Elizabeth Taylor: Actress, Dead at 79...

Elizabeth Rosemond Taylor, DBE
(February 27, 1932 – March 23, 2011)




Elizabeth Taylor, also known as Liz Taylor, was an English-American actress.

Beginning as a child star, as an adult she came to be known for her acting talent and beauty, and had a much publicised private life, including eight marriages and several near death experiences. Taylor was considered one of the great actresses of Hollywood's Golden Age. The American Film Institute named Taylor seventh on its Female Legends list.

The Hollywood legend's career spanned seven decades and she had five Oscar nominations.

Taylor acted in her first film at the age of 10, three years after her American parents had returned to the United States from London, where she was born in Hampstead in 1932.

After just one film, she was hired by MGM, and became a child star with National Velvet, starring opposite Mickey Rooney. One of the longest-surviving stars of the old studio system, she was widely acclaimed for her roles Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Raintree Country and Cleopatra.

Her two best actress Oscars were awarded for Butterfield 8 in 1960, and for her portrayal of a foul-mouthed alcoholic in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in 1967.

Later in life she became known for charitable work for Aids and other causes, as well as her friendship with Michael Jackson, who asked her to be godmother to two of his three children.

Taylor dealt with various health problems over the years. In February 2011 new symptoms related to congestive heart failure caused her to be admitted into Cedars-Sinai Medical Center for treatment.

Taylor died surrounded by her four children at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, California.

RIP

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Jane Russell: Actress, Dead at 89...

Ernestine Jane Geraldine Russell
(June 21, 1921 – February 28, 2011)




Jane Russell was an American film actress and was one of Hollywood's leading sex symbols in the 1940s and 1950s.

She was discovered by the wealthy industrialist Howard Hughes who in 1940 cast her in the movie The Outlaw. In 1947, Russell delved into music before returning to films. She made several films unde her contract with RKO – thrillers such as His Kind of Woman (1951) and Macao (1952), both opposite Robert Mitchum; The Las Vegas Story (1952) with Victor Mature; and Double Dynamite (1951), with Frank Sinatra and Groucho Marx. The Western Montana Belle had been made for RKO in 1948, but Howard Hughes bought out the rights and sat on it for four years, releasing it only in 1952, when he felt his protégée was sufficiently established. In that year she also made Son of Paleface for Paramount.

Her best known role came in 1953 when she starred alongside another Hollywood legend, Marilyn Monroe, in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

After starring in multiple films in the 1950s, Russell again returned to music while completing several other films in the 1960s. She starred in over 20 films throughout her career.

In 1955, she founded the World Adoption International Fund. For her achievements in film, she received several accolades including having her hand and foot prints immortalized in the forecourt of Grauman's Chinese Theater and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Russell married three times and adopted three children.

She died at her home in Santa Maria, California of a respiratory-related illness. She is survived by her three children: Thomas Waterfield, Tracy Foundas and Robert Waterfield.

RIP

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Rue McClanahan: Actor, Dead at 76...

Rue McClanahan
(February 21, 1934 – June 3, 2010)



Rue McClanahan was an American actress, known for her roles as Vivian Cavender Harmon on Maude, Fran Crowley on Mama's Family, and Blanche Devereaux on The Golden Girls, a role that won her an Emmy Award.

RIP

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Lynn Redgrave: Actress, Dead at 67...

Lynn Rachel Redgrave, OBE
(8 March 1943 – 2 May 2010)





Lynn Redgrave was an English actress.

Redgrave starred in the 1966 hit film Georgy Girl, which won her a New York Film Critics Award and nominations for an Academy Award and a Golden Globe Award. She was also nominated for best supporting actress in the 1998 film Gods and Monsters. She had many other successes on stage and screen.

A member of the famous acting dynasty, Redgrave was sister to Vanessa and Corin and the daughter of actor and director Michael Redgrave.

She was aunt to film and TV star Joely Richardson and to Natasha Richardson, who died last year following a ski accident.

Her brother Corin, an actor and political activist, died on April 6. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000.

In 1967, Redgrave married and professionally partnered the British/Canadian/American actor and director John Clark. Together they had three children, Benjamin, Kelly and Annabel Lucy Clark. The marriage ended in divorce in December 2000.

In 2001 Redgrave was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire.

Redgrave was diagnosed with breast cancer in December 2002.

Her publicist, Rick Miramontez, speaking on behalf of her children, said she died at her home in Connecticut. Her three children were with her.

In addition to her children, she is survived by her sister Vanessa, as well as several other famous members of the Redgrave family.

RIP

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Kathryn Grayson: Actress, Dead at 88...

Kathryn Grayson
(February 9, 1922 – February 17, 2010)



Kathryn Grayson was an American actress and operatic soprano singer.

She was born Zelma Kathryn Elisabeth Hedrick in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The Hedrick family later moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where she was discovered singing on the empty stage of the St. Louis Municipal Opera House by a janitor, who introduced her to Frances Marshall of the Chicago Civic Opera.

Trained as an opera singer from the age of twelve, Grayson was contracted to MGM and established a career in films from the early 1940s. The actress was among the top movie musical performers of her day, starring opposite Frank Sinatra and Gene Kelly in 1945's Anchors Aweigh. Most of her films were musicals and after several supporting roles, she was given lead roles in such films as Show Boat (1951) with Ava Gardner and Howard Keel and Kiss Me Kate (1953). She was paired with Howard Keel and Mario Lanza in some of her films.

When movie musicals fell out of favor with film audiences, she progressed to theatre work, and appeared in several musicals, including the highly successful Camelot from 1962 until 1964. During the 1960s, she performed in several operas, including La bohème, Madama Butterfly, Orpheus in the Underworld and La traviata.

Grayson appeared on television occasionally. Her first TV appearances were in the 1950s, and she received an Emmy nomination in 1956 for her performance in the General Electric Theater episode Shadow on the Heart with John Ericson. More recently, she appeared in several episodes of Angela Lansbury's series Murder, She Wrote in the late 1980s.

In Hollywood she married twice, first to the actor John Shelton and then to the actor/singer Johnnie Johnston with whom she had one daughter, Patricia Kathryn.

Grayson died of natural causes at her home in Los Angeles, California. She is survived by her daughter, two grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

RIP

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Zelda Rubinstein: Actress, Dead at 76...

Zelda Rubinstein
(May 28, 1933 – January 27, 2010)




Zelda Rubinstein was an American actress and human rights activist, best known as eccentric medium Tangina Barrons in the movies Poltergeist (1982) and its sequels, Poltergeist II: The Other Side (1986), and Poltergeist III (1988). She also made guest appearances in the TV spin-off Poltergeist: The Legacy (1996).

Rubinstein was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and attended the University of California and the University of Pittsburgh. She stood just 4 feet 3 inches (130 cm) due to a deficiency of the anterior pituitary gland, which produces growth hormone.

Rubinstein entered the film industry comparatively late, upon returning to the United States after living in London for several years. Poltergeist was her first major film role. She remained active in film and televison from thereon, frequently portraying various psychic characters.

Rubinstein was also known for her outspoken activism for little people and and was an early and public activist raising awareness of Aids-related diseases.

On December 29, 2009, it was reported that, after a month-long stay at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, her close companion and her family made the decision to take Rubinstein off life support due to both kidney and lung failure. Rubinstein died at Barlow Respiratory Hospital in Los Angeles.

RIP

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Jennifer Jones: Actress, Dead at 90...

Jennifer Jones
(March 2, 1919 – December 17, 2009)




Jennifer Jones was an American actress. A five-time Academy Award nominee, Jones won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Song of Bernadette (1943).

Jones was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the daughter of Phil and Flora Mae Isley, who ran a travelling theatre. She toured with her parents as a child in vaudeville tent shows. Her first stage role, playing a peppermint candy, was at the age of five.

Her father hoped she would become a lawyer, but she persuaded him to let her attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, where she met and married her first husband, the actor Robert Walker. They travelled to Hollywood.

Hollywood publicised her as an overnight discovery, though this was not strictly true. She had first tried her hand there four years earlier under her real name, Phylis Isley, playing opposite John Wayne in a B picture, New Frontier, and in a small role in the serial Dick Tracy's G-Men (both 1939).

Thanks to her early success, she enjoyed a reputation as a "heavyweight" actress, that got her dramatic roles. There were those who felt that she rarely measured up to them, and that parts in Madame Bovary (1949), Gone to Earth (1950), Carrie (1952) and Tender Is the Night (1962) allegedly exposed her limitations.

She starred in two comedy films, yet they were among her most accomplished work. Cluny Brown (1946), which she made for Ernst Lubitsch and John Huston's Beat the Devil (1954).

It was often stated that Jones was a manufactured star. Two of her three husbands were millionaires. David O Selznick, whom she married in 1949, was a celebrated Hollywood tycoon who had made Gone with the Wind (1950). He took personal charge of her career, casting her in his own pictures and leasing her services to others as a prime attraction. With Selznick's death in 1965, her acting career petered out. She made only three more films, with long intervals between them. The last, The Towering Inferno (1974), offered her only a cameo role as one of those trapped on the upper floors of a burning skyscraper.

In 1971, Jones married her second tycoon – the multi-millionaire industrialist Norton Simon.

With Robert Walker, Jones had two sons – Michael, who predeceased her, and Robert Walker Jr, who also became an actor. Her daughter, Mary Selznick, died aged 21 in 1976.

Jones enjoyed a quiet retirement in Southern California close to her son, Robert. She granted no interviews and rarely appeared in public. She died of natural causes at her home.

RIP

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Brenda Joyce, Actress, Dead at 92...

Betty Graffina Leabo
(February 25, 1917[1] – July 4, 2009)


Brenda Joyce was an American film actress. She was born as Betty Graffina Leabo in Excelsior Springs, Missouri.

She was the only "Jane" to star opposite two different Tarzans in the talking era of the big screen.

After Maureen O'Sullivan exited the "Tarzan" series after six films, the strikingly blonde Joyce stepped in to star with Johnny Weissmuller in "Tarzan and the Amazons" (1945). She played the intrepid Jane Parker in four more movies, culminating with "Tarzan's Magic Fountain" (1949) opposite the new Tarzan, Lex Barker.

As a model and 21-year-old student at UCLA, Joyce was spotted by a Fox talent scout and named the studio's Discovery of the Year for 1939. That year, she was given the plum role of Fern Simon in "The Rains Came," an adaptation of the Louis Bromfield novel that starred Myrna Loy, Tyrone Power and George Brent.

In addition to the "Tarzan" films, Joyce appeared in such films as "Little Old New York" (1940), "Marry the Boss's Daughter" (1941), "The Postman Didn't Ring" (1942) and "The Spider Woman Strikes Back" (1947).

Joyce didn't make a movie after 1949. She worked for a decade in Washington for the Department of Immigration and appeared in two episodes of PBS kids show "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" in 1971.

She died July 4th at a nursing home in Santa Monica. A family friend said she died of pneumonia after suffering from dementia for a decade.

She is survived by a son, two daughters and three grandchildren.

RIP

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Jill Balcon, Actress, Dead at 84....

Jill Angela Henriette Balcon
(3 January 1925 – 18 July 2009)



Jill Balcon was an English actress of film and radio. She was known for her distinctive and beautifully-modulated voice and spent much of her career working in radio; but for most of her life her own fame was eclipsed by that of the famous men in whose shadow she lived: her father, the film producer Sir Michael Balcon, her husband Cecil Day-Lewis, the Poet Laureate, and her son, the actor Daniel Day-Lewis. She made her film debut in Nicholas Nickleby (1947). Over the years she appeared regularly, though not extensively, on screen.

In 1951, she married the Irish poet Cecil Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis was 21 years her senior and was married when they started their relationship. Day-Lewis broke with both his wife and his mistress to be with Balcon for the remainder of his life.

After her marriage to Day-Lewis, she made several more films in the late 1940s and 1950s before having her family. She continued to work mainly in radio, becoming, with her distinctive, honeyed voice, a supreme performer in plays and poetry readings. In 2003 the BBC commissioned Juliet Ace to write a play for her to mark her 60th anniversary on the airwaves, Deadheading the Roses, which featured her son Daniel Day-Lewis playing a friend of her character.

In later life she took cameo roles in two Derek Jarman films – Edward II (1991) and Wittgenstein (1993) – and was an imposing Lady Bracknell in Oliver Parker's 1999 adaptation of An Ideal Husband alongside Cate Blanchett, Minnie Driver and Rupert Everett.

RIP

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Farrah Fawcett, Actress, Dead at 62...

Ferrah Leni ("Farrah") Fawcett
February 2, 1947 – June 25, 2009

Ferrah Leni ("Farrah") Fawcett was an American actress. A multiple Golden Globe and Emmy Award nominee, Fawcett rose to international fame when she first appeared as private investigator Jill Munroe in the TV series Charlie's Angels in 1976. Fawcett later appeared off-Broadway to the approval of critics and in highly rated television movies in roles often challenging and sometimes unsympathetic. Fawcett was also a pop culture figure whose hairstyle was emulated by millions of young women and whose poster sales broke records, making her an international sex symbol in the 1970s and 1980s. While her impact was particularly strong on the teens of the 1970s, her appeal spreads over multiple generations.

She died in the intensive care unit of Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, California, with her longtime partner Ryan O'Neal and friend Alana Stewart by her side.

RIP