America’s most renowned news anchor died on Friday. My appreciation of him is on time.com:
Newsman Walter Cronkite, who died at the age of 92, was so thoroughly and uniquely linked with the word “trust” that it is tempting to say that the word should be buried with him. In the generation since he left the anchor desk at the CBS Evening
…
Oscar Mayer, the purveyor of meats who shared a name with the company he chaired, died Monday at age 95. It’s a little odd to feel nostalgia for the passing of a man who, I would guess, most of us did not know except for the name attached to his products. But Mayer’s company, and his name (actually his family name; he joined the family …
After a three-year fight with cancer, actress Farrah Fawcett died today at age 62. No one is likely to argue that Charlie’s Angels, the TV series for which she’s best known, was a masterpiece of video storytelling or a landmark for actresses (“There were three little girls…”). But Fawcett herself, as a star during her brief run on the …
Ed McMahon, best known as the longtime sidekick to Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, died overnight at age 86. I was a kid for most of McMahon’s heyday, so my personal memories of him are as much from his American Family Publishers career as from Tonight. But I have to appreciate what McMahon did for TV by so wholly coming to own the …
Actor David Carradine was reportedly found dead in his hotel room in Bangkok. He was 72.
My memories of Carradine, beyond Kill Bill, are mostly limited to distant foggy memories of seeing Kung Fu when I was three or four years old. I re-watched some of the series when it came out on DVD, however, and what impressed me about his …
“Sassy” is the word that comes easiest to mind when describing an actress like Bea Arthur and the characters she played, most notably on Maude and The Golden Girls. But sassy finally seems too small for Arthur, who died today of cancer at age 86. It connotes perkiness and feistiness; Arthur, on the other hand, exuded too much stature and …
Ron Silver, an actor as well known for his off-stage activism as his on-stage work, has died of esophageal cancer. While I didn’t particularly follow Silver’s political work (he was active in liberal causes but endorsed George W. Bush for re-election in 2004), as an actor on TV (and film and theater), he was distinguished for bringing a …
Not a shock but too bad, anyway: Life on Mars is being cancelled. I can’t say I will miss it deeply; after a very strong pilot, the show vacillated between being a mystery about how Sam got trapped in the ’70s and simply being a ’70s cop show with a twist. (And actually, it was often better as the latter.) I feel about it very much …
Comedian and actor Bernie Mac died early this morning of complications from pneumonia. I was more familiar with him from his Fox sitcom than from his standup, but Mac first broke through to a wide, national (read: white) audience in The Original Kings of Comedy, the concert film about the African American comedy tour. It was in a routine …
Though he wasn’t mainly known as a TV personality per se, he is forever known for Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV (a routine which, ironically, was itself cited in a Supreme Court ruling on what you could and couldn’t say on broadcast TV). Putting his civil and linguistic libertarianism at the center of his work made him a …
He died suddenly, at work, in the NBC Washington bureau this afternoon. Whether you praise or criticize him (and I’ve done both), his influence on political journalism has been immense, as he’s demonstrated right up through his last election. My obituary of him should be is online at time.com. shortly.
Update: Appropriately, and …
Sportscaster Jim McKay died over the weekend at age 86. I make no secret on this blog that I don’t watch a lot of sports, but for me, McKay—known for his versatile coverage of the Olympics and for being the voice of ABC’s Wide World of Sports—brings back for me the weekends as a kid when I still did, and when his WWS broadcasts …
Harvey Korman, the comic actor best known for his appearances on The Carol Burnett Show and Mel Brooks’ movies (for instance, as the tightly wound Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles), died yesterday. On the Burnett show, my earliest memory of him, he was one of TV’s all-time great supporting comics, pulling off multiple roles with …
