Which celebrity death touched you the most in 2011?
Is there something about their career you really connected with? Or maybe somebody that had been around & working most of your entire life?
I’ll start with Elizabeth Taylor. My parents were big fans of hers and I can recall vividly watching her movies with my family when I was very young. If there ever was Hollywood Royalty then Elizabeth Taylor was it. Back when being a star really meant something. You had to have a long line of major hit movies to be called a star. She was flat out one classy lady.
Sadly Elizabeth was suffering health problems and rarely performed since I’ve been an adult. But, I still love watching her movies.
Hey, Charles Napier died! He was one of the hippies in that one Star Trek: TOS episode, “The Way to Eden”, and the Driver of the Winnebago, in “The Blues Brothers.” He was the general in the Deep Space Nine episode, “Little Green Men”, when they came to Earth in the 50’s. Spent most of his career being a hard-ass military type, but I saw him on an episode of, I think, “Dinner & a Movie”(or something very like it), and he seemed like a warm, funny guy.
Heh, he was in Roger Ebert’s infamous, “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” too. Guy was in a whole lot of memorable movies and TV shows.
I tend to watch the AMC We Remember - I find it interesting to see who has died in the year, sometimes you get some surprising entries. One of those “I didn’t even realize they were still alive” things when it comes to actors from the early part of the 20th century.
I am saddened to see how crappy American Movie Classics has gotten. I can remember when they didn’t have commercials, and showed movies from the 30s and 40s with occasional forrays into the 50s. I don’t consider anything from the 70s and 80s worth showing on a ‘classic movie’ type channel. I want to see the old Studio System movies.
If I had a cable channel, I would format it to be like an old nicolodeon, a cartoon, a short or two, the main movie and maybe a B movie afterwards, or a featurette [short subject but longer than a newsreel]
But then again, I am old enough to remember when HBO was only on in the evenings, and the movie had a 2 hour block, when the movie ended, there was nothing until the next movie was scheduled to come on after the original movies 2 hour block [ie 8pm, 10pm, midnight]
Though they were not really celebrities, 2011 saw a related pair of notable deaths: Frank Buckles, the last US veteran of World War I (he had been an ambulance driver), and Claude Choules, the last male British veteran of that war and its last surviving combat veteran of any nation. The only surviving veteran now is Florence Green of the Women’s RAF, aged 110.
By the time I was born, World War II veterans were middle-aged and World War I veterans were old men. Now we have lost the Great War vets and we are losing the Second World War veterans slowly but steadily. I hope we have the sense to take care of the stories they leave behind them
Dick Winters died this year. I only knew of him from HBO’s Band of Brothers, which is a good example of taking care of their stories, I think.
I’ll miss Liz Taylor the most. It feels odd that she’s not in the world anymore. I feel the same way about Johnny Cash. Both of them were part of my life for a long time.
I came in just after that era to see people like Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels, and Undertaker start to take over. Macho Man was an announcer and then jumped to WCW so I lumped him in with Hogan and Warrior. Once he had pretty much disappeared, I started watching some of his old matches and regret that I never thought more of him back in the day. He was entertaining in the ring and out. I don’t watch wrestling on a regular basis anymore, but I’d tune in for sure if I heard Macho Man was going to return to Raw or a PPV, even just for an interview.
An obscure one, Felicia Tang Lee. She was an attractive Asian-American soft-core actress. I remember her from a few years ago but hadn’t heard much about her lately. Not too surprising as she was passing the age of nude modeling.
I found out a few months back that she had indeed retired after her 30th birthday in 2008. But she didn’t have a long and happy retirement as she died in 2009. Her boyfriend was charged with murdering her but he was acquitted in 2011 (it was the trial reports where I heard about her death). The jury apparently accepted the defense’s claim that Lee had beat herself to death.
Steve Jobs. I admired him for years, and the spouse used to work at Apple. He was one of the two famous people I ever cried about when I heard they died. (The other was Eric Woolfson of the Alan Parsons Project.)
Christopher Hitchens, though that was hardly unexpected. Apart from all the religious and political writing, he was a fabulous book reviewer. I just read his last book of essays, and his writings on Dickens, Twain, Orwell, etc., were great–I have books by Michael Frayn and Kingsley Amis on my library list now, at his recommendation.
Barbara Kent, 100-some years old, one of the last of the silent-movie players (she was never a “star,” despite what the obits said). She acted with Garbo, Gilbert, Swanson . . . Another last link gone to the silents.
Poor Yvette Vickers. Such a charming actress, dead a year in her home before she was found.
Another vote for Randy Savage. I was deeply into wrestling in the late 80’s/early 90’2 when he was at his height of popularity, and it felt like a bit of my past went with him.
