Tuesday, July 22, 2008
Television is mourning one of its Golden Girls.Estelle Getty, the cantankerous octogenarian Sophia on the classic NBC sitcom, has died at the age of 84.
Getty, who suffered from dementia, passed away early this morning at her Los Angeles home surrounded by her family, acording to her son Carl Gettleman.
Donning a granny wig and oversize glasses to play a character 20 years older than herself, Getty won an Emmy and Golden Globe as the wisecracking oldest member of The Golden Girls, costarring with Bea Arthur, Betty White and Rue McClanahan.
"Our mother-daughter relationship was one of the greatest comic duo's ever, and I will miss her," Arthur said in a statement.
The sitcom, which ran from 1985 to 1992, gave Getty her breakthrough role at age 61, after she struggled for years as a character actress.
Monday, June 23, 2008
A LEGEND LOST: COMEDIAN GEORGE CARLIN DIES OF HEART FAILURE
0 comments Posted by THE fly GIRL at 9:18 AM
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Acerbic standup comedian and satirist George Carlin, whose staunch defense of free speech in his most famous routine "Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television" led to a key Supreme Court ruling on obscenity, has died.
Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas. He was 71.
"He was a genius and I will miss him dearly," Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.
Carlin's jokes constantly breached the accepted boundaries of comedy and language, particularly with his routine on the "Seven Words" - all of which are taboo on broadcast TV and radio to this day.
When he uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance.
When the words were later played on a New York radio station, they resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling upholding the government's authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language during hours when children might be listening.
"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," he told The Associated Press earlier this year.
Despite his reputation as unapologetically irreverent, Carlin was a television staple through the decades, serving as host of the "Saturday Night Live" debut in 1975 - noting on his Web site that he was "loaded on cocaine all week long" - and appearing some 130 times on "The Tonight Show."
He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" in 1989 - a testament to his range from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness (and sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).
"Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?" he once mused. "Are they afraid someone will clean them?"
He won four Grammy Awards, each for best spoken comedy album, and was nominated for five Emmy awards. On Tuesday, it was announced that Carlin was being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which will be presented Nov. 10 in Washington and broadcast on PBS.
Carlin started his career on the traditional nightclub circuit in a coat and tie, pairing with Burns to spoof TV game shows, news and movies. Perhaps in spite of the outlaw soul, "George was fairly conservative when I met him," said Burns, describing himself as the more left-leaning of the two. It was a degree of separation that would reverse when they came upon Lenny Bruce, the original shock comic, in the early '60s.
"We were working in Chicago, and we went to see Lenny, and we were both blown away," Burns said, recalling the moment as the beginning of the end for their collaboration if not their close friendship. "It was an epiphany for George. The comedy we were doing at the time wasn't exactly groundbreaking, and George knew then that he wanted to go in a different direction."
That direction would make Carlin as much a social commentator and philosopher as comedian, a position he would relish through the years.
"The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things - bad language and whatever - it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition," Carlin told the AP in a 2004 interview. "There's an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. ... It's reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have."
Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, and grew up in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, raised by a single mother. After dropping out of high school in the ninth grade, he joined the Air Force in 1954. He received three court-martials and numerous disciplinary punishments, according to his official Web site.
While in the Air Force he started working as an off-base disc jockey at a radio station in Shreveport, La., and after receiving a general discharge in 1957, took an announcing job at WEZE in Boston.
"Fired after three months for driving mobile news van to New York to buy pot," his Web site says.
From there he went on to a job on the night shift as a deejay at a radio station in Fort Worth, Texas. Carlin also worked variety of temporary jobs including a carnival organist and a marketing director for a peanut brittle.
In 1960, he left with Burns, a Texas radio buddy, for Hollywood to pursue a nightclub career as comedy team Burns & Carlin. He left with $300, but his first break came just months later when the duo appeared on Jack Paar's "Tonight Show."
Carlin said he hoped to would emulate his childhood hero, Danny Kaye, the kindly, rubber-faced comedian who ruled over the decade that Carlin grew up in - the 1950s - with a clever but gentle humor reflective of its times.
Only problem was, it didn't work for him, and they broke up by 1962.
"I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn't really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing that for the better part of 10 years when it finally dawned on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the wrong people," Carlin reflected recently as he prepared for his 14th HBO special, "It's Bad For Ya."
Eventually Carlin lost the buttoned-up look, favoring the beard, ponytail and all-black attire for which he came to be known.
But even with his decidedly adult-comedy bent, Carlin never lost his childlike sense of mischief, even voicing kid-friendly projects like episodes of the TV show "Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends" and the spacey Volkswagen bus Fillmore in the 2006 Pixar hit "Cars."
Carlin's first wife, Brenda, died in 1997. He is survived by wife Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; son-in-law Bob McCall; brother Patrick Carlin; and sister-in-law Marlene Carlin.
Carlin, who had a history of heart trouble, went into St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica on Sunday afternoon complaining of chest pain and died later that evening, said his publicist, Jeff Abraham. He had performed as recently as last weekend at the Orleans Casino and Hotel in Las Vegas. He was 71.
"He was a genius and I will miss him dearly," Jack Burns, who was the other half of a comedy duo with Carlin in the early 1960s, told The Associated Press.
Carlin's jokes constantly breached the accepted boundaries of comedy and language, particularly with his routine on the "Seven Words" - all of which are taboo on broadcast TV and radio to this day.
When he uttered all seven at a show in Milwaukee in 1972, he was arrested on charges of disturbing the peace, freed on $150 bail and exonerated when a Wisconsin judge dismissed the case, saying it was indecent but citing free speech and the lack of any disturbance.
When the words were later played on a New York radio station, they resulted in a 1978 Supreme Court ruling upholding the government's authority to sanction stations for broadcasting offensive language during hours when children might be listening.
"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," he told The Associated Press earlier this year.
Despite his reputation as unapologetically irreverent, Carlin was a television staple through the decades, serving as host of the "Saturday Night Live" debut in 1975 - noting on his Web site that he was "loaded on cocaine all week long" - and appearing some 130 times on "The Tonight Show."
He produced 23 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, three books, a couple of TV shows and appeared in several movies, from his own comedy specials to "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" in 1989 - a testament to his range from cerebral satire and cultural commentary to downright silliness (and sometimes hitting all points in one stroke).
"Why do they lock gas station bathrooms?" he once mused. "Are they afraid someone will clean them?"
He won four Grammy Awards, each for best spoken comedy album, and was nominated for five Emmy awards. On Tuesday, it was announced that Carlin was being awarded the 11th annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which will be presented Nov. 10 in Washington and broadcast on PBS.
Carlin started his career on the traditional nightclub circuit in a coat and tie, pairing with Burns to spoof TV game shows, news and movies. Perhaps in spite of the outlaw soul, "George was fairly conservative when I met him," said Burns, describing himself as the more left-leaning of the two. It was a degree of separation that would reverse when they came upon Lenny Bruce, the original shock comic, in the early '60s.
"We were working in Chicago, and we went to see Lenny, and we were both blown away," Burns said, recalling the moment as the beginning of the end for their collaboration if not their close friendship. "It was an epiphany for George. The comedy we were doing at the time wasn't exactly groundbreaking, and George knew then that he wanted to go in a different direction."
That direction would make Carlin as much a social commentator and philosopher as comedian, a position he would relish through the years.
"The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things - bad language and whatever - it's all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition," Carlin told the AP in a 2004 interview. "There's an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. ... It's reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have."
Carlin was born on May 12, 1937, and grew up in the Morningside Heights section of Manhattan, raised by a single mother. After dropping out of high school in the ninth grade, he joined the Air Force in 1954. He received three court-martials and numerous disciplinary punishments, according to his official Web site.
While in the Air Force he started working as an off-base disc jockey at a radio station in Shreveport, La., and after receiving a general discharge in 1957, took an announcing job at WEZE in Boston.
"Fired after three months for driving mobile news van to New York to buy pot," his Web site says.
From there he went on to a job on the night shift as a deejay at a radio station in Fort Worth, Texas. Carlin also worked variety of temporary jobs including a carnival organist and a marketing director for a peanut brittle.
In 1960, he left with Burns, a Texas radio buddy, for Hollywood to pursue a nightclub career as comedy team Burns & Carlin. He left with $300, but his first break came just months later when the duo appeared on Jack Paar's "Tonight Show."
Carlin said he hoped to would emulate his childhood hero, Danny Kaye, the kindly, rubber-faced comedian who ruled over the decade that Carlin grew up in - the 1950s - with a clever but gentle humor reflective of its times.
Only problem was, it didn't work for him, and they broke up by 1962.
"I was doing superficial comedy entertaining people who didn't really care: Businessmen, people in nightclubs, conservative people. And I had been doing that for the better part of 10 years when it finally dawned on me that I was in the wrong place doing the wrong things for the wrong people," Carlin reflected recently as he prepared for his 14th HBO special, "It's Bad For Ya."
Eventually Carlin lost the buttoned-up look, favoring the beard, ponytail and all-black attire for which he came to be known.
But even with his decidedly adult-comedy bent, Carlin never lost his childlike sense of mischief, even voicing kid-friendly projects like episodes of the TV show "Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends" and the spacey Volkswagen bus Fillmore in the 2006 Pixar hit "Cars."
Carlin's first wife, Brenda, died in 1997. He is survived by wife Sally Wade; daughter Kelly Carlin McCall; son-in-law Bob McCall; brother Patrick Carlin; and sister-in-law Marlene Carlin.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
The two men vying to become president, Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain, and congressional leaders, journalists and other Washington elite paid tribute to television journalist Tim Russert on Wednesday at a private funeral mass.
"It is not easy to preach a homily for Tim and to communicate the feelings we all share concerning this remarkable man, for he was truly one of the great communicators in American society," Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, the archbishop emeritus of Washington, D.C., said in his homily.
Russert, the host of the Sunday-morning talk show "Meet the Press," died Friday of a heart attack at the age of 58. He also served as the Washington bureau chief for NBC News. A political insider, Russert was known for conducting tough interviews of Washington's most powerful politicians, yet he evoked an everyman quality that showed his blue-collar roots.
Among the dignitaries were New York Gov. David Patterson, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
There were also enough TV journalists to fill several political roundtables. Among the honorary pallbearers were NBC News anchor Brian Williams, "Today" show host Matt Lauer and Bryant Gumbel. Retired anchor Tom Brokaw greeted the guests, saying no house meant more to Russert than "the house of the Lord."
"It has all been said so eloquently in the tributes that have come from some of the highest authorities in our nation and even around the world. ... All that remains is to say thank you to the good and gracious God who gave us Tim Russert for 58 years and to pray that the beloved anchor of Meet the Press is now sitting at the large table of the Lord to begin a conversation which will last forever," said McCarrick, who presided over the Catholic service.
Russert's son Luke was also scheduled to speak.
The funeral service at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in the Georgetown was private, but a loud speaker broadcast the service to about 100 onlookers standing along the tree-lined streets. A man wearing a kilt played the bagpipes as the crowd arrived.
An invitation-only memorial service was scheduled to be held at the Kennedy Center later on Wednesday.
Yahoo! News
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Sydney Pollack helped make a sex symbol of Robert Redford, an Oscar-caliber star of Jane Fonda and a woman of Dustin Hoffman.
Pollack, the quintessential actor's director of Tootsie, The Way We Were and more, who seemed most comfortable in the company of Hollywood's biggest stars, and vice versa, died tonight of cancer at his Los Angeles home.
The filmmaker, a two-time Oscar-winner, was 73.
"Sydney made the world a little better, movies a little better and even dinner a little better," George Clooney said in a statement. "A tip of the hat to a class act. He'll be missed terribly."
Pollack recently worked with Clooney on Michael Clayton, which Pollack acted in and helped produce, and Leatherheads, which he executive produced.
Michael Clayton, a Best Picture contender at this past February's Oscars, brought Pollack his sixth career nomination. He won his pair of statuettes for directing and producing the 1985 Best Picture winner, Out of Africa.
He also earned nominations for directing and producing Tootsie, the beloved cross-dressing 1982 comedy, and for directing the 1969 dance-marathon drama They Shoot Horses, Don't They?.
A former acting teacher who became an in-demand character actor, Pollack had memorable on-screen turns in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives and his own Tootsie, in which he played Hoffman's exasperated acting agent.
SOURCE
Pollack, the quintessential actor's director of Tootsie, The Way We Were and more, who seemed most comfortable in the company of Hollywood's biggest stars, and vice versa, died tonight of cancer at his Los Angeles home.
The filmmaker, a two-time Oscar-winner, was 73.
"Sydney made the world a little better, movies a little better and even dinner a little better," George Clooney said in a statement. "A tip of the hat to a class act. He'll be missed terribly."
Pollack recently worked with Clooney on Michael Clayton, which Pollack acted in and helped produce, and Leatherheads, which he executive produced.
Michael Clayton, a Best Picture contender at this past February's Oscars, brought Pollack his sixth career nomination. He won his pair of statuettes for directing and producing the 1985 Best Picture winner, Out of Africa.
He also earned nominations for directing and producing Tootsie, the beloved cross-dressing 1982 comedy, and for directing the 1969 dance-marathon drama They Shoot Horses, Don't They?.
A former acting teacher who became an in-demand character actor, Pollack had memorable on-screen turns in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, Woody Allen's Husbands and Wives and his own Tootsie, in which he played Hoffman's exasperated acting agent.
SOURCE
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