Celebrities, Celebrity Deaths | featured news

Sherman Hemsley, the actor who made the irascible, bigoted George Jefferson of "The Jeffersons" one of television's most memorable characters and a symbol for urban upward mobility, has died.

Celeste Holm, 95, a musical comedy star who also showed a flair for dramatic work and won an Academy Award for her sympathetic role in “Gentleman’s Agreement,” Elia Kazan’s landmark 1947 film exploring anti-Semitism, died July 15 at her home in New York City.

Ernest Borgnine, star of screens big and small, died yesterday at the age of 95. During his long and prolific career, the Academy Award-winning star of “Marty” racked up 200 movie and TV credits... Katie Holmes is scheduled to begin shooting a movie next week. “Molly,” a film she co-wrote and co-produced, will star Holmes as (irony alert!) a single mother, People magazine reports...

Andy Griffith died this morning at his North Carolina home, reports WITN-TV. The TV icon’s death was confirmed by Bill Friday, a close friend and a former president at the University of North Carolina. He was 86 years old. His cause of death has yet to be released, but he suffered from heart problems and quadruple-bypass surgery a decade ago.

Ray Bradbury, a master of science fiction whose lyrical evocations of the future reflected both the optimism and the anxieties of his own postwar America, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 91.

Richard Dawson, the wisecracking British entertainer who was among the schemers in the 1960s TV comedy "Hogan's Heroes" and a decade later began kissing thousands of female contestants as host of the game show "Family Feud" has died.

THE PROBLEM WITH drawing lines for a living is that sometimes, even the comics fan doesn’t follow them back to the beginning. Which is another way of saying: If you don’t know “Herman,” you should remedy that and acquaint yourself. Because prior to “The Far Side” and “The Neighborhood” and “Speed Bump” and other single-panel strips that are labeled/branded as “quirky” or “weird” or “off the wall” (or in the case of my own ol’ syndicated single-panel strip, “warped”), there was “Herman,” which sprung from the unique pioneering mind of Jim Unger.

His manager, Mitchell Greenhill, said in a news release that Watson died Tuesday at Wake Forest Baptist Hospital Medical Center in Winston-Salem, N.C.

The inventor of the television remote control, Eugene Polley, dies of natural causes, aged 96, in a Chicago hospital.

Disco queen Donna Summer, whose pulsing anthems such as "Last Dance," "Love to Love You Baby" and "Bad Girls" became the soundtrack for a glittery age of sex, drugs, dance and flashy clothes, has died. She was 63.