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Greg Giraldo, whose sharp and searing standup was familiar to fans of Comedy Central and Last Comic Standing, died Wednesday from the effects of a prescription drug overdose. Giraldo, a former lawyer, brought an intelligent and combative style to Comedy Central’s roasts as well as the panel of …
Edwin Newman, whose TV news career spanned much of the early decades of NBC TV and most of its news programs, has died at age 91. Over the years, Newman had roles as various as foreign bureau chief, political correspondent, Today Show personality and Meet the Press moderator and panelist.
From the early ’50s through the early ’80s, …
The other Thursday, as people walked in early to one of the 500 theaters where the RiffTrax demolition of Reefer Madness was scheduled to play, they found one of those pre-show movie trivia games in progress on-screen. “MOVIE MISTAKES,” one card read. “Furry Vengeance was classified as a movie on the Internet Movie Database.” And: “We
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David Wolper, a prolific film and TV producer who brought miniseries The Thorn Birds and most notably Roots to TV, died Tuesday at age 82. (In addition to his TV projects, he produced movies including Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and L.A. Confidential.) In the above clip, he …
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Mitch Miller, the goateed bandleader who hosted NBC’s Sing Along with Mitch in the early 1960s, died Saturday at age 99. Miller’s music and his show were before my time, but I’ve always found the phenomenon of his show fascinating from the archival footage. Partly because Sing Along …
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Daniel Schorr, a broadcast journalist with a career in reporting and commentary spanning more than half a century, has died at age 93. I, like many who came to admire him in recent years, knew him best from his comments and interviews on NPR. But he was a giant of TV journalism who …
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Another loss for Cleveland: Harvey Pekar, the storyteller and jazz critic whose rants and tales of daily life were realized in the American Splendor series of comic books, has died at age 70. TV fans of a certain age—and maybe even under a certain age—will remember him as one of …
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Actress Rue McClanahan died this morning, reportedly of a stroke, at age 76. McClanahan had a wide and varied career on stage, in film and on television, but she’s most widely remembered for playing the vivacious and bodaciously lusty senior Blanche Devereaux in the sitcom The Golden …
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Gary Coleman, best-known for his performance as a child actor as Arnold Jackson in Diff’rent Strokes, died today of a brain hemorrhage. He was 42.
Coleman will be remembered by people who grew up with his catchphrase (“Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?”) and his portrayal of a spunky …
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Art Linkletter died today at age 97. Over his decades as an entertainer, he had many roles—radio host, TV host, celebrity endorser, comic, anti-drug crusader—but his best-known work came in TV and radio shows based on a simple idea: that ordinary people are tremendously …
David Mills, an Emmy-winning writer and producer who worked on acclaimed shows including NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life on the Street, The Corner and The Wire, died yesterday at age 48, of a brain aneurysm. His death comes less than two weeks before his newest series—Treme, co-created by his longtime colleague and friend David …
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Fess Parker, star of numerous Disney movies (Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier)—and TV’s Daniel Boone—has died at age 85. I’m a generation too young to have many firsthand memories of him (for some reason, I was never a fan of the old Disney movies as a kid), so most of my …
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Alex Chilton, a great American songwriter, died Wednesday of an apparent heart attack in New Orleans, at age 59. First with The Box Tops but most importantly with the Memphis band Big Star, Chilton all but invented American power-pop, even if most people will know him more by the …
