Deaths, Celebrity Deaths | featured news

Teri Shields, who launched daughter Brooke's on-camera career when she was a baby and managed the young star into her 20s, sometimes with controversy, has died.

George McGovern once joked that he had wanted to run for president in the worst way - and that he had done so....

Lane Goodwin, the 13-year-old Western Kentucky boy who gained national attention in his fight against cancer, died Wednesday at his home in Beech Grove.

Former U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, the outspoken Pennsylvania centrist whose switch from Republican to Democrat ended a 30-year career in which he played a pivotal role in several Supreme Court nominations, died Sunday. He was 82.

Herbert Lom, the Czech-born actor best known as Inspector Clouseau's long-suffering boss in the "Pink Panther" movies, died Thursday, his son said. He was 95.

...His presence was formidable, even intimidating: The former bodyguard had a muscular, 6-foot-4 frame, but it was topped by the brightest of megawatt smiles... Duncan died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he was being treated for a heart attack, said his fiancée, reality TV personality Rev. Omarosa Manigault, in a statement released by publicist Joy Fehily.

Television news didn't seem to fully recognize the importance of the first human to walk on the moon on the weekend he died. In the hours after Armstrong's death was announced, news networks were airing canned programming - jailhouse documentaries, a rerun interview with Rielle Hunter, Mike Huckabee's weekend show. Menacing satellite pictures of Tropical Storm Isaac had much more air time than Armstrong's dusty hops on the lunar surface. Talk of the upcoming GOP national convention sucked up the air.

The man who wrote "Drugstore Cowboy," an autobiographical crime novel that led to an acclaimed 1989 film starring Matt Dillon, has died at age 75.

Phyllis Diller, the housewife turned humorist who aimed some of her sharpest barbs at herself, punctuating her jokes with her trademark cackle, died Monday morning in Los Angeles at age 95.

Joe Kubert's art seemed tattered at the edges and populated by rangy heroes with haunted eyes. He and his wife founded the only accredited trade school for comic book artists. Joe Kubert was never a superstar comics artist — his work didn't have the necessary bombast or polished edges — but the man who drew ragged, soulful soldiers in "Sgt. Rock," "The Haunted Tank" and "Enemy Ace" did something his characters would have admired: Kubert marched farther and longer than anyone else and proved himself a natural leader.