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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 …
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Peter Graves, best known for starring as Jim Phelps in Mission: Impossible (or, for a later generation, for his appearances in the Airplane! movies and the Biography series he hosted), has died. The original M:I series was before my time, but I’m always impressed, watching it in …
Corey Haim, first famous in the ’80s as a child star and then as a cautionary tale of the dangers of becoming a child star, was reported as found dead of a drug overdose early this morning, at age 38. Preliminary reports suggest the overdose was accidental.
It would be nice to say that this was a surprising end for Haim, who became a …
Professional wrestler and sometime actor Captain Lou Albano died this morning at age 76. I never followed his career inside the ring, but like any kid who watched too much MTV in the ’80s, I was plenty familiar with his work as the father figure in Cyndi Lauper’s videos. Beyond those claims to fame, Albano’s ubiquity on MTV, and his …
Folk singer Mary Travers died yesterday from leukemia at age 72. Peter, Paul and Mary should not have been at all my thing: a group of completely earnest folk icons of the ’60s is probably as close to the opposite of my usual taste as is possible. But there was always something entrancing about Travers, who was anything but the sterotype …
TV, movie and theater writer Larry Gelbart died today at age 81. The war comedy M*A*S*H was not the sum total of his career—he also wrote for Sid Caesar, wrote the movie Tootsie and the Broadway comedy A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum—but it’s what I’ll remember him for. Because, of course, it was a landmark comedy; it …
Don Hewitt, who launched and executive-produced the newsmagazine colossus 60 Minutes, died today. His own news organization remembers him here.
It’s been a sad summer for CBS News, and yet one that’s reminded the world of that network’s huge role in reporting the news of the 20th century. Like Walter Cronkite, Hewitt was of a generation …
Robert Novak, the political columnist and longtime TV pundit, has died of brain cancer. I’m not going to claim to have been a big fan–of his politics, I’ll admit, but also of the style of TV confrontation he and others plied–but I was a big watcher of his, for years. And the man who “relished his ‘Prince of Darkness’ public persona,” …
It’s not a TV moment, exactly, but an attention-must-be paid moment for pop-culture geeks of my generation (and maybe others): director John Hughes has died of a heart attack at age 59.
The Breakfast Club, actually, figures heavily in Dan Harmon’s pilot for Community, the comedy debuting on NBC next month. And really it’s become a sort …
