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Leslie Nielsen, star of TV’s Police Squad! as well as the Airplane and Naked Gun movies, has died at age 84. Nielsen was a dramatic actor who turned to comedy relatively late, but the first half of his career was preparation for the second, in which he became one of Hollywood’s …
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Alexander Anderson, creator of Rocky and His Friends and the subsequent spinoffs involving the cold-war-era capers of the flying squirrel and Bullwinkle J. Moose, died Friday. TIME film critic Richard …
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Tom Bosley, a TV fixture as the Cunningham paterfamilias on Happy Days, died today at age 83.
There are two types of TV dads: those who play somebody’s dad, and those who make you feel as if they could be—almost, in some way, as if they are—your dad. Bosley was the latter. His …
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Barbara Billingsley, best known as Cleaver family matriarch June in Leave It to Beaver, has died at age 94. Through June Cleaver, Billngsley created one of that handful of TV characters who we’ve come to know not just as people but as symbols of the ideas and social threads of an …
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Stephen J. Cannell, creator or producer of dozens of TV series over several decades, is reported to have died at age 69. Cannell’s extensive list of achievements includes a number of well-known TV series, especially cop and crime shows, and likely The Rockford Files and The A-Team …
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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 …