hope, in his 2003 "Hope Dies Last."

Terkel won a 1985 Pulitzer Prize for "The Good War," remembrances of World War II; contrasted rich and poor along the same Chicago street in "Division Street: America," 1966; limned the Depression in "Hard Times," 1970; and chronicled how people feel about their jobs in "Working," 1974.

"When the Chinese Wall was built, where did the masons go for lunch? When Caesar conquered Gall, was there not even a cook in the army? And here's the big one, when the Armada sank, you read that King Philip wept. Were there no other tears?" Terkel said upon receiving an honorary National Book Award medal in 1997. "And that's what I believe oral history is about. It's about those who shed those other tears, who on rare occasions of triumph laugh that other laugh."

Andre Schiffrin --Terkel's longtime editor, publisher and close friend who gave Terkel the idea for many of his books--said Terkel "had been in bad shape in recent weeks and he really felt that his life had come to an end. But he was as engaged as ever. He was a big fan of (Democratic presidential candidate Barack) Obama and he said one of the things that kept him going was that he wanted to see the results of the election."

For his oral histories, Terkel interviewed his subjects on tape, then transcribed and sifted. "What first comes out of an interview are tons of ore; you have to get that gold dust in your hands," he wrote in his memoir. "Now, how does it become a necklace or a ring or a gold watch? You have to get the form; you have to mold the gold dust."

Said Schiffrin: "He liked to tell the story of an interview with a woman in a public housing unit in Chicago. At the end of the interview, the woman said, `My goodness, I didn't know I felt that way.' That was his genius."

Terkel would joke that his obsession with tape recording was equaled by only one other man, a certain former president of the United States: "Richard Nixon and I could be aptly described as neo-Cartesians. I tape, therefore I am."

He also was a syndicated radio talk show host, voice of gangsters on old radio soaps, jazz critic, actor in the 1988 film "Eight Men Out," and survivor of the 1950s blacklist.

In 1999, a panel of judges organized by the Modern Library, a book publisher, picked "Working" as No. 54 on its list of the century's 100 best English-language works of nonfiction. And in 2006, the Library of Congress announced that a radio interview he did with author James Baldwin in September 1962 was selected for the National Recording Registry of sound recordings worthy of preservation. Terkel's other interview subjects included Louis Armstrong, Buster Keaton, Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan.

Terkel's politics were liberal, vintage FDR. He would never forget the many New Deal programs from the Great Depression and worried that the country suffered from "a national Alzheimer's disease" that made government the perceived enemy. In a 1992 interview with the AP, he advocated "pressure from below, from the grass roots. That means the people who live and work in cities--that used to be called the working class, although now everyone says middle class."

Terkel was born Louis Terkel on May 16, 1912, in the Bronx. His father, Samuel, was a tailor; his mother, Anna, a seamstress. The family moved to Chicago in 1922 and ran a rooming house where young Louis would meet the workers and activists who would profoundly influence his view of the world.

"It was those loners--argumentative ones, deceptively quiet ones, the talkers and the walkers--who, always engaged in something outside themselves, unintentionally became my mentors," Terkel wrote in "Touch and Go."

He got the nickname Studs as a young man, from the character Studs Lonigan, the protagonist of James T. Farrell's beloved trilogy of novels about an Irish-American youth from Chicago's South Side.

Terkel graduated from the University of Chicago in 1932, studying philosophy, and also picked up a law degree. But instead of choosing law, he worked briefly in the civil service and then found employment in radio with one of his beloved "alphabet agencies" from the New Deal, the WPA Writers Project.

His early work as a stage actor led to radio radio acting, disc jockey jobs and then to radio interview shows beginning in the 1940s. From 1949 to 1952, he was the star of a national TV show, "Studs' Place," a program of largely improvised stories and songs set in a fictional bar (later a restaurant) owned by Studs. Some viewers even thought it was a real place, and would go looking for it in Chicago.

"People were never put down," Terkel recalled in the 1995 book "The Box: An Oral History of Television, 1920-1961." "The stories were about little aspects of their lives. There was no audience and no canned laughter. ... It was one of the most exhilarating times of my life."

The McCarthy-era antipathy toward activists cost him his national TV outlet. But his radio interview show flourished, first at WFMT in Chicago and then, through syndication, in many markets.

As his editor sponsored elaborate parties to celebrate his 95th birthday and the release of his 2007 memoir, "Touch and Go," Terkel reflected on a career spent writing about those who rarely heard their stories told.

"My discovery was people needed to be needed by others, need to count; that's the word," he said in an interview with the AP.

He also joked about his long life: "Curiosity did not kill this cat."

In 1939, he married social worker Ida Goldberg, a marriage that lasted 60 years even though she couldn't get him to dance and always called him Louis, not Studs. "Ida was a far better person than I, that's the reality of it," Terkel later wrote of Ida, who died in 1999.

"She had a certain empathy I lack. And she was more politically active than I. ... Did she play a tremendous role in my life? Yeah, you could say so."

Richard Blackwell, 86;   fashion designer;  'Worst Dressed List'

WEDNESDAY, October 19, 2008 - (Associated Press) - LOS ANGELES - Mr. Blackwell, the acerbic designer whose annual worst-dressed list skewered the fashion felonies of cel- ebrities from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Britney Spears, has died. He was 86.

BLACKWELL DIED ON SUNDAY at Cedars-Sinai Medical Cen- ter of complications from an intestinal infection, publicist Harlan Boll said.

BLACKWELL, whose first name was Richard, was a little-known dress de- signer when he issued his first tongue-in-cheek criticism of Hollywood fashion disasters for 1960... long before Joan Rivers and others turned such ridicule into a daily affair.

YEAR AFTER YEAR, he would take Hollywood's reigning stars and other celebrities to task for failing to dress in what he thought was the way they should.

BEING dowdy was bad enough, but the more outrageous clothing a woman wore, the more biting his criticism. He once said a reigning Miss America looked "like an armadillo with cornpads."

The critic acknowledged he had mixed feelings about appearing so publicly mean. Most of the women he put through the wringer, he said, were people he genuinely admired for their talent if not their fashion sense.

"The list is and was a satirical look at the fashion flops of the year," he said in 1998. "I merely said out loud what others were whispering. ... It's not my intention to hurt the feelings of these people. It's to put down the clothing they're wearing."

He told the Los Angeles Times in 1968 that designers were forgetting that their job "is to dress and enhance women. ... Maybe I should have named the 10 worst designers instead of blaming the women who wear their clothes."

Surprisingly, the woman who topped his worst-dressed list for 1982 (announced in early 1983) was the newly married Diana, Princess of Wales. He said she had gone from "a very young, independent, fresh look" to a "tacky, dowdy" style. She quickly regained her footing and wound up as a regular on Blackwell's favorites list, the "fabulous fashion independents."

Blackwell had started out as an actor himself, having been spotted by a talent agent while still in his teens. He landed a job as an understudy in the Broadway production of Sidney Kingsley's heralded drama "Dead End."

Although he got to play the role of the Dead End Kids' leader on stage only one time, it led him to Hollywood where he landed bit parts in such films as "Little Tough Guy" (uncredited) and "Juvenile Hall" (as Dick Selzer).

He abandoned his acting career in 1958 after failing to make it in movies and switched to fashion design. He claimed to be the first to make designer jeans for women, and his salon had begun to attract a few Hollywood names when he issued his first list covering the fashion faux pas of 1960. (Italian star Anna Magnani and Gabor were among his early victims.)

It quickly brought him the celebrity he had long coveted, and he quickly became a favorite on the TV talk show circuit. He hosted his own show, "Mr. Blackwell Presents," in 1968 and appeared as himself in such TV shows as "Matlock" and "Matt Houston."

In 1992, he sued Johnny Carson for claiming that he had added Mother Teresa to his list, saying the comment exposed him to hatred and ridicule. NBC's response was that the "Tonight Show" host was obviously joking.

"Did you see what he said about Mother Teresa? 'Miss Nerdy Nun is a fashion no-no,'" Carson had said. "Come on now, that's just too much."

During his heyday the issuing of Blackwell's annual list was an eagerly anticipated media event.

On the second Tuesday in January he would assemble reporters at his mansion for a lavish breakfast before making a dramatic entrance for the television cameras.

By the turning of the millennium, however, the list had lost its juice and Blackwell took to issuing it by e-mail.

Born Richard Sylvan Selzer in 1922, Blackwell recounted in his autobiography, "From Rags to Bitches," a troubled, poverty-ridden childhood in which he was variously a truant, thief and prostitute.

He is survived by Robert Spencer, his partner of nearly 60 years.

Edie Adams, 81;  a stage, television and screen actress;  singer

WEDNES., Oct. 15, 2008 - (Associated Press) - LOS ANGELES - Actress and singer Edie Adams, the blonde beauty who won a Tony Award for bringing Daisy Mae to life on Broadway and who played the television foil to her husband, comedian Ernie Kovacs, has died.   She was 81.

ADAMS DIED ON WEDNESDAY in a Los Angeles hospital from pneumonia and cancer, publicist Henri Bollinger said.

A GRADUATE OF JUILLIARD SCHOOL OF MUSIC, Adams hoped to become an opera singer but instead went on to gain fame for her sketches with Kovacs and her pivotal roles in two top Broadway musicals.

FOR NEARLY TWO DECADES, she also was the sexy spokeswoman for Muriel cigars, singing and breathily cooing in TV commercials: "Why don't you pick one up and smoke it sometime?"

SHE WAS BORN Elizabeth Edith Enke in 1927 in Kingston, Pa., and grew up in Tenafly, N.J. She first attracted notice on the TV show "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts." Kovacs was then performing his innovative comedy show on a Philadelphia TV station, and his director saw her and invited her to audition.

"HERE was this guy with the big mustache, the big cigar and the silly hat," she recalled in 1982. "I thought, `I don't know what this is, but it's for me.'"

When she auditioned for the Kovacs show, she knew a lot about opera but only three pop songs, she recalled.

"I sang them all during the audition, and if they had asked to hear another, I never would have made it," she said.

With her innocent face and refreshing manner, Adams became the ideal partner for Kovacs' far-out humor. They eloped to Mexico City in 1954.

Kovacs moved his show--which appeared in various guises in the 1950s and early 1960s--to New York, where he became the darling of critics and discriminating viewers and hugely influential on other comedians. Both Kovacs and Adams garnered Emmy nominations in 1957 for best performances in a comedy series.

Adams found success on Broadway as well.

She was acclaimed for her role as the sister to Rosalind Russell's character in the 1953 "Wonderful Town," the Comden-Green-Bernstein musical based on "My Sister Eileen."

In 1957, Adams won a Tony for best featured (supporting) actress in a musical for her role as Daisy Mae in "Li'l Abner," based on Al Capp's satirical comic strip.

"Edith Adams makes a wonderful Daisy Mae with her busty blouse, brief skirt and bare legs--the hill-billy girl with a touch of Al Capp's Hollywood glamour," The New York Times wrote.

She and Kovacs moved to Hollywood in the late 1950s, and both became active in films.

In Billy Wilder's classic "The Apartment," the 1960 Oscar winner for best picture, Adams played the spurned secretary to philandering businessman Fred MacMurray.

Among her other movies were "Lover Come Back," "Call Me Bwana" (with Bob Hope), the all-star comedy "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" (as Sid Caesar's wife), "Under the Yum Yum Tree," "The Best Man" and "The Honey Pot."

In early 1962, Kovacs left a star-filled baby shower for Mrs. Milton Berle and crashed his car into a light pole, dying instantly. He had been a carefree gambler and profligate buyer of unneeded things. He once telephoned his wife and said he had bought the California Racquet Club, with its nightclub, shops and mortgages.

His widow was faced with debts of $520,000, trouble with the Internal Revenue Service and a nasty custody battle over Kovacs' daughters, Betty and Kippie, from his first marriage. She and Kovacs also had a daughter Mia, born in 1959.

Berle, Frank Sinatra, Jack Lemmon, Dean Martin and other stars organized a TV special to raise money for her and her daughters. "No," she said, "I can take care of my own children."

For a solid year, she worked continuously. She did movies, TV musical revues and a Las Vegas act where Groucho Marx introduced her with the comment: "There are some things Edie won't do, but nothing she can't do."

She won custody of her stepdaughters, tearfully telling reporters after the verdict: "This is the way Ernie would have wanted it."

Over a career that spanned some six decades, Adams also appeared in various stage productions; had a short-lived TV show in 1963 that earned her two Emmy nominations; performed in nightclubs and released several albums.

In the 1980s and 1990s, she made appearances on such TV shows as "Murder, She Wrote" and "Designing Women." She also played Tommy Chong's mother, Mrs. Tempest Stoner, in the first Cheech and Chong movie, "Up in Smoke," in 1978.

Over the years, she strove to keep Kovacs' comedic legacy alive by buying rights to his TV shows and repackaging them for television and videocassettes.

After her widowhood, she had two brief marriages to photographer Martin Mills and trumpeter Pete Candoli.

She is survived by her son, Joshua Mills. Daughter Mia Kovacs was killed at 22 in a 1982 car accident.

Richard Wright, 65; musician, founding member of 'Pink Floyd'

MONDAY, September 15, 2008 - (New York Times) - LONDON - Richard Wright, the keyboardist whose somber, monumental sounds were at the core of Pink Floyd’s art-rock that has sold millions and millions of albums, died Monday in London, where he had lived.   He was 65.

THE CAUSE WAS CANCER, said his publicist, Claire Singers.

WRIGHT WAS A FOUNDING MEMBER of Pink Floyd, and his spacious, somber, enveloping keyboards, backing vocals and eerie effects were an essential part of its musical identity.

THOUGH SYD BARRETT and then Roger Waters wrote most of Pink Floyd’s songs, Wright shares credit on the improvisatory psychedelic studio works the band composed collectively, and he sang a few lead vocals, including on "Astronomy Domine" from the band’s debut album, "The Piper at the Gates of Dawn."

WRIGHT was one of two songwriters on "The Great Gig in the Sky," a hymnlike track with a soaring, wordless female vocal at the center of "The Dark Side of the Moon," the blockbuster 1973 Pink Floyd album that has sold some 40 million copies.

David Gilmour, Pink Floyd’s guitarist and singer, said in a statement on Monday: "In the welter of arguments about who or what was Pink Floyd, Rick’s enormous input was frequently forgotten. He was gentle, unassuming and private but his soulful voice and playing were vital, magical components of our most recognized Pink Floyd sound."

Wright was born in London in 1943 and taught himself to play keyboards, developing an early interest in jazz. He attended a boys’ school founded by the haberdashers' guild, then studied architecture at the Regent Street Polytechnic College.

With fellow students at Regent Street — Waters on guitar or bass and Nick Mason on drums — he started a group, at first playing American rhythm-and-blues songs. Barrett joined them in 1965, reshaping the music and naming the band The Pink Floyd Sound, after the American bluesmen Pink Anderson and Floyd Council.

Barrett’s whimsical, asymmetrical songs and the band’s fondness for experimental sounds placed it at the center of London’s underground psychedelic movement in the mid-1960s. "Music was our drug," Wright once told an interviewer.

"The Piper at the Gates of Dawn" was released in 1967 and yielded pop hits in England, but LSD use and mental illness made Barrett so unstable that he left Pink Floyd in 1968. He recorded two solo albums; Wright and Gilmour produced the second one, "Barrett," in 1970. Barrett died in 2006, at the age of 60.

Pink Floyd’s late-1960s and early-’70s albums mingled pop songs with extended pieces, like the 23-minute "Echoes," which begins with single notes from Wright’s keyboard, on 1971’s "Meddle."

On the 1969 album, "Ummagumma," which includes solo studio recordings by each band member, Wright’s four-part "Sisyphus" encompasses a majestic dirge with tympani, a piano piece that moves from rippling impressionism to crashing free jazz, a clattery interlude for keyboards and percussion, and a mostly elegiac improvisation with organ, guitar, tape effects and birdcalls.

With "The Dark Side of the Moon," Pink Floyd reined in its improvisation, came up with a concept album about workaday pressures and insanity and established itself as an arena-rock staple. The album stayed in the Billboard Top 200 album chart for 741 weeks. Pink Floyd continued to thrive through the 1970s, and Wright released his first solo project, "Wet Dream," in 1978. Pink Floyd’s 1979 album, "The Wall," eventually sold 23 million copies in the United States.

But there were conflicts within the band. Waters, who had increasingly taken control of Pink Floyd, reportedly threatened not to release "The Wall" unless Wright resigned his full membership in the band. Wright quit, only to tour with Pink Floyd in 1980-81 as a salaried sideman. He does not appear on the band’s 1983 album, "The Final Cut."

After that album, Waters left Pink Floyd for a solo career, declaring the band a "spent force creatively." Amid lawsuits, Gilmour and Mason regrouped under the Pink Floyd name; Wright rejoined them for the 1987 album "A Momentary Lapse of Reason" and "The Division Bell" in 1994.

He made another solo album, "Broken China," in 1996, with Sinead O’Connor among the guest performers.

Wright, who was married three times, is survived by three children, Benjamin, Gala and Jamie; and one grandchild.

In interviews in 1996, Wright said he had not spoken to Waters for 14 years. Wright played keyboards on Gilmour’s 2006 album, "On an Island," and went on tour with Gilmour’s band.

Pink Floyd’s 1970s lineup reunited briefly at the Live 8 London concert in Hyde Park on July 2, 2005, performing four songs before sharing a hug.

Isaac Hayes,  65;  pioneering R&B singer, songwriter, musician

SUN., August 10, 2008 - (Associated Press) - MEMPHIS, TN - Isaac Hayes, the pioneering singer, songwriter and mus- ician whose relentless "Theme From Shaft" won Academy and Grammy awards, died Sunday.   He was 65.

A FAMILY MEMBER FOUND HAYES unresponsive near a treadmill and he was pronounced dead about an hour later at Baptist East Hospital in Memphis, according to the sheriff's office. The cause of death was not immediately known.

IN THE EARLY 1970S, Hayes laid the groundwork for disco, for what became known as urban-contemporary music and for romantic crooners like Barry White. And he was rapping before there was rap. HIS CAREER HIT ANOTHER HIGH in 1997 when he became the voice of Chef, the sensible school cook and devoted ladies man on the animated TV show "South Park."

THE ALBUM "HOT BUTTERED SOUL" made Hayes a star in 1969. His shaven head, gold chains and sunglasses gave him a compelling visual image.

"HOT BUTTERED SOUL" was groundbreaking in several ways: He sang in a "cool" style unlike the usual histrionics of big-time soul singers. He prefaced the song with "raps," and the numbers ran longer than three minutes with lush arrangements.

"JOCKS would play it at night," Hayes recalled in a 1999 Associated Press interview. "They could go to the bathroom, they could get a sandwich, or whatever."

Next came "Theme From Shaft," a No. 1 hit in 1971 from the film "Shaft" starring Richard Roundtree.

"That was like the shot heard round the world," Hayes said in the 1999 interview.

At the Oscar ceremony in 1972, Hayes performed the song wearing an eye-popping amount of gold and received a standing ovation. TV Guide later chose it as No. 18 in its list of television's 25 most memorable moments. He won an Academy Award for the song and was nominated for another one for the score. The song and score also won him two Grammys.

"The rappers have gone in and created a lot of hit music based upon my influence," he said. "And they'll tell you if you ask."

Hayes was elected to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

"I knew nothing about the business, or trends and things like that," he said. "I think it was a matter of timing. I didn't know what was unfolding."

A self-taught musician, he was hired in 1964 by Stax Records of Memphis as a backup pianist, working as a session musician for Otis Redding and others. He also played saxophone.

He began writing songs, establishing a songwriting partnership with David Porter, and in the 1960s they wrote such hits for Sam and Dave as "Hold On, I'm Coming" and "Soul Man."

All this led to his recording contract.

In 1972, he won another Grammy for his album "Black Moses" and earned a nickname he reluctantly embraced. Hayes composed film scores for "Tough Guys" and "Truck Turner" besides "Shaft." He also did the song "Two Cool Guys" on the "Beavis and Butt-Head Do America" movie soundtrack in 1996.

Additionally, he was the voice of Nickelodeon's "Nick at Nite" and had radio shows in New York City (1996 to 2002) and then in Memphis.

He was in several movies, including "It Could Happen to You" with Nicolas Cage, "Ninth Street" with Martin Sheen, "Reindeer Games" starring Ben Affleck and the blaxploitation parody "I'm Gonna Git You, Sucka."

In the 1999 interview, Hayes described the South Park cook as "a person that speaks his mind; he's sensitive enough to care for children; he's wise enough to not be put into the 'whack' category like everybody else in town — and he l-o-o-o-o-ves the ladies."

But Hayes angrily quit the show in 2006 after an episode mocked his Scientology religion. "There is a place in this world for satire, but there is a time when satire ends and intolerance and bigotry towards religious beliefs of others begins," he said.

Co-creator creators Matt Stone responded that Hayes "has no problem — and he's cashed plenty of checks — with our show making fun of Christians." A subsequent episode of the show seemingly killed off the Chef character.

Hayes was born in 1942 in a tin shack in Covington, Tenn., about 40 miles north of Memphis. He was raised by his maternal grandparents after his mother died and his father took off when he was 1 1/2. The family moved to Memphis when he was 6.

Hayes wanted to be a doctor, but got redirected when he won a talent contest in ninth grade by singing Nat King Cole's "Looking Back."

He held down various low-paying jobs, including shining shoes on the legendary Beale Street in Memphis. He also played gigs in rural Southern juke joints where at times he had to hit the floor because someone began shooting.

Bernie Mac,  50;  television & movie actor,  stand-up comedian

SATURDAY, August 9, 2008 - (Associated Press) - LOS ANGELES - Bernie Mac blended style, authority and a touch of self-aware bluster to make audiences laugh as well as connect with him. For Mac, who died Saturday at age 50, it was a winning mix, delivering him from a poor childhood to stardom as a standup comedian, in films including the casino heist caper "Ocean's Eleven" and his acclaimed sitcom "The Bernie Mac Show."

THOUGH HIS COMEDY drew on tough experiences as a black man, he had mainstream appeal — befitting inspiration he found in a wide range of humorists: Harpo Marx as well as Moms Mabley; squeaky-clean Red Skelton, but also the raw Redd Foxx.

MAC DIED SATURDAY morning of complications from pneumonia in a Chicago-area hospital, his publicist, Danica Smith, said in a statement from Los Angeles. "The world just got a little less funny," said "Oceans" co-star George Clooney.

Don Cheadle, another member of the "Oceans" gang, concurred: "This is a very sad day for many of us who knew and loved Bernie. He brought so much joy to so many. He will be missed, but heaven just got funnier."

Mac suffered from sarcoidosis, an inflammatory lung disease that produces tiny lumps of cells in the body's organs, but had said the condition went into remission in 2005. He recently was hospitalized and treated for pneumonia, which his publicist said was not related to the disease.

Recently, Mac's brand of comedy caught him flack when he was heckled during a surprise appearance at a July fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate and fellow Chicagoan Barack Obama.

Toward the end of a 10-minute standup routine, Mac joked about menopause, sexual infidelity and promiscuity, and used occasional crude language. Obama took the stage about 15 minutes later, implored Mac to "clean up your act next time," then let him off the hook, adding: "By the way, I'm just messing with you, man."

Even so, Obama's campaign later issued a rebuke, saying the senator "doesn't condone these statements and believes what was said was inappropriate."

But despite controversy or difficulties, in his words, Mac was always a performer.

"Wherever I am, I have to play," he said in 2002. "I have to put on a good show."

Mac worked his way to Hollywood success from an impoverished upbringing on Chicago's South Side. He began doing standup as a child, telling jokes for spare change on subways, and his film career started with a small role as a club doorman in the Damon Wayans comedy "Mo' Money" in 1992. In 1996, he appeared in the Spike Lee drama "Get on the Bus."

He was one of "The Original Kings of Comedy" in the 2000 documentary of that title that brought a new generation of black standup comedy stars to a wider audience.

"The majority of his core fan base will remember that when they paid their money to see Bernie Mac ... he gave them their money's worth," Steve Harvey, one of his co-stars in "Original Kings," told CNN on Saturday.

Mac went on to star in the hugely popular "Ocean's Eleven" franchise with Brad Pitt and George Clooney, playing a gaming-table dealer who was in on the heist. Carl Reiner, who also appeared in the "Ocean's" films, said Saturday he was "in utter shock" because he thought Mac's health was improving.

"He was just so alive," Reiner said. "I can't believe he's gone."

Mac and Ashton Kutcher topped the box office in 2005's "Guess Who," a comedy remake of the classic Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn drama "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?" Mac played the dad who's shocked that his daughter is marrying a white man.

Mac also had starring roles in "Bad Santa," "Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle" and "Transformers."

But his career and comic identity were forged in television.

In the late 1990s, he had a recurring role in "Moesha," the UPN network comedy starring pop star Brandy. The critical and popular acclaim came after he landed his own Fox television series "The Bernie Mac Show," about a child-averse couple who suddenly are saddled with three children.

Mac mined laughs from the universal frustrations of parenting, often breaking the "fourth wall" to address the camera throughout the series that aired from 2001 to 2006. "C'mon, America," implored Mac, in character as the put-upon dad. "When I say I wanna kill those kids, YOU know what I mean."

The series won a Peabody Award in 2002, and Mac was nominated for a Golden Globe and an Emmy. In real life, he was "the king of his household" — very much like his character on that series, his daughter, Je'niece Childress, told The Associated Press on Saturday.

"But television handcuffs you, man," he said in a 2001 Associated Press interview before the show had premiered. "Now everyone telling me what I CAN'T do, what I CAN say, what I SHOULD do, and asking, `Are blacks gonna be mad at you? Are whites gonna accept you?'"

He also was nominated for a Grammy award for best comedy album in 2001 along with his "The Original Kings of Comedy" co-stars Harvey, D.L. Hughley and Cedric The Entertainer.

Chicago music producer Carolyn Albritton said she was Bernie Mac's first manager, having met him in 1991 at Chicago's Cotton Club where she hosted an open-mike night. He was an immediate hit, Albritton said Saturday, and he asked her to help guide his career. In 2007, Mac told David Letterman on CBS' "Late Show" that he planned to retire soon.

"I'm going to still do my producing, my films, but I want to enjoy my life a little bit," Mac told Letterman. "I missed a lot of things, you know. I was a street performer for two years. I went into clubs in 1977."

Mac was born Bernard Jeffrey McCullough on Oct. 5, 1957, in Chicago. He grew up on the South Side, living with his mother and grandparents. His grandfather was the deacon of a Baptist church.

In his 2004 memoir, "Maybe You Never Cry Again," Mac wrote about having a poor childhood — eating bologna for dinner — and a strict, no-nonsense upbringing.

"I came from a place where there wasn't a lot of joy," Mac told the AP in 2001. "I decided to try to make other people laugh when there wasn't a lot of things to laugh about."

Mac's mother died of cancer when he was 16. In his book, Mac said she was a support for him and told him he would surprise everyone when he grew up.

"Woman believed in me," he wrote. "She believed in me long before I believed."

Mac's death Saturday coincided with the annual Bud Billiken Parade in Chicago, a major event in the predominantly black South Side that the comedian had previously attended.

"It's truly the passing of one of our favorite sons," said Paula Robinson, president of the Black Metropolis National Heritage Area. "He was extremely innovative in putting his life experiences in comedic form and doing it without vulgarity.

"He was an ambassador of Chicago's black community, and the national black community at large."

A public memorial is planned for noon Aug. 16 at The House of Hope church in Chicago, said Smith, Mac's publicist.

Bernie Brillstein,  77;   agent, manager, producer & studio head

FRIDAY, August 8, 2008 - (Associated Press) - LOS ANGELES - Bernie Brillstein, a Hollywood talent agent, manager, producer and studio head who over half a century guided the careers of "Saturday Night Live" comedians and helped package a slew of TV and movie hits, has died.   He was 77.

BRILLSTEIN DIED OF CHRONIC OBSTRUCTIVE pulmonary disease Thursday night at a Los Angeles hospital, according to information provided Friday by Brillstein Entertainment Partners.

STARTING IN THE MAILROOM of the William Morris talent agency in 1956, Brillstein moved up to become a Hollywood power broker famous for putting together TV and movie deals, often starring talent he represented and with himself as executive producer.

BRILLSTEIN HELPED GUIDE the careers of John Belushi and Muppets creator Jim Henson. He also helped bring "Saturday Night Live" and "The Sopranos" to television.

WITH PARTNER BRAD GREY, he founded the influential management and production company Brillstein-Grey Entertainment in 1991, which later was named Brillstein Entertainment Partners.

AMONG the successful shows he helped bring to TV were the long-running variety show "Hee Haw" and "Alf." He was executive producer on the hit movie "Ghostbusters."

Brash, sharp and rotundly rumpled, Brillstein exemplified the old-school stereotype of an agent rather than the slick, corporate "Jerry Maguire" operator.

"He had a soul that is often missing in the business, which has taken on much more of a corporate tone," said Jon Liebman, chief executive officer of Brillstein Entertainment Partners.

In his 1999 memoir, "Where Did I Go Right? — You're No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead," he recalled that early on at the William Morris Agency in New York he helped negotiate a Broadway musical deal for an actress — only to find out that she had been dead for four years.

"Now that's classic agenting," he recalled. "We got a dead person a $250-a-week raise. I knew I was in the right business."

Brillstein had a reputation for caring deeply for his clients. Being an agent, he told CNN in 1999, was much more than cutting deals for clients.

"You're a wife. You really are," he said. "You take care of everything and get them ready for the day."

"How do you take an actor or comedian or a writer and point them in the right direction and go through all that garbage unless you love it and love them and think they're talented and worth it?" he said. "It's an amazing experience."

Belushi's 1982 death from a drug overdose hurt Brillstein deeply. So did contentions in Bob Woodward's "Wired" that Belushi's handlers and associates ignored his drug use because he made money for them.

Belushi, Brillstein argued, was out of control and had refused to get treatment.

Born April 26, 1931, in New York, Brillstein was the nephew of successful radio comic Jack Pearl. He studied marketing and advertising in college before taking the mailroom job at William Morris, where he worked his way up the ranks, then left to join another agency and later formed his own management company.

One client in the 1970s was Lorne Michaels, who created "Saturday Night Live." Brillstein helped pitch the idea to NBC and credited Michaels with bringing him many clients from the show, including Belushi, Gilda Radner and Dan Aykroyd.

Brillstein shrewdly used his clients, including comedy writers, in TV shows and movies he helped package — despite the potential conflict of interest in placing a client in a project in which he had a financial interest.

He was listed as an executive producer on several Belushi movies, including "The Blues Brothers."

Brillstein became chief executive officer at Lorimar Film Entertainment in 1986, but lasted just two years because the studio was sold to Warner Bros.

"I put about 20 films in development at Lorimar and ended up making six lousy movies, two good movies and one great movie," he said in his autobiography. The good one was "Dangerous Liaisons," starring John Malkovich and Glenn Close.

Brillstein worked with Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz in the 1980s but the two had a famous falling-out. Years later, Brillstein would refer to Ovitz in his autobiography as a scorpion and "gangster."

Brillstein, who was married several times, is survived by his wife Carrie; sons Michael Brillstein, David Koskoff and Nick Koskoff; daughters Kate Brillstein and Leigh Brillstein; and a grandson, Alden.

Estelle Getty, 84;  actress, known from 'Golden Girls' as Sophia

WEDNESDAY, July 23, 2008 - (Associated Press) - LOS AN- GELES - Estelle Getty, the diminutive actress who spent 40 years struggling for success before landing a role of a lifetime in 1985 as the sarcastic octogenarian Sophia on TV's "The Golden Girls," has died.   She was 84.

GETTY, WHO SUFFERED FROM ADVANCED DEMENTIA, died at about 5:30 AM Tuesday at her Hollywood Boulevard home, said her son, Carl Gettleman of Santa Monica.

"SHE WAS LOVED THROUGHOUT THE WORLD in six continents, and if they loved sitcoms in Antarctica she would have been loved on seven continents," her son said. "She was one of the most talented comedic actresses who ever lived."

"THE GOLDEN GIRLS," featuring four female retirees sharing a house in Miami, grew out of NBC programming chief Brandon Tartikoff's belief that television was ignoring its older viewers.

THREE of its stars had already appeared in previous series: Bea Arthur in "Maude," Betty White in "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and Rue McClanahan in "Mama's Family." The last character to be cast was Sophia Petrillo, the feisty 80-something mother of Arthur's character.

When she auditioned, Getty was appearing on stage in Hollywood as the carping Jewish mother in Harvey Fierstein's play "Torch Song Trilogy." In her early 60s, she flunked her "Golden Girls" test twice because it was believed she didn't look old enough to play 80.

"I could understand that," she told an interviewer a year after the show debuted. "I walk fast, I move fast, I talk fast."

She came prepared for the third audition, however, wearing dowdy clothes and telling an NBC makeup artist, "To you this is just a job. To me it's my entire career down the toilet unless you make me look 80." The artist did, Getty got the job and won two Emmys.

It culminated a long struggle for success during which Getty worked low-paying office jobs to help support her family while she tried to make it as a stage actress.

"I knew I could be seduced by success in another field, so I'd say, 'Don't promote me, please,"' she recalled. She also appeared in small parts in a handful of films and TV movies during that time, including "Tootsie," "Deadly Force" and "Victims for Victims: The Theresa Saldana Story."

After her success in "The Golden Girls," other roles came her way. She played Cher's mother in "Mask," Sylvester Stallone's in "Stop or My Mom Will Shoot" and Barry Manilow's in the TV film "Copacabana." Other credits included "Mannequin" and "Stuart Little" (as the voice of Grandma Estelle).

"The Golden Girls," which ran from 1985 to 1992, was an immediate hit, and Sophia, who began as a minor character, soon evolved into a major one.

Audiences particularly loved the verbal zingers Getty would hurl at the other three. When McClanahan's libidinous character Blanche once complained that her life was an open book, Sophia shot back, "Your life's an open blouse."

Getty had gained a knack for one-liners in her late teens when she did standup comedy at a Catskills hotel. Female comedians were rare in those days, however, and she bombed.

Undeterred, she continued to pursue a career in entertainment, and while her parents were encouraging, her father also insisted that she learn office skills so she would have something to fall back on.

Born Estelle Scher to Polish immigrants in New York, Getty fell in love with theater when she saw a vaudeville show at age 4.

She married New York businessman Arthur Gettleman (the source of her stage name) in 1947, and they had two sons, Carl and Barry. The marriage prevailed despite her long absences on the road and in "The Golden Girls."

In addition to her son Carl, Getty is survived by son Barry Gettleman, of Miami; a brother, David Scher of London; and a sister, Rosilyn Howard of Las Vegas.

Tony Snow, 53;  former Bush press secretary, Fox News anchor

SATURDAY, July 12, 2008 - (Associated Press) - WASH- INGTON, DC - Tony Snow, a conservative writer and com- mentator who cheerfully sparred with reporters in the White House briefing room during a stint as President Bush's press secretary, died on Saturday of colon cancer. He was 53.

"AMERICA HAS LOST A DEVOTED PUBLIC SERVANT and a man of character," President Bush said in a statement from Camp David, where he was spending the weekend. "It was a joy to watch Tony at the podium each day. He brought wit, grace, and a great love of country to his work."

SNOW, WHO SERVED AS THE FIRST HOST of the television news program "Fox News Sunday" from 1996 to 2003, would later say that in the Bush administration he was enjoying "the most exciting, intellectually aerobic job I'm ever going to have."

SNOW WAS WORKING for Fox News Channel and Fox News Radio when he replaced Scott McClellan as press secretary in May 2006 during a White House shake-up. Unlike McClellan, who came to define caution and bland delivery from the White House podium, Snow was never shy about playing to the cameras.

WITH a quick-from-the-lip repartee, broadcaster's good looks and a relentlessly bright outlook -- if not always a command of the facts -- he became a popular figure around the country to the delight of his White House bosses.

He served just 17 months as press secretary, a tenure interrupted by his second bout with cancer. In 2005 doctors had removed his colon and he began six months of chemotherapy. In March 2007 a cancerous growth was removed from his abdominal area and he spent five weeks recuperating before returning to the White House.

"All of us here at the White House will miss Tony, as will the millions of Americans he inspired with his brave struggle against cancer," Bush said.

Snow resigned as Bush's chief spokesman last September, citing not his health but a need to earn more than the $168,000 a year he was paid in the government post. In April, he joined CNN as a commentator.

As press secretary, Snow brought partisan zeal and the skills of a seasoned performer to the task of explaining and defending the president's policies. During daily briefings, he challenged reporters, scolded them and questioned their motives as if he were starring in a TV show broadcast live from the West Wing.

Critics suggested that Snow was turning the traditionally informational daily briefing into a personality-driven media event short on facts and long on confrontation. He was the first press secretary, by his own accounting, to travel the country raising money for Republican candidates.

Although a star in conservative politics, as a commentator he had not always been on the president's side. He once called Bush "something of an embarrassment" in conservative circles and criticized what he called Bush's "lackluster" domestic policy.

Most of Snow's career in journalism involved expressing his conservative views. After earning a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Davidson College in North Carolina in 1977 and studying economics and philosophy at the University of Chicago, he wrote editorials for The Greensboro (N.C.) Record, and The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk.

He was the editorial page editor of The Newport News (Va.) Daily Press and deputy editorial page editor of The Detroit News before moving to Washington in 1987 to become editorial page editor of The Washington Times.

Snow left journalism in 1991 to join the administration of the first President Bush as director of speechwriting and deputy assistant to the president for media affairs. He then rejoined the news media to write nationally syndicated columns for The Detroit News and USA Today during much of the Clinton administration.

Roger Ailes, chairman of Fox News, called Snow a "renaissance man."

Robert Anthony Snow was born June 1, 1955, in Berea, Ky., and spent his childhood in the Cincinnati area. Survivors include his wife, Jill Ellen Walker, whom he married in 1987, and three children.

Dr. Michael E. DeBakey, 99; pioneering heart surgeon, inventor

SATURDAY, July 12, 2008 - (Associated Press) - HOUSTON - Dr. Michael DeBakey, the world-famous cardiovascular surgeon who pioneered such now-common procedures as bypass surgery and invented a host of devices to help heart patients, has died.   He was 99.

DEBAKEY DIED FRIDAY NIGHT at The Methodist Hospital in Houston from "natural causes," according to a statement issued early Saturday by Baylor College of Medicine and The Methodist Hospital.

DEBAKEY COUNTED WORLD LEADERS among his patients and helped turn Baylor from a provincial school into one of the nation's great medical institutions.

"DR. DEBAKEY'S REPUTATION brought many people into this institution, and he treated them all: heads of state, entertainers, businessmen and presidents, as well as people with no titles and no means," said Ron Girotto, president of The Methodist Hospital System.

GIROTTO SAID THE SURGEON "has improved the human condition and touched the lives of generations to come."

"THERE is no question that he was one of the pioneers of cardiovascular surgery in the last half of the 20th century," Dr. Denton Cooley, president and surgeon-in-chief at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston and longtime DeBakey rival, said Saturday.

Cooley said one of DeBakey's greatest legacies is "that he influenced so many students to pursue careers in cardiovascular surgery."

While still in medical school in 1932, he invented the roller pump, which became the major component of the heart-lung machine, beginning the era of open-heart surgery. The machine takes over the function of the heart and lungs during surgery.

It was the start of a lifetime of innovation. The surgical procedures that DeBakey developed once were the wonders of the medical world. Today, they are commonplace procedures in most hospitals.

He also was a pioneer in the effort to develop artificial hearts and heart pumps to assist patients waiting for transplants, and helped create more than 70 surgical instruments.

In early 2006, DeBakey underwent surgery for a damaged aorta — a procedure he had developed.

In a rare interview published later that year, DeBakey gave The New York Times details of the operation, performed when he was 97.

"It is a miracle," DeBakey said. "I really should not be here." He said he at first gambled that his aorta would heal on its own and refused to be admitted to a hospital, and was unresponsive and near death when his doctors and his wife decided to proceed, despite his age. He then spent several months in the hospital.

As he recovered, DeBakey told his doctors he was glad they had operated, despite his earlier refusals. "If they hadn't done it, I'd be dead," he said.

Dr. William T. Butler, a colleague of DeBakey's at Baylor, said in March 2006 that DeBakey established himself with his surgical firsts as the "maestro of cardiovascular surgery."

"Dr. DeBakey was never afraid to challenge the status quo, often going against the tide," Butler said. "Some times his colleagues did not really accept his visionary ideas, particularly as he propelled beyond the boundaries of existing scientific dogma."

But the accolades poured in Saturday as news of the death spread. Baylor College of Medicine President Dr. Peter G. Traber recorded a taped webcast for the college community saying DeBakey "created the foundations of modern surgical practice," and always looked for new ways to treat patients ravaged by heart disease.

Cardiovascular surgeon Dr. George Noon called his longtime partner "the greatest surgeon of the 20th century" who "single-handedly raised the standard of medical care, teaching and research around the world."

In a 1985 Associated Press interview, DeBakey said, "I'm accused of being a perfectionist and, in the way it's usually defined, I guess I am. In medicine, and certainly in surgery, you have to be as perfect as possible. There's no room for mistakes."

DeBakey was the first to perform replacement of arterial aneurysms and obstructive lesions in the mid-1950s. He later developed bypass pumps and connections to replace excised segments of diseased arteries.

A tireless worker and a stern taskmaster, DeBakey literally had scores of patients under his care at any one time, helping to establish his name as a leading cardiovascular surgeon. He performed more than 60,000 heart surgeries during his 70 year career, The Methodist Hospital said.

"Man was born to work hard," he said.

His patients ranged from penniless peasants from the Third World to such famous figures as the Duke of Windsor, the Shah of Iran, King Hussein of Jordan, Turkish President Turgut Ozal, Nicaraguan Leader Violetta Chamorro and Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon.

But he said celebrities don't get special treatment on the operating table: "Once you incise the skin, you find that they are all very similar."

He made headlines again in 1996 when he flew to Moscow to help examine ailing Russian President Boris Yeltsin and served as a consultant when he underwent surgery.

DeBakey served as chairman of the President's Commission on Heart Disease, Cancer and Stroke during Johnson's administration and helped establish the National Library of Medicine. He was author of more than 1,000 medical reports, papers, chapters and books on surgery, medicine and related topics.

"I like my work, very much. I like it so much that I don't want to do anything else," DeBakey said.

Baylor University College of Medicine was a fledgling medical school when DeBakey joined it in 1948, five years after it moved from Dallas to Houston.

The Waco-based university later cut its ties to the school, but DeBakey, as the medical school's president and later chancellor, had helped to establish its own identity.

In 1953, DeBakey performed the first Dacron graft to replace part of an occluded artery. In the 1960s, he began coronary arterial bypasses.

In 1962, DeBakey received a $2.5 million grant to work on an artificial heart that could be implanted without being linked to an exterior console. In 1966, he was the first to successfully use a partial artificial heart — a left ventricular bypass pump.

It was the first implantation of a complete artificial heart by Cooley in 1969 that led to the famous feud between the two surgeons that lasted until the two publicly made amends in 2007. The patient, Haskell Karp, 47, lived on the artificial heart for nearly five days, then received a heart transplant, but died 36 hours later.

Cooley was censured by the medical school and the National Heart Institute for using the experimental device, and he and DeBakey traded accusations about their research. Cooley, who contended Karp was so ill he had no choice but to operate, left Baylor and established the Texas Heart Institute at St. Luke's Episcopal Hospital in the Texas Medical Center.

Meanwhile, the effort to save lives through heart transplants was stalled. Dr. Christiaan Bernard in South Africa had performed the first human heart transplant in history in late 1967. In the United States, DeBakey and Cooley were among those who began performing the transplants, but death rates were high because the recipients' bodies rejected the new organs.

The advent of a new anti-rejection drug, cyclosporine, gave new impetus to organ transplants in the 1980s. In 1984, DeBakey performed his first heart transplant in 14 years.

His work as an inventor continued. In the late 1990s, DeBakey brought out a ventricular assist device touted as one-tenth the size of current heart pumps that helped ease suffering for patients waiting for heart transplants.

In the late 1990s, he took an active role in creating the Michael E. DeBakey Heart Institute at Hays Medical Center in Hays, Kansas.

DeBakey was born Sept. 7, 1908, in Lake Charles, Louisiana., the son of Lebanese immigrants. He became inter- ested in medicine while listening to physicians chat at his father's pharmacy.

"I always knew I wanted to be a doctor. I just didn't know what kind," DeBakey once said.

He received his bachelor's and medical degrees from Tulane University in New Orleans.

He recalled in 1999 that the time he finished medical school in 1932, "there was virtually nothing you could do for heart disease. If a patient came in with a heart attack, it was up to God."

Early in his career, DeBakey invented a new blood transfusion needle, a new suture scissors and a new colostomy clamp. He began teaching at Tulane in 1937.

During World War II, DeBakey worked in Europe as director of the surgeon general's surgical consultants division, helping develop mobile army surgical hospitals (MASH units) and specialized treatment centers for returning veterans.

DeBakey's first wife, Diana Cooper DeBakey, died of a heart attack in 1972. Three years later, DeBakey married a German film actress, Katrin Fehlhaber.

She survives, along with their daughter, Olga-Katarina, and two of his four sons from his first marriage, Michael and Dennis. Two other sons, Ernest and Barry, preceded him in death, a Baylor spokeswoman said.

George Carlin,  71;  comedian,  known for his "Seven Words..."

MONDAY, June 23, 2008 - (C N N) - LOS ANGELES - George Carlin, the influential comedian whose routines used profanity, scatology and absurdity to point out the silli- ness and hypocrisy of human life, has died.   He was 71.

CARLIN, WHO HAD A HISTORY OF HEART TROUBLE, died of heart failure Sunday, according to publicist Jeff Abraham. Carlin went to St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon, complaining of chest pain, and died at 5:55 PM PDT.

CARLIN PERFORMED AS RECENTLY as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, and maintained a busy performing schedule, which included regular TV specials for HBO.

"HE WAS A GENIUS and I will miss him dearly," Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.

CARLIN WAS "A HUGELY INFLUENTIAL FORCE in stand-up comedy. He had an amazing mind, and his humor was brave, and always challenging us to look at ourselves and question our belief systems, while being incredibly entertaining. He was one of the greats," actor and comedian Ben Stiller said in a statement.

CARLIN was often quoted, his best lines traded like baseball cards. "Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?" began one famous routine. Another pointed out the differences between the pastoral game of baseball and the militaristic game of football: "Baseball is played on a diamond, in a park. The baseball park! Football is played on a gridiron, in a stadium, sometimes called Soldier Field or War Memorial Stadium."

Then there were the non sequiturs: "The bigger they are, the worse they smell," he observed.

He filled three best-selling books, more than 20 record albums and countless television appearances with his material.

He appreciated the impact his words made on fans.

"These are nice additional merit badges that you earn if you've left a mark on a person or on some people," he told CNN.com in 2004. "I'd say it's flattering, but flattery implies insincerity, so I call it a compliment."

Carlin was probably best known for a routine that began, "I was thinking about the curse words and the swear words, the cuss words and the words that you can't say." It was a monologue, known as "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television," that got Carlin arrested and eventually led to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The "Seven Dirty Words" bit prompted a landmark indecency case after New York's WBAI-FM radio aired it in 1973.

The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 that the sketch was "indecent but not obscene," giving the Federal Communications Commission broad leeway to determine what constituted indecency on the airwaves.

"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," Carlin said. "In the context of that era, it was daring.

"It just sounds like a very self-serving kind of word. I don't want to go around describing myself as a 'groundbreaker' or a 'difference-maker' because I'm not and I wasn't," he said. "But I contributed to people who were saying things that weren't supposed to be said."

In November, Carlin was slated to receive the 2008 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, given by the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

"In his lengthy career as a comedian, writer and actor, George Carlin has not only made us laugh, but he makes us think," Kennedy Center Chairman Stephen Schwarzman said in a statement. "His influence on the next generation of comics has been far-reaching."

In a typically wry response, Carlin said, "Thank you, Mr. Twain. Have your people call my people."

Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, in New York. He dropped out of high school in the ninth grade and joined the Air Force, where his misfit ways continued -- he received three courts-martial and several punishments.

After leaving the military, he spent a few years in radio, where he met Burns. In 1960, the pair left to pursue a comedy career in Los Angeles. Burns told the AP that the Carlin of those years was "fairly conservative," but things changed when the two saw Lenny Bruce in the early '60s.

"It was an epiphany for George," Burns told the AP. "The comedy we were doing at the time wasn't exactly groundbreaking, and George knew then that he wanted to go in a different direction."

Carlin remembered a similar feeling, he told CNN.com.

"[His career] represented a lot of such honesty on the stage, the willingness to confront a lot of sacred cows and expose them," he said of Bruce. "He did it with a great deal of irreverence and with a lot of brilliance."

Carlin went solo in 1962. For most of the decade, he was a conservative-looking presence: clean-shaven, attired in jacket and tie, making his amused observations to audiences on "The Tonight Show" and "The Ed Sullivan Show."

But as the times changed, so did Carlin. He let his hair down, grew a beard and dressed in jeans and tie-dyed T-shirts. It was this Carlin who became a hit with college audiences in the early '70s and made such albums as "FM & AM" and "Occupation: Foole."

Carlin hosted the first broadcast of "Saturday Night Live" in October 1975.

He also appeared in movies, including "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" (1989), Kevin Smith's "Dogma" (1999) and "Cars" (2006). For the latter, he was the voice of Fillmore, the Volkswagen bus.

He starred as a cabdriver in his own sitcom, "The George Carlin Show," which ran from 1993 to 1995. He also played the character of Mr. Conductor on the PBS series "Shining Time Station" and lent his voice to two episodes of "The Simpsons."

Carlin was blunt about his own struggles. He suffered several heart attacks, one at Dodger Stadium during a baseball game. He also underwent treatment for drug and alcohol abuse.

He was relentlessly amused by humanity -- in one of his most famous lines, he pointed out that "if you're born in this world you're given a ticket to the freak show. If you're born in America, you're given a front-row seat" -- but refused to consider himself a cynic. He preferred "disappointed idealist."

It all went into his comedy. He was fascinated by language and euphemism, noting that "there's a reluctance to confront reality and a desire to soften unpleasant realities." In a different life, he said, he may have been a teacher. Which he was, anyway.

"Part of what my impulse is with things I've said or done, I think it is an attempt to demystify these things, to take them out of the realm of the forbidden and the disgusting and the off-base, and to at least bring them into the discussion," he told CNN.com.

He is survived by his wife, Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; son-in-law Bob McCall; brother Patrick Carlin; and sister-in-law Marlene Carlin. Carlin's first wife, Brenda, died in 1997.

Syd Charisse, 86;  was famed dancer, & motion picture actress

WEDNESDAY, June 18, 2008 - (Associated Press) - LOS AN- GELES - Cyd Charisse, the long-legged beauty who danced with the Ballet Russe as a teenager and starred in MGM musicals with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, died Tuesday. She was 86.

CHARISSE WAS ADMITTED to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center on Monday after suffering an apparent heart attack, said her publicist, Gene Schwam.

SHE APPEARED IN DRAMATIC FILMS, but her fame came from the Technicolor musicals of the 1940s and 1950s.

CLASSICALLY TRAINED, she could dance anything, from a pas de deux in 1946's "Ziegfeld Follies" to the lowdown Mickey Spillane satire of 1956's "The Band Wagon" with Astaire.

SHE also forged a popular song-and-dance partnership on television and in nightclub appearances with her husband, singer Tony Martin.

Her height was 5 feet 6 inches, but in high heels and full-length stockings, she seemed serenely tall, and she moved with extraordinary grace. Her flawless beauty and jet-black hair contributed to an aura of perfection that Astaire described in his 1959 memoir, "Steps in Time," as "beautiful dynamite."

"Her beauty was breathtaking," Debbie Reynolds, who starred with Charisse in the 1952 classic "Singin' in the Rain," said in a statement. "The world will miss her dancing."

Charisse arrived at MGM as the studio was establishing itself as the king of musicals. Three producers — Arthur Freed, Joe Pasternak and Jack Cummings — headed units that drew from the greatest collection of musical talent. Dancers, singers, directors, choreographers, composers, conductors and a symphony-size orchestra were under contract and available. The contract list also included the screen's two greatest male dancers: Astaire and Kelly.

Astaire, who danced with her in "The Band Wagon" and "Silk Stockings," said of Charisse in a 1983 interview: "She wasn't a tap dancer, she's just beautiful, trained, very strong in whatever we did. When we were dancing, we didn't know what time it was."

She first gained notice as a member of the famed Ballet Russe, and got her start in Hollywood when star David Lichine was hired by Columbia Pictures for a ballet sequence in a 1943 Don Ameche-Janet Blair musical, "Something to Shout About."

Although that film failed to live up to its title, its ballet sequence attracted wide notice, and Charisse, then billed as Lily Norwood, began receiving movie offers.

"I had just done that number with David as a favor to him," she said in "The Two of Us," her 1976 double autobiography with Martin. "Honestly, the idea of working movies had never once entered my head. I was a dancer, not an actress. I had no delusions about myself. I couldn't act — I had never acted. So how could I be a movie star?"

She overcame her doubts and signed a seven-year contract at MGM. She also got a new name, the exotic "Cyd" instead of her lifelong nickname Sid to go with her first husband's last name.

"Singin' in the Rain" marked a breakthrough.

When Freed was dissatisfied with another dancer who had been cast, Charisse inherited the role and danced with Kelly in the "Broadway Melody" number that climaxed the movie. She stunned critics and audiences with her 25-foot Chinese silk scarf that floated in the air with the aid of a wind machine. Charisse also danced with Kelly in "Brigadoon," "It's Always Fair Weather" and "Invitation to the Dance."

Tim Russert, 58;  moderator of 'Meet the Press', NBC News V.P.

SATURDAY, June 14, 2008 - (New York Times) - WASH- INGTON, DC - Tim Russert, a fixture in American homes on Sunday mornings and election nights since becoming moderator of "Meet the Press" nearly 17 years ago, died Friday after collapsing at the Washington bureau of NBC News.  He was 58 and had lived in Northwest Wash- ington.

HIS DEATH WAS ANNOUNCED by Tom Brokaw, former anchor of "NBC Nightly News," who broke into the net- work’s programming just after 3:30 PM.

AN NBC SPOKESWOMAN, Allison Gollust, said in an e-mail message Friday night that Russert had died of a "sudden heart attack." His internist, Dr. Michael A. Newman, said on MSNBC that an autopsy had found that Russert had an enlarged heart and significant coronary artery disease.

WHEN STRICKEN, RUSSERT had been recording voice-overs for this Sunday’s program. Russert, who was also the Washington bureau chief and a senior vice president of NBC News, had returned in the last couple of days from a trip to Italy to celebrate the recent graduation of his son, Luke, from Boston College.

WITH HIS PLAIN-SPOKEN EXPLANATIONS and hard-hitting questions, Russert played an increasingly outsize role in the news media’s coverage of politics. The elegantly simple white memo board he used on election night in 2000 to explain the deadlock in the race between George W. Bush and Al Gore — "Florida, Florida, Florida," he had scribbled, in red marker — became an enduring image in the history of American television coverage of the road to the White House.

MORE RECENTLY, he drew criticism for his sharp — some said disproportionately sharp — questioning of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in her pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination, most notably in a debate between her and Senator Barack Obama in Cleveland in February. But he asked tough questions of Senator Obama, too, as well as any number of Republicans.

But he leavened his prosecutorial style with an exuberance for politics — and politicians, on both sides of the aisle. And the easy way he spoke on camera belied his fierce preparation, often to the detriment of his social life. He rarely ventured out on Saturday nights.

"He really was the best political journalist in America, not just the best television journalist in America," said Al Hunt, the Washington executive editor of Bloomberg News and former Washington bureau chief of The Wall Street Journal.

Russert’s political analysis was born of experience: he worked as a counselor to Gov. Mario M. Cuomo of New York in 1983-84 and for five years before that was special counsel to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. He had been chosen to run Moynihan’s New York City office before he turned 30.

"He absolutely set the standard for moving from politics to journalism," said Hunt, a close friend who first met Russert in his days working for Moynihan. "He proved it could be done. He proved it could be done with extraordinary skill and integrity."

Or, as Ethel Kennedy, the widow of Robert F. Kennedy, told NBC on Friday: "He had done his homework, so we didn’t have to do ours. We longed to hear what his take on world events was."

"Meet the Press," the top-rated public affairs program on television, is viewed by nearly four million people each Sunday, according to Nielsen Media Research. As word of Russert’s death spread across BlackBerry and computer screens, tributes poured into NBC from the highest elected officials and competitors on other networks. Dozens of loyal viewers also posted tributes on media Web sites.

Brokaw is to host a special edition of "Meet the Press" on Sunday, which will pay tribute to Russert’s life and career. With Russert’s unexpected passing, NBC will soon be forced to confront a question with no immediately easy answer: how to replace its lead political analyst with the presidential election less than five months away.

In a statement, President Bush described Russert as "an institution in both news and politics for more than two decades."

"He was always well-informed and thorough in his interviews," Bush said. "And he was as gregarious off the set as he was prepared on it."

Former President Bill Clinton and Senator Clinton issued a statement saying: "Tim had a love of public service and a dedication to journalism that rightfully earned him the respect and admiration of not only his colleagues but also those of us who had the privilege to go toe to toe with him."

With his bulky frame, thick face and devilishly arched eyebrows, Timothy John Russert Jr. was an unlikely television star. And it was not just that he was the son of a onetime garbage collector in his native Buffalo, or a graduate, with honors, of the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. When he joined NBC in 1984, it was as an executive working on special news projects. Among his earliest "gets": arranging an appearance a year later by Pope John Paul II on the "Today" program, broadcasting from Rome.

Behind the scenes and off camera, Russert’s colleagues at NBC News soon learned that he had a gift for making the most complex political machinations understanding and compelling.

"He had a better political insight than anyone else in the room, period," said Jeff Zucker, the chief executive of NBC Universal, who was then an up-and-coming producer.

As Zucker told it Friday, Michael Gartner, then president of NBC News, went to Russert at some point in the late 1980s to ask him to be the Washington bureau chief.

"Michael came back from the meeting," Zucker said, "and said he had also decided to name him the new mod- erator of ‘Meet the Press.’ "

"This was a guy who had no on-camera experience," Zucker said. "Forget that he had never hosted a program. He had never appeared on television."

He made his debut as moderator in December 1991. Eight years later, Bill Carter wrote in The New York Times that Russert had reinvented "Meet the Press," which first appeared on television in 1948, "changing it from a sleepy encounter between reporters and Washington newsmakers into an issue-dense program, with Russert taking on the week’s newsmaker."

Among those who submitted to Russert’s prosecutorial questions (which he often set up with evidence, often from the subject’s own mouth, cued on videotape) were Bill Clinton and Al Gore, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, John Kerry and John McCain.

During the perjury trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr., Cheney’s former chief of staff, Russert was put in the unfamiliar position of answering questions himself, from the witness stand. Libby had said that he first learned of the identity of a C.I.A. operative, Valerie Wilson, from Russert in a July 2003 conversation. Russert denied the claim, and prosecutors have asserted that Libby concocted that account to avoid acknowledging that he had learned about her from fellow officials.

Those reporters who covered the television beat saw many sides of Russert, whether it was in a direct phone call or voice mail message sternly questioning the accuracy of a particular reference to him, or the way he would seem to melt when being asked about one of his heroes, Bruce Springsteen, who was known to receive Russert backstage at his concerts.

Off camera and away from the office, Russert was a gregarious man with a rolling laugh and a roster of friends who were in his life for decades. Those who were in the presence of him and his son were long struck by the closeness of the relationship. Russert was known to steal away from the NBC Washington bureau during the day to greet his son upon his return from school, or to surprise him while he was caddying at a golf course in Nantucket, Mass., where the family had a home.

Four years ago, when the younger Russert was preparing to depart Washington for Boston College, several friends wondered aloud to the father how he would survive being so far away from his son.

In addition to his son, Russert is survived by his wife, Maureen Orth, a writer for Vanity Fair magazine; his father, Tim Russert and three sisters. The elder Russert is the subject of the son’s best-selling book, "Big Russ & Me."

Hunt, of Bloomberg News, said that in one of the last of their nearly weekly conversations, early this month, he and Russert were relishing the opportunity to cover this year’s presidential campaign. As his old friend recalled through tears Friday, Russert marveled, "Can you believe we get paid for this year?"

Bo Diddley, 79; musician, melded rhythm & blues - rock 'n' roll

TUESDAY, June 3, 2008 - (C N N) - MIAMI - Bo Diddley, the musical pioneer whose songs, such as "Who Do You Love?" and "Bo Diddley," melded rhythm and blues and rock 'n' roll through a distinctive thumping beat, has died. He was 79.

DIDDLEY DIED ON MONDAY, surrounded by family and loved ones at his home in Archer, Florida, said a family spokeswoman.

THE CAUSE WAS HEART FAILURE, his family said.

DIDDLEY IS SURVIVED BY HIS BROTHER, the Rev. Kenneth Haynes of Biloxi, Mississippi, his children, Evelyn Kelly, Ellas A. McDaniel, Tammi D. McDaniel and Terri Lynn Foster, as well as 15 grandchildren, 15 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.

THE WORLD-RENOWNED guitarist's signature beat -- usually played on an equally distinctive rectangular-bodied guitar -- laid the foundation for rock 'n' roll, and became so identified with him that it became known as the "Bo Diddley" beat. It was unlike anything else heard in pop music.

"THIS DISTINCTIVE, African-based ... rhythm pattern (which goes bomp-bomp-bomp bomp-bomp) was picked up by other artists and has been a distinctive and recurring element in rock 'n' roll through the decades," according to the rock 'n' roll Hall of Fame.

GUITARIST George Thorogood, a Diddley disciple, put it more bluntly.

"[Chuck Berry's] 'Maybellene' is a country song sped up," Thorogood told Rolling Stone in 2005. " 'Johnny B. Goode' is blues sped up. But you listen to 'Bo Diddley,' and you say, 'What in the Jesus is that?' "

Among the artists who made use of the Bo Diddley beat were Buddy Holly ("Not Fade Away," later covered by the Rolling Stones), Johnny Otis ("Willie and the Hand Jive"), the Yardbirds (covering Diddley's "I'm a Man" and adding their own guitar stylings to the closing bars, which were later incorporated into the Count Five's "Psychotic Reaction"), the Strangeloves ("I Want Candy"), Bruce Springsteen ("She's the One"), U2 ("Desire") and George Michael ("Faith"). Hundreds of artists have covered Diddley songs.

"Bo Diddley was one of rock 'n' roll's true pioneers," said Neil Portnow, president and CEO of The Recording Academy, the music industry organization best known for presenting the Grammy Awards. "He inspired legions of musicians with his trademark rhythm and signature custom-built guitar, and his song 'Bo Diddley' earned a rightful place in the Grammy Hall Of Fame. He leaves an indelible mark on American music and culture, and our deepest sympathies go out to his family, friends and fans. The 'Bo Diddley beat' surely will continue on."

Diddley's debut single was his self-titled 1955 classic, with "I'm a Man" as its B-side. The songs were released on Chicago's Chess-Checker Records label, also the home of Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon.

"It was the first in a string of groundbreaking sides that walked the fine line between rhythm & blues and rock 'n' roll," his Hall of Fame biography says.

Diddley was also an innovator in using the electric guitar, tweaking his instruments and adding a variety of effects to his recordings.

A contemporary of Berry, Fats Domino and Elvis Presley, Diddley cut a stylish figure on the rock 'n' roll landscape. With his guitar, dark glasses and black hat, he looked vaguely menacing; his music was much earthier and bluesier than that of his rock 'n' roll contemporaries.

However, Diddley wasn't above climbing on bandwagons in search of wider popularity; his early 1960s albums included such titles as "Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger," "Bo Diddley's a Twister," "Bo Diddley's Beach Party" and "Surfin' with Bo Diddley."

Eventually, Diddley returned to his roots and became a rock 'n' roll elder statesman. He was featured in the Thorogood video "Bad to the Bone," playing pool with Thorogood, and showed up during the Nike "Bo Knows" campaign starring Bo Jackson.

At the conclusion of a Nike commercial that showed Jackson excelling at a variety of sports, the athlete picked up a guitar and produced a squall of noise. Cut to Diddley, listening to the attempt: "Bo, you don't know Diddley," he said.

"I never could figure out what it had to do with shoes, but it worked," Diddley told The Associated Press. "I got into a lot of new front rooms on the tube."

Diddley was born Ellas Otha Bates in McComb, Mississippi, on December 30, 1928. He later took the name McDaniel after being adopted by his mother's cousin. Diddley's family moved to Chicago when he was 7, according to his Hall of Fame biography.

He played violin as a child, but said he was inspired to pick up the guitar after hearing John Lee Hooker's 1949 rhythm and blues hit, "Boogie Chillen."

He told many stories of how he got the name "Bo Diddley." In a 1999 interview, he said it came from his childhood friends, according to AP. Other tales included a one-string instrument from traditional blues called a diddley bow, the AP notes.

Either way, it became his own -- as did his music.

"I don't like to copy anybody. Everybody tries to do what I do, update it," he told the AP. "I don't have any idols I copied after."

"They copied everything I did, upgraded it, messed it up. It seems to me that nobody can come up with their own thing, they have to put a little bit of Bo Diddley there," he said.

He continued to tour well into 2007, but suffered a stroke last May and a heart attack in August.

He was inducted into the rock 'n' roll Hall of Fame in January 1987.

Though he was upset that he never received the financial rewards he expected -- "I am owed," he told the AP, adding "a dude with a pencil is worse than a cat with a machine gun" -- he reflected modestly on the rock 'n' roll revolution he helped start.

"Well, it's no different from anything else, I guess. I started sumthin'. I just happened to be the first one," he told the British magazine Uncut in 2005. "But I never thought it would turn into what it did. Somebody had to be first, and it happened to be me."

Sydney Pollack, 73; an Academy Award-winning director, actor

MONDAY, May 26, 2008 - (Associated Press) - LOS ANGELES - Academy Award-winning director Sydney Pollack, a Holly- wood mainstay who achieved commercial success and critical acclaim with the gender-bending comedy "Tootsie" and the period drama "Out of Africa," has died.   He was 73.

POLLACK DIED OF CANCER Monday afternoon at his home in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles, surrounded by family, said publicist Leslee Dart. Pollack had been diagnosed with can- cer about nine months ago, said Dart.

POLLACK, WHO OCCASIONALLY APPEARED ON THE SCREEN himself, worked with and gained the respect of Hollywood's best actors, including Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, in a long career that reached prominence in the 1970s and 1980s.

"SYDNEY MADE THE WORLD a little better, movies a little better and even dinner a little better. A tip of the hat to a class act," George Clooney said in a statement from his publicist. "He'll be missed terribly," Clooney said.

LAST FALL, he played Marty Bach opposite Clooney in "Michael Clayton," a drama that examines a law firm's fixer. The film, which Pollack co-produced, received seven Oscar nominations, including for best picture and a best actor nod for Clooney. Tilda Swinton won the Oscar for supporting actress.

Pollack was no stranger to the Academy Awards. In 1986, "Out of Africa" a romantic epic starring Streep and Redford of a woman's passion set against the landscape of colonial Kenya, captured seven Oscars, including best director.

In accepting his Oscar, Pollack commended Streep, who was nominated for best actress but did not win.

"I could not have made this movie without Meryl Streep," Pollack said. "She is astounding — personally, professionally, all ways."

Over the years, several of his other films, including "Tootsie" and "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?" got several nominations, including best director nods.

Pollack's movies frequently had some of Hollywood's top actors: "Absence of Malice" with Sally Field and Paul Newman, "The Yakuza" with Robert Mitchum, "Three Days of the Condor" with Redford, and "The Firm" with Tom Cruise, among others.

"Having the opportunity to know Sydney and work with him was a great gift in my life," Field said in a statement. "He was a good friend and a phenomenal director and I will cherish every moment that I ever spent with him."

In later years, he devoted increasing time to acting, appearing in Woody Allen's "Husbands and Wives," Robert Altman's "The Player," Robert Zemeckis' "Death Becomes Her," and Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut." He also had a recurring role in the TV comedy "Will & Grace."

Pollack's recent producing credits include "The Talented Ripley" and "Cold Mountain." His last screen appearance was in "Made of Honor," a romantic comedy currently in theaters, where he played the oft-married father of star Patrick Dempsey's character.

In recent years, Pollack also produced many independent films with filmmaker Anthony Minghella and a production company Mirage Enterprises.

The Lafayette, Indiana, native was born to first-generation Russian-Americans. In high school, he fell in love with theater, a passion that prompted him forego college and move to New York and enroll in the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater.

Studying under Sanford Meisner, Pollack spent several years cutting his teeth in various areas of theater, eventually becoming Meisner's assistant.

"We started together in New York and he always excelled at everything he set out to do, his friendships and his humanity as much as his talents," said Martin Landau, a longtime close friend and associate in Actor's Studio, through spokesman Dick Guttman.

After appearing in a handful of Broadway productions in the 1950s, Pollack turned his eye to directing — where he would ultimately leave his biggest mark. He helmed "The Way We Were" (1973), "Jeremiah Johnson" (1972), "Havana" (1990) and "The Interpreter" (2005).

"Sydney let the dialogue and the emotion of a scene speak for itself. Not given to cinematic tricks, his gentle and thoughtful touch and his focus on the story let us inhabit the world he created in each film," said Michael Apted, president of the Directors Guild of America.

But Pollack, who stood over six feet (1.8 meters) tall and had a striking presence on the screen, never totally gave up acting.

At the 2005 Tribeca Film Festival, Pollack said "Tootsie" star Dustin Hoffman pushed the director into playing the actor's exasperated agent.

Pollack said Hoffman repeatedly sent him roses with a note reading, "Please be my agent. Love, Dorothy." At that point, Pollack had not acted in 20 years.

"Most of the great directors that I know of were not actors, so I can't tell you it's a requirement," he said. "On the other hand, it's an enormous help."

In the 1982 movie, Hoffman plays an out-of-work actor who pretends to be a woman to land a role on a soap opera.

"I didn't think anyone would believe him as a woman," Pollack said. "But the world did, they went crazy."

Pollack was survived by his wife, Claire; two daughters, Rebecca and Rachel; his brother Bernie; and six grandchildren.

Dick Martin, 86;  was half the comedy team 'Rowan and Martin'

SUNDAY, May 25, 2008 - (Associated Press) - LOS ANGELES - Dick Martin, the zany half of the comedy team whose "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In" took television by storm in the 1960s – making stars of Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin and creating such national catch-phrases as "Sock it to me!" – has died.   He was 86.

MARTIN, WHO WENT ON TO BECOME one of television's busiest directors after splitting with Dan Rowan in the late 1970s, died Saturday night of respiratory complications at a hospital in Santa Monica, family spokesman Barry Greenberg said.

"HE HAD HAD SOME PRETTY SEVERE respiratory problems for many years, and he had pretty much stopped breathing a week ago," Greenberg said.

MARTIN HAD LOST THE USE OF ONE OF HIS LUNGS as a teenager, and needed supplemental oxygen for most of the day in his later years.

HE WAS SURROUNDED by family and friends when he died just after 6 PM Saturday, Greenberg said.

"LAUGH-IN," which debuted in January 1968, was unlike any comedy-variety show before it. Rather than relying on a series of tightly scripted song-and-dance segments, it offered up a steady, almost stream-of-consciousness run of non-sequitur jokes, political satire and madhouse antics from a cast of talented young actors and comedians that also included Ruth Buzzi, Arte Johnson, Henry Gibson, Jo Anne Worley and announcer Gary Owens.

Presiding over it all were Rowan and Martin, the veteran nightclub comics whose stand-up banter put their own distinct spin on the show.

Like all straight men, Rowan provided the voice of reason, striving to correct his partner's absurdities. Martin, meanwhile, was full of bogus, often risque theories about life, which he appeared to hold with unwavering certainty.

Against this backdrop, audiences were taken from scene to scene by quick, sometimes psychedelic-looking visual cuts, where they might see Hawn, Worley and other women dancing in bathing suits with political slogans, or sometimes just nonsense, painted on their bodies. Other times, Gibson, clutching a flower, would recite nonsensical poetry or Johnson would impersonate a comical Nazi spy.

"Laugh-In" astounded audiences and critics alike. For two years, the show topped the Nielsen ratings, and its catchphrases — "Sock it to me," "You bet your sweet bippy" and "Look that up in your Funk and Wagnall's" — were recited across the country.

Stars such as John Wayne and Kirk Douglas were delighted to make brief appearances, and even Richard Nixon, running for president in 1968, dropped in to shout a befuddled-sounding, "Sock it to me!" His opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, was offered equal time but declined because his handlers thought it would appear undignified.

Rowan and Martin landed the show just as their comedy partnership was approaching its zenith and the nation's counterculture was expanding into the mainstream.

The two were both struggling actors when they met in 1952. Rowan had sold his interest in a used car dealership to take acting lessons, and Martin, who had written gags for TV shows and comedians, was tending bar in Los Angeles to pay the rent.

Rowan, hearing Martin was looking for a comedy partner, visited him at the bar, where he found him eating a banana.

"Why are you eating a banana?" he asked. "If you've ever eaten here, you'd know what's with the banana," he replied, and a comedy team was born.

Although their early gigs in Los Angeles' San Fernando Valley often were performed gratis, they donned tuxedos for them and put on an air of success.

"We were raw," Martin recalled years later, "but we looked good together and we were funny."

They gradually worked up to the top night spots in New York, Miami and Las Vegas and began to appear regularly on television.

In 1966, they provided the summer replacement for "The Dean Martin Show." Within two years, they were headlining their own show.

The novelty of "Laugh-In" diminished with each season, however, and as major players such as Hawn and Tomlin moved on to bigger careers, interest in the series faded.

After the show folded in 1973, Rowan and Martin capitalized on their fame with a series of high-paid engagements around the country. They parted amicably in 1977.

"Dan has diabetes, and his doctor advised him to cool it," Martin told The Associated Press at the time.

Rowan, a sailing enthusiast, spent his last years touring the canals of Europe on a houseboat. He died in 1987.

Martin moved on to the game-show circuit, but quickly tired of it. After he complained about the lack of challenges in his career, fellow comic Bob Newhart's agent suggested he take up directing.

He was reluctant at first, but after observing "The Bob Newhart Show," he decided to try. Later, he would recall that it was "like being thrown into the deep end of the swimming pool and being told to sink or swim."

Soon he was one of the industry's busiest TV directors, working on numerous episodes of "Newhart" as well as such shows as "In the Heat of the Night," "Archie Bunker's Place" and "Family Ties."

Born into a middle-class family in Battle Creek, Mich., Martin had worked in a Ford auto assembly plant after high school.

After an early failed marriage, he was for years a confirmed bachelor. He finally settled down in middle age, marrying Dolly Read, a former bunny at the Playboy Club in London. Survivors include his wife and two sons, actor Richard Martin and Cary Martin.

Hamilton Jordan, 63; was President Carter's campaign director

SATURDAY, May 24, 2008 - (Associated Press) - WASHINGTON - Hamilton Jordan, a fun-loving political operative who helped propel a virtually unknown Jimmy Carter from the Georgia statehouse to the White House, died Tuesday night at his home in Atlanta, close friends said.   He was 63.

"HAMILTON WAS MY CLOSEST POLITICAL ADVISER, a trusted confidant, and my friend," said the former president. "His judgment, insight and wisdom were excelled only by his compassion and love of our country."

JORDAN HAD BEEN TREATED over the past 20 years for six types of cancer.

AS JIMMY CARTER'S YOUNG AND TIRELESS campaign director, Jordan (pronounced JER-den) was the principal architect of the strategy for electing a Democratic president from the South. Along the way, he cultivated a reputation as a Georgia "good ole boy," masking an astute political mind.

AFTER the Carter administration took office, Jordan played a key role in several administration accomplishments. He chaired task forces on civil service reform and the Saudi-Egyptian arms package. He also played a vital role in the successful effort to uphold Carter's nuclear carrier veto and the repeal of a Turkish arms embargo.

Carter bestowed the title of White House chief of staff on his 34-year-old political adviser as part of a comprehensive shakeup of the administration.

Jordan also took on more of a foreign policy role in the waning days of the administration. In 1980, the president sent him to Panama to mediate a dispute between Panamanian authorities and a team of American doctors about medical treatment and facilities for the deposed shah of Iran.

Jordan's major success was his role in the passage of the Panama Canal treaties. He organized a series of White House briefings for influential people in key senators' districts and flew to Panama for a long visit with Gen. Omar Torrijos, the Panamanian head of state.

Jody Powell, who was Carter's press secretary, said that in the last 20 years of Jordan's life, "when he fought cancer so courageously for so long," there was "a reflection and amplification of the qualities I saw in him in the 20 years before then — courage and unfailing good humor and concern for other people."

Jordan spent the past two decades not merely fighting for his life but "trying to help other people fighting cancer," Powell said.

In the White House, life seemed to become rockier for Jordan. It was reported that he was boorish in the presence of the wife of the Egyptian ambassador at a state dinner, comparing her decolletage to "the pyramids along the Nile." Another woman told reporters he spit iced amaretto and cream down her blouse. He was falsely accused of snorting cocaine at Studio 54.

After the White House, Jordan headed the Association of Tennis Professionals and was a marketing executive for Whittle Communications. He ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate from Georgia in 1986 and in 1992 managed H. Ross Perot's brief presidential campaign.

Eddy Arnold,  89;  country music artist, had mainstream appeal

THURSDAY, May 8, 2008 - (Associated Press) - NASHVILLE - Eddy Arnold, the gentleman crooner who took country music uptown and sold more than 85 million recordings over seven decades, died Thursday.   He was 89.

HIS DEATH, AT A CARE FACILITY near Nashville, was con- firmed by the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum.

FROM HIS DEBONAIR ATTIRE to the savvy with which he adapted his sound to popular trends, Arnold personified the evolution of country music in the years after World War II, from a rural vernacular to an idiom with broad mainstream appeal.

"I'VE NEVER THOUGHT OF MYSELF as a country and western singer," he told a reporter for The Charlotte Observer in 1968. "With the type material I do, I'm really a pop music artist." He added, "I want my songs to be accepted by everyone."

ARNOLD was a harbinger of the lush, orchestral Nashville Sound, made popular by the likes of Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline in the late 1950s and '60s. His greatest success was on the country charts, where, taken together, his singles have spent more time — including more time in the top position — than those of any other singer in the music's history.

Thirty-seven of his hits crossed over to the pop charts. The biggest of those, "Make the World Go," reached the pop Top Ten during the fall of 1965, when it was heard on the radio alongside the latest records by the Beatles, the Supremes and the Rolling Stones.

At the heart of Arnold's appeal was his lustrous, purling singing voice. Unlike many of his Nashville peers, he sang not through his nose but from his diaphragm. Influenced by crooners like Bing Crosby and Gene Autry, he favored romantic ballads and novelties over songs about drinking and cheating. Intimacy was his calling card.

Reviewing a concert he gave at Carnegie Hall in March 1968, Robert Shelton observed in The New York Times: "His singing is smooth, earnest, buoyant and uncomplicated. He is sentimental and direct. For women he seems to be a non-challenging romantic figure, and for their husbands is non-threatening."

Arnold's early peak of popularity was from 1945 to 1954, during which he had 57 consecutive singles in the country Top Ten. Nineteen of those hits reached No. 1. Two of them, "I'll Hold You in My Heart (Till I Can Hold You in My Arms)" and "I Wanna Play House with You," were later recorded by Elvis Presley, who patterned his crooning style after Arnold's.

In 1943 Arnold hired Colonel Tom Parker as his manager. A former carnival barker, Parker later directed the career of Presley.

Arnold effectively used radio and television as a platform for promoting his music. He was host of a series of network variety shows and appeared as a guest on the likes of Milton Berle's "Texaco Star Theater." He also starred in the Hollywood movies "Feudin' Rhythm" (1949) and "Hoedown" (1950).

Arnold was among the first country singers to perform in the casino rooms in Las Vegas. He appeared at the Sahara as early as 1953. He announced his retirement from performing in Las Vegas 46 years later, at the Orleans Hotel Casino. That same year, at the age of 81, he had his final record on the charts, a remake of his 1955 hit "The Cattle Call" sung with LeAnn Rimes, then a teenager.

Robert Edward Arnold was born May 15, 1918, in rural Henderson, Tennessee His father died after Arnold turned 11; several months later, creditors foreclosed on the family farm, forcing the Arnolds to become sharecroppers.

Music became a way out of poverty for Arnold. He began playing the guitar when he was 7. Ten years later he was performing in beer halls and cafés and singing on the radio in Jackson, Tennessee He went on to work on radio shows in Memphis, St. Louis and Nashville before becoming the lead singer of Pee Wee King's Golden West Cowboys, a popular act on the Grand Ole Opry, in 1940. Three years later he struck out on his own and formed the Tennessee Plowboys.

He made his early recordings, on which he not only sang but also played guitar, in New York and Chicago under the supervision of Steve Sholes, the head of the country and R&B divisions of RCA. He later recorded in Nashville, working with the producer Chet Atkins, among others.

The rise of rock 'n' roll in the mid-1950 saw singers like Presley supplanting Arnold and other perennial hitmakers on the country charts. Arnold considered retiring from the music business to focus on his already successful ventures in real estate development. Instead he dropped his plowboy image and recast himself as a cabaret-style singer clad in a tuxedo and backed by a string section. More Perry Como than Hank Williams, he was the embodiment of "hillbilly" music's move from the country to the city.

Arnold was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1966 and won the Country Music Association's first Entertainer of the Year award the following year.

Arnold is the subject of two biographies, both published in 1997: "I'll Hold You in My Heart," by Don Cusic, and "Eddy Arnold: Pioneer of the Nashville Sound," by Michael Streisguth.

Arnold's wife of 66 years, Sally Gayhart Arnold, died on March 11 at the age of 87. Arnold is survived by their children, Richard Edward Jr. of Nashville and Jo Ann Pollard of Brentwood, Tennessee; and two grandchildren.

Charlton Heston, 84;  epic actor of 50's, 60's,  former NRA head

SATURDAY, April 5, 2008 - (Associated Press) - LOS ANGELES - Charlton Heston, who won the 1959 best actor Oscar as the chariot-racing "Ben-Hur" and portrayed Moses, Michel- angelo, El Cid and other heroic figures in movie epics of the '50s and '60s, has died.   He was 84.

THE ACTOR DIED SATURDAY NIGHT at his home in Beverly Hills with his wife Lydia at his side, family spokesman Bill Powers said.

POWERS DECLINED TO COMMENT on the cause of death or provide any further details.

HESTON REVEALED IN 2002 that he had symptoms consistent with Alzheimer's disease, saying, "I must reconcile courage and surrender in equal measure."

WITH his large, muscular build, well-boned face and sonorous voice, Heston proved the ideal star during the period when Hollywood was filling movie screens with panoramas depicting the religious and historical past. "I have a face that belongs in another century," he often remarked.

The actor played the role of leader offscreen as well. He served as president of the Screen Actors Guild and chairman of the American Film Institute and marched in the civil rights movement of the 1950s. With age he grew more conservative and campaigned for conservative candidates.

In June 1998, Heston was elected president of the National Rifle Association, for which he had posed for ads holding a rifle. He delivered a jab at then-President Clinton, saying, "America doesn't trust you with our 21-year-old daughters, and we sure, Lord, don't trust you with our guns."

Heston stepped down as NRA president in April 2003, telling members his five years in office were "quite a ride. ... I loved every minute of it."

That same year, Heston was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor. "The largeness of character that comes across the screen has also been seen throughout his life," President Bush said at the time.

He engaged in a lengthy feud with liberal Ed Asner during the latter's tenure as president of the Screen Actors Guild. His latter-day activism almost overshadowed his achievements as an actor, which were considerable.

Heston lent his strong presence to some of the most acclaimed and successful films of the midcentury. "Ben-Hur" won 11 Academy Awards, tying it for the record with the more recent "Titanic" (1997) and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" (2003). Heston's other hits include: "The Ten Commandments," "El Cid," "55 Days at Peking," "Planet of the Apes" and "Earthquake."

He liked to cite the number of historical figures he had portrayed:

Andrew Jackson ("The President's Lady," "The Buccaneer"), Moses ("The Ten Commandments"), title role of "El Cid," John the Baptist ("The Greatest Story Ever Told"), Michelangelo ("The Agony and the Ecstasy"), General Gordon ("Khartoum"), Marc Antony ("Julius Caesar," "Antony and Cleopatra"), Cardinal Richelieu ("The Three Musketeers"), Henry VIII ("The Prince and the Pauper").

Heston made his movie debut in the 1940s in two independent films by a college classmate, David Bradley, who later became a noted film archivist. He had the title role in "Peer Gynt" in 1942 and was Marc Antony in Bradley's 1949 version of "Julius Caesar," for which Heston was paid $50 a week.

Film producer Hal B. Wallis ("Casablanca") spotted Heston in a 1950 television production of "Wuthering Heights" and offered him a contract. When his wife reminded him that they had decided to pursue theater and television, he replied, "Well, maybe just for one film to see what it's like."

Heston earned star billing from his first Hollywood movie, "Dark City," a 1950 film noir. Cecil B. DeMille next cast him as the circus manager in the all-star "The Greatest Show On Earth," named by the Motion Picture Academy as the best picture of 1952.

Arthur C. Clarke, 90;  was the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey

WEDNESDAY, March 19, 2008 - (B B C) - COLUMBO, Sri Lanka - Visionary science fiction writer Sir Arthur C. Clarke, author of more than 100 books, has died at the age of 90 in Sri Lanka.

ONCE CALLED "the first dweller in the electronic cottage", his vision of the future, and its technology - popularised in films like 2001: A Space Odyssey - captured the popular imagina- tion.

SIR ARTHUR'S VIVID - and very detailed - descriptions of space shuttles, super-computers and rapid communications systems were enjoyed by millions of readers around the world.

HIS WRITINGS gave science fiction - a genre often accused of veering towards the fan- tastical - a refreshingly human and practical face.

HIS IDEAS AND GADGETS engaged his readers because of, not despite, their plausibility. Quite often, his fictional musings formed the basis of what we now see as science fact.

PASSION FOR SCIENCE...   Arthur Charles Clarke was born in Minehead, a town in Somerset in the south-west of England, on 16 December 1917.

A farmer's son, he was educated at Huish's Grammar School in Taunton before joining the civil service.

A youthful interest in dinosaurs and Morse code blossomed into a fascination with all things scientific.

During World War II, Sir Arthur volunteered for the Royal Air Force, where he worked in the, then highly-secretive, development of radar.

Demobbed at the war's end, he went to King's College, London, where he took a First in maths and physics, before becoming a full-time writer in the late 1940s.

He wrote story-lines for the comic-book hero, Dan Dare, inspired Gene Roddenberry to create Star Trek and posited Clarke's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Beyond this, during the war, he published a paper in which he predicted that, at 22,300 miles above the Earth's surface, communications satellites would sit in geo-stationary orbit, allowing electronic signals to be bounced off them around the globe.

2001...   His vision, soon proved, revolutionised the communications and broadcasting industry.

No wonder, then, that Sir Arthur counted both Rupert Murdoch and CNN founder Ted Turner among his friends and acolytes.

But it was his creation, with the legendary film director Stanley Kubrick, of 2001: A Space Odyssey, that brought Sir Arthur world-wide fame.

Based in part on his short story, Sentinel, the film quickly established itself as a cult classic.

Its mysterious monoliths, the psychopathic Hal 9000 computer and a final sequence which baffled many cinema-goers have become frequently-referenced icons of cinema.

He lectured, was feted by everyone from the astronaut Buzz Aldrin to R Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, and appeared on television, most notably in Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World.

Sir Arthur's private life was as off-beat as his books. He moved to Sri Lanka - then called - Ceylon, in 1956. There he lived with a business partner and his family, scuba-dived and played table-tennis with local youths.

He only married once, to Marilyn Mayfield in 1953. According to his entry on Who's Who, the marriage was dissolved in 1964, and Sir Arthur never had children.

His status as the grand old man of science fiction was threatened when, in 1998, allegations of child abuse, which he strenuously denied, caused the confirmation of a knighthood to be delayed.

Sri Lanka's Justice Minister Lakshman Peiris ruled there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.

A seer of the modern age, Sir Arthur was an original thinker, a scientific expert whose tales combined technology and good old-fashioned storytelling and whose influence went far beyond the written page.

Marking his 90th birthday last year, he told fans: "I want to be remembered most as a writer. I want to entertain readers and hopefully stretch their imaginations as well.

"If I have given you delight by aught that I have done, let me lie quiet in that night, which shall be yours anon."

William F. Buckley, 82;  conservative thinker, author, columnist

THURSDAY, February 28, 2008 - (Associated Press) - NEW YORK - William F. Buckley Jr. died at work, in his study. The Cold War had ended long before. A Republican was in the White House. The word "liberal" had been shunned like an ill-mannered guest.

AT THE END OF HIS 82 YEARS, much of it spent stoking and riding a right-wing wave as an erudite commentator and conservative herald, all of Buckley's dreams seemingly had come true.

"HE FOUNDED A MAGAZINE, NATIONAL REVIEW, wrote more than 50 books, influenced the course of political history, had a son, had two grandchildren and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean three times," said his son, novelist Christopher Buckley. "He really didn't leave any stone unturned."

BUCKLEY WAS FOUND DEAD IN HIS STUDY on Wednesday morning in Stamford, Connecticut.

HIS assistant said Buckley was found by his cook. The cause of death was unknown, but he had been ill with emphysema, she said.

As an editor, columnist, novelist, debater and host of the TV talk show "Firing Line," Buckley worked at a daunting pace, taking as little as 20 minutes to write a column for National Review.

Yet on the platform, he was all handsome, reptilian languor, flexing his imposing vocabulary ever so slowly, accenting each point with an arched brow or rolling tongue and savoring an opponent's discomfort with wide-eyed glee.

"There's no 'weltschmerz,' or any sadness that permeates my vision," he told The Associated Press in a 2004 interview at his Park Avenue duplex. "There isn't anything I reasonably hoped for that wasn't achieved."

President Bush called Buckley a great political thinker, wit, author and leader. "He influenced a lot of people, including me," the president said. "He captured the imagination of a lot of people."

But Buckley was also willing to criticize his own and made no secret of his distaste for at least some of Bush's policies. In a 2006 interview with CBS, he called the Iraq war a failure.

"If you had a European prime minister who experienced what we've experienced, it would be expected that he would retire or resign," Buckley said at the time.

Luck was in the very bones of Buckley, blessed with a leading man's looks, an orator's voice, a satirist's wit and an Ivy League scholar's vocabulary. But before he emerged in the 1950s, few imagined that conservatives would rise so high, or so enjoy the heights.

For at least a generation, conservatism had meant the pale austerity of Herbert Hoover, the grim isolationism of Sen. Robert Taft, the snarls and innuendoes of Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Democrats were the party of big spenders and "Happy Days Are Here Again." Republicans settled for respectable cloth coats.

Unlike so many of his peers and predecessors on the right, Buckley wasn't a self-made man prescribing thrift, but a multimillionaire's son who enjoyed wine, sailing and banter and assumed his wishes would be granted.

Even historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who labeled Buckley "the scourge of American liberalism," came to appreciate his "wit, his passion for the harpsichord, his human decency, even ... his compulsion to épater [to shock] the liberals."

Buckley once teased Schlesinger after the historian praised the advent of computers for helping him work more quickly. "Suddenly I was face-to-face with the flip side of Paradise," Buckley wrote. "That means, doesn't it, that Professor Schlesinger will write more than he would do otherwise?"

Buckley founded the biweekly magazine National Review in 1955, declaring that he proposed to stand "athwart history, yelling 'stop' at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who urge it."

Conservatives had been outsiders in both mind and spirit, marginalized by a generation of discredited stands -- from opposing Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal to the isolationism that preceded the U.S. entry into World War II. Before Buckley, liberals so dominated intellectual thought that critic Lionel Trilling claimed there were "no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation."

"Bill could go to the campus with that arch manner of his. And he was exciting and young and conservative," conservative author and columnist George Will told the AP in 2004. "And all of a sudden, conservatism was sexy."

The National Review was initially behind history, opposing civil rights legislation and once declaring that "the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail."

Buckley also had little use for the music of the counterculture, once calling the Beatles "so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of antimusic."

As conservatives gained influence, so did Buckley and his magazine. The long rise would peak in 1980, when Buckley's good friend Ronald Reagan was elected president.

"Ronnie valued Bill's counsel throughout his political life, and after Ronnie died, Bill and Pat were there for me in so many ways," Reagan's widow, Nancy Reagan, said Wednesday in a statement.

Buckley's wife, the former Patricia Alden Austin Taylor, died in 2007 at age 80. Christopher is their only child. Buckley is also survived by two brothers and three sisters.

Gordon B. Hinckley, 97

MONDAY, January 28, 2008 - (Associated Press) - SALT LAKE CITY, Utah - Mormon church president Gordon B. Hinckley died Sunday, a church spokesman said. He was 97.

HINCKLEY WAS THE 15TH PRESIDENT of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and its longest-serving president.

SINCE taking over as president and prophet of the church on March 12, 1995, Hinckley oversaw one of the greatest periods of expansion in church history.

_________________________

The number of temples worldwide more than doubled, from 49 to more than 120 and church membership grew from about 9 million to more than 12 million.

Like his contemporary, Pope John Paul II, he became by far his church's most traveled leader in history.

And the number of Mormons outside the United States surpassed that of American Mormons for the first time since the church, the most successful faith born in the United States, was founded in 1830.

The church presidency is a lifetime position.

The previous oldest church president was David O. McKay, who was 96 when he died in 1970.
__________________________

Former Indonesian President Suharto,  86;  he had a 32 yr rule

MONDAY, January 28, 2008 - (Los Angeles Times) - JAKARTA, Indonesia - Former President Suharto, an army general who rose to power in Indonesia with the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people and ruled for 32 years over an era of rapid economic growth and extraordinary graft, died Sunday in Indonesia.   He was 86.

SUHARTO'S UNYIELDING OPPOSITION to communism won him the backing of the United States during the height of the Cold War, although he was one of the most brutal and corrupt rulers of that era. He governed the world's fourth-most-populous nation with a combination of paternalism and ruthlessness from 1965 until he was ousted in spring 1998.

LIKE MANY JAVANESE, Suharto went by only one name. He had been in poor health for years after suffering several strokes and other ailments. He was rushed to the hospital Jan. 4 with anemia and low blood pressure.

SUHARTO surprised his doctors, and the nation, last week by overcoming a blood infection and making what one physician called a miraculous recovery. But his health took a sudden turn for the worse again, and by Sunday morning he had suffered multiple organ failure for a second time.

As Suharto drifted in and out of consciousness, his family gave doctors permission to take him off life support.

Declaring a week of mourning, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono asked all Indonesians to "pay the highest respect to one of the best sons of the nation.

"I'm asking all Indonesians to pray for him, for his dedication and service to the country, and to human beings. We also pray for the family to be strong, and look ahead for better future," the president said.

Suharto expanded Indonesia's territory by force and guile, annexing the territories of Papua and East Timor and brutally suppressing the independence movement in the province of Aceh in a conflict that lasted 27 years.

The estimates of the number of people killed by Suharto's regime "vary from 300,000 to 2 million, but the exact number nobody knows," said Asmara Nababan, former secretary general of Indonesia's Human Rights Commission. "It created a big wound in society, and even today it is not completely gone."

His military regime incarcerated hundreds of thousands of political prisoners for years without trial. Many critics of his rule simply vanished.

But long before Suharto's death, Indonesians were working to build a democracy from the rubble of his regime, which collapsed in 1998 amid nationwide protests and riots sparked by an economic meltdown across the region.

Under a carefully managed compromise, the Indonesian military retained its dominance over politics behind the scenes in exchange for allowing democratic reforms.

In one of the most significant steps of the post-Suharto era, government power has been decentralized. More than 16,000 public service facilities were transferred to regional authorities, which boosted economic growth in areas that once felt overlooked.

Conflicts in East Timor and Aceh have been resolved. East Timor was granted independence, and guerrillas in Aceh laid down their arms in exchange for special autonomy for the province, a peace deal forged after the devastation of the 2004 tsunami.

After Suharto was ousted, Indonesia's radical Islamic movement gained new strength, but the softer approach has slowly shown results. There have been fewer high-profile attacks in recent years.

Suharto preferred an iron hand. He not only crushed Indonesia's Communist Party but also suppressed Islamic extremists, forcing the most militant clerics into exile.

At the same time, he divvied up the nation's wealth among his six children and his cronies, amassing a family fortune estimated at $40 billion.

In 2000, the government charged him with embezzling $571 million. But the courts eventually ruled that Suharto, who had suffered strokes after resigning the presidency, was too ill to face charges.

Suharto was born June 8, 1921, in Kemusu, a village in central Java.

His wife, Siti Hartinah, died in 1996. Suharto is survived by three sons and three daughters.

"It had already risen to a height of 45,000 feet, and was still boiling upward like something terribly alive," he wrote in his book. "Even more fearsome was the sight on the ground below. Fires were springing up everywhere amid a turbulent mass of smoke that had the appearance of bubbling hot tar."

The flight back to Tinian was uneventful, and Tibbets alighted from the plane to be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross.

Months later, Truman commiserated with Tibbets at the White House about the criticisms over dropping the bomb.

"It was my decision," Truman told him. "You didn't have any choice."

Heath Ledger, 28;  Australian Academy Award nominated actor

WEDNESDAY, January 23, 2008 - (International Herald Trib- une) - NEW YORK CITY - Heath Ledger, the Australian-born actor whose breakthrough role as a gay cowboy in the 2005 movie "Brokeback Mountain" earned him a nomination for an Academy Award (and comparisons to the likes of Marlon Brando) was found dead Tuesday in an apartment in New York City.

THE POLICE SAID he was found naked on the floor by the bed in an apartment in the Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo that Ledger, 28, had been renting. The chief police spokesman, Paul Browne, said the police did not suspect foul play.

"THERE WAS NO INDICATION of a disturbance," he said, adding that there were no signs that Ledger had been drinking. Nor were any illegal drugs found in the loft, which neighbors said Ledger had occupied for several months.

POLICE officials said that a bottle of prescription sleeping pills was found on a nearby night table.

An autopsy was inconclusive, and more tests are needed, the medical examiner's office said Wednesday, according to The Associated Press. It will take about 10 days to complete the investigation, said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner.

Ledger, who became one of Hollywood's hottest under-30 stars with "Brokeback Mountain," had become a familiar figure in the neighborhood after moving there after he broke up with the actress Michelle Williams - and something of a fixture in gossip columns. He had clashed with paparazzi in Australia and had partied in New York, but unlike some stars, he was not remembered as a difficult celebrity.

Heathcliff Andrew Ledger was born on April 4, 1979, in Perth, Australia, where a local theater company cast him in "Peter Pan" when he was 10. That role led to parts on children's television programs and to the 1992 film "Clowning Around" and the 1993-4 television series "Ship to Shore."

After appearing in a short-lived Australian television series, he moved to Los Angeles in 1999 "with no expectations and all the confidence of youth," as The Sunday Telegraph put it. His first Hollywood film was the teenage romantic comedy "10 Things I Hate About You," a send-up of Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew."

He passed up other roles in teen films. "I feel like I'm wasting time if I repeat myself," he later said in an interview with The New York Times. He paid a price, running so low on money that, according to the magazine Current Biography, he was borrowing from his agent.

The payoff came in an audition for the Mel Gibson film "The Patriot" - Ledger's second audition; he had walked out of the first, saying his reading was no good. He later appeared in "A Knight's Tale" and "Monster's Ball" in 2001, and in four films released in 2005: "Lords of Dogtown," "Casanova," "The Brothers Grimm" and the cowboy romance that established him as a major star, "Brokeback Mountain."

"Ledger magically and mysteriously disappears beneath the skin of his lean, sinewy character," the critic Stephen Holden wrote in The New York Times. "It is a great screen performance, as good as the best of Marlon Brando and Sean Penn."

Ledger met Williams while filming "Brokeback Mountain." They began a romance and moved to Boerum Hill in the New York borough of Brooklyn, where their comings and goings were widely noted in the New York tabloids and on celebrity-oriented Web sites. Williams gave birth to their daughter, Matilda Rose, on Oct. 28, 2005.

Until the couple separated last summer, Ledger, Williams and Matilda were the darlings of Brooklyn, photographed around Boerum Hill. But Ledger often clashed with paparazzi - most intensely back home in Australia.

Ledger's death shook Warner Brothers, which is scheduled to release his next film July 18 - "The Dark Knight," a big-budget sequel to "Batman Begins." Ledger plays the Joker, a psychotic bank robber.

Bobby Fischer, 64;  chess master once hailed as American hero

FRIDAY, January 18, 2008 - (B B C) - REYKJAVIK, Iceland - Bobby Fischer, who has died at the age of 64, was a talented chess grandmaster once hailed as an American hero for breaking a Soviet dominance of the game that had lasted nearly 30 years.

HIS SURPRISE DEFEAT of Soviet champion Boris Spassky in 1972 in the "chess match of the century" established him at the top of the game, after a run of 20 consecutive tournament victories that is still hailed as the longest winning streak in world chess.

BUT INSTEAD of capitalising on his win, he withdrew from competition and rarely played at international level afterwards.

IN RECENT YEARS, he had been better known for his paranoia, obsessive behaviour and outrageous public statements, which all but overshadowed his undoubted brilliance.

VOLATILE AND IMPETUOUS...   Born in Chicago in 1943, Bobby Fischer was a chess genius from the beginning, playing from the age of eight.

He was US junior champion at 13 and open champion at 14, a title he won seven more times.

He became a grandmaster at 15, but was already showing himself to be volatile and impetuous, often turning up late for or walking out of matches.

His victory in 1972 was unexpected, as every world champion since World War II had been from the USSR, and seemed a foretaste of a promising career.

But the man who once said that "all I want to do, ever, is play chess" played precious little of it at international level after he won the world championship in Reykjavik in 1972.

Instead of capitalising on his win, Fischer withdrew from competition. Three years later, the World Chess Federation stripped him of his title for failing to defend it against Anatoly Karpov.

Since then, apart from the Fischer-Spassky rematch in Yugoslavia in 1992 that provoked the wrath of the US government, America's greatest chess player made headlines for all the wrong reasons.

RECLUSIVE...   Until Fischer was detained in July 2004 while trying to leave Japan with a revoked US passport, his whereabouts had often been a mystery.

His reclusiveness, his anti-Semitic diatribes in radio interviews and - most unforgivably for his fellow countrymen - his support for the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US all tarnished his legend.

"This is all wonderful news. It is time to finish off the US once and for all," he told a radio station in the Philippines after learning of the attacks.

BBC journalist and chess expert David Edmonds, co-author of the book Bobby Fischer Goes To War, says Americans were profoundly shocked by the transformation.

"To many people, he had been an American icon in 1972. The match had been presented as a classic Cold War battle," he told the BBC News website.

"The Soviet Union had held the world chess title since World War II and chess was an enormously important propaganda tool. Lenin was a keen chess player, so was Trotsky - even Karl Marx himself played chess.

"Bobby Fischer was held up as an archetype after that, and many people view what has happened to him with great sadness. They feel he has been letting not only himself down, but the US down as well."

Certainly Fischer's behaviour in later years was irrational to such an extent that many questioned his sanity. He repeatedly claimed that he was being hounded by a Jewish conspiracy, despite the fact that his mother was Jewish.

Even in his heyday, he was known for making unreasonable demands at tournaments, complaining about everything from the lighting of the hall to the amount of prize money on offer.

RUTHLESS...   Fischer also had a gladiatorial view of chess. "I like the moment when I break a man's ego," he once said in an interview, adding to the sense of theatre surrounding him that helped elevate the game from an obscure pastime to worldwide front-page news.

"He did enjoy humiliating his opponents. He could sense when his opponent was crumbling before him," says David Edmonds.

"But his style of playing was never flashy for the sake of showing off - it was clean, logical, ruthless and efficient. There was nothing ornamental about it," he says.

Despite the scale of his downfall, Fischer continued to inspire successive generations of chess players.

Many continued to see him as an artist with a unique charisma, and tried to overlook the flaws that have brought him low.

Until the end, the US government viewed him as a fugitive from justice - but his move to Iceland meant he escaped the endgame of a public trial that could have destroyed the last vestiges of his reputation.

Edmund Hillary, 88; first person to reach summit of Mt. Everest

FRIDAY, January 11, 2008 - (B B C) - AUKLAND, New Zea- land - Sir Edmund Hillary, who has died at the age of 88, made it to the summit of Everest in 1953, and became the first man on the planet to reach its highest point.

AS A BOY IN NEW ZEALAND, Edmund Hillary's fragile ap- pearance belied his ground-breaking potential.

AT SCHOOL, he was in a gym group for those lacking co-ordination and admitted to feeling a "deep sense of infer- iority".

But the 40-mile journey to school in Auckland each day gave young Edmund many hours to pore over adventure stories and travel ever further in his mind.

UNRECORDED ACHIEVEMENT...   Although Sir Edmund briefly worked as a beekeeper after he left school, he had found his true vocation at the age of 16 while on a school trip to Mount Ruapehu, 320km (200 miles) south of Auckland.

He had seen snow for the first time as well as learning to climb.

After spending two years as a navigator in the New Zealand's air force, he joined a local Alpine Club to take on all the national peaks.

Unsatisfied by these local triumphs, he also travelled to the Himalayas and started wrestling to improve his strength.

This was all with the idea of taking on the ultimate challenge, becoming the first man to climb Everest.

By the time Sir Edmund attempted his ascent, seven previous expeditions to the top of the world's highest mountain had failed.

Sir Edmund recalled: "We didn't know if it was humanly possible to reach the top."

Despite this general trepidation, the determined New Zealander joined a trip led by British climber, Sir John Hunt.

After a gruelling climb up the southern face, battling the effects of high altitude and bad weather, Sir Edmund and Tenzing Norgay managed to reach the peak at 1130 local time on 29 May.

'ALL THIS - AND EVEREST TOO!'...   When they finally reached the top Sir Edmund, who lost four stone on the expedition, reported his first sensation as one of relief.

He took the famous photo of his Sherpa companion posing with his ice-axe, but refused Tenzing's offer to take one of him, so his ascent went unrecorded.

On the morning of Queen Elizabeth's coronation in May 1953, her subjects were told that Sir Edmund had made it to the summit.

As he was a New Zealander and therefore a citizen of the Commonwealth, British subjects celebrated his achievement as their own.

On the day the Queen was crowned, one newspaper headline crowed "All this - and Everest too!"

Sir Edmund was knighted for his efforts, and Tenzing given a medal.

The pair initially reported the ascent as one made in unison. Only after the Sherpa's death in 1986, did Sir Edmund reveal that he had been about 10 feet ahead at the final ridge.

PERSONAL TRAGEDY...   Sir Edmund was apparently so shy that he even proposed to his wife with a message via her mother.

In the years that followed his famous ascent, he shunned the celebrity that had become his overnight.

On the 50th anniversary of his achievement, he even turned down an invitation from the Queen, so that he could instead travel to Kathmandu to be with lifelong Sherpa friends.

He was made an honorary Nepalese citizen in 2003.

Sir Edmund was far happier exploring.

During the next two decades, he led expeditions to the South Pole, searched for the fabled Yeti, and completed six Himalayan ascents.

And he became increasingly concerned by the plight of the Sherpa people he had met on his expeditions.

He spent two years as New Zealand's High Commissioner to India, and founded the Himalayan Trust in 1964, which helped establish clinics, hospitals and nearly 30 schools.

It also supported the construction of two airstrips, bringing in more tourists than Sir Edmund liked.

He continued this work after personal tragedy in 1975, when his wife and daughter died in a plane crash on their way to meet him at a construction site.

Although the explorer was inconsolable for a long time, he found solace in the Nepal landscape and its people.

'LIFE'S A BIT LIKE MOUNTAINEERING...'   He was a vociferous opponent of what he considered the com- mercialisation of the mountain, rich tourists paying their way to the ultimate altitude thrill, and often leaving rub- bish behind them.

Seemingly forgetting his own determination to conquer the high ridges, Sir Edmund urged these later climbers to "leave the mountains in peace".

Although he will always be remembered for reaching the world's highest plateau, for the explorer himself, his greatest satisfaction came with the Nepalese people he befriended.

He said: "My most worthwhile things have been the building of schools and clinics. That has given me more satisfaction than a footprint on a mountain."

Sir Edmund Hillary remained philosophical about living with such an early achievement. He explained: "I've had a full and rewarding life. Life's a bit like mountaineering - never look down."