RIP: TERI GARR

Teri Garr, offbeat comic actress of ‘Young Frankenstein’ and ‘Tootsie,’ has died. She was 79.

Garr died Tuesday of multiple sclerosis “surrounded by family and friends,” said publicist Heidi Schaeffer. Garr battled other health problems in recent years and underwent an operation in January 2007 to repair an aneurysm.

Admirers took to social media in her honor, with writer-director Paul Feig calling her “truly one of my comedy heroes. I couldn’t have loved her more” and screenwriter Cinco Paul saying: “Never the star, but always shining. She made everything she was in better.”

The actor, who was sometimes credited as Terri, Terry or Terry Ann during her long career, seemed destined for show business from her childhood.

Her father was Eddie Garr, a well-known vaudeville comedian; her mother was Phyllis Lind, one of the original high-kicking Rockettes at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. Their daughter began dance lessons at 6 and by 14 was dancing with the San Francisco and Los Angeles ballet companies.

She was 16 when she joined the road company of “West Side Story” in Los Angeles, and as early as 1963 she began appearing in bit parts in films.

She recalled in a 1988 interview how she won the “West Side Story” role. After being dropped from her first audition, she returned a day later in different clothes and was accepted.

From there, the blonde, statuesque Garr found steady work dancing in movies, and she appeared in the chorus of nine Presley films, including “Viva Las Vegas,” “Roustabout” and “Clambake.”

Her big film break came as Gene Hackman’s girlfriend in 1974’s Francis Ford Coppola thriller “The Conversation.” That led to an interview with Mel Brooks, who said he would hire her for the role of Gene Wilder’s German lab assistant in 1974’s “Young Frankenstein” — if she could speak with a German accent.

“Cher had this German woman, Renata, making wigs, so I got the accent from her,” Garr once recalled.

The film established her as a talented comedy performer, with New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael proclaiming her “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen.”

Her big smile and off-center appeal helped land her roles in “Oh God!” opposite George Burns and John Denver, “Mr. Mom” (as Michael Keaton’s wife) and “Tootsie” in which she played the girlfriend who loses Dustin Hoffman to Jessica Lange and learns that he has dressed up as a woman to revive his career. (She also lost the supporting actress Oscar at that year’s Academy Awards to Lange.)

Although best known for comedy, Garr showed in such films as “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “The Black Stallion” and “The Escape Artist” that she could handle drama equally well.

“I would like to play ‘Norma Rae’ and ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ but I never got the chance,” she once said, adding she had become typecast as a comic actor.

It was also during those years that Garr began to feel “a little beeping or ticking” in her right leg. It began in 1983 and eventually spread to her right arm as well, but she felt she could live with it. By 1999 the symptoms had become so severe that she consulted a doctor. The diagnosis: multiple sclerosis.

For three years Garr didn’t reveal her illness.

“I was afraid that I wouldn’t get work,” she explained in a 2003 interview. “People hear MS and think, ‘Oh, my God, the person has two days to live.’”

After going public, she became a spokeswoman for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, making humorous speeches to gatherings in the U.S. and Canada.

“You have to find your center and roll with the punches because that’s a hard thing to do: to have people pity you,” she commented in 2005. “Just trying to explain to people that I’m OK is tiresome.”

She also continued to act, appearing on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” “Greetings From Tucson,” “Life With Bonnie” and other TV shows. She also had a brief recurring role on “Friends” in the 1990s as Lisa Kudrow’s mother. After several failed romances, Garr married contractor John O’Neill in 1993. They adopted a daughter, Molly, before divorcing in 1996.

In her 2005 autobiography, “Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood,” Garr explained her decision not to discuss her age.“My mother taught me that showbiz people never tell their real ages. She never revealed hers or my father’s,” she wrote. She retired from acting in 2011. Garr is survived by her daughter, Molly O’Neil, and a grandson, Tyryn.

RIP: MITZI GAYNOR

Mitzi Gaynor, Showbiz Dynamo and Star of ‘South Pacific,’ Dies at 93

The singer, dancer and actress was a movie-musical legend, Las Vegas headliner and centerpiece of annual TV specials. Mitzi Gaynor, the leggy entertainer whose saucy vitality and blond beauty graced the big screen in South Pacific and on Las Vegas stages and in spectacular TV specials, has died. She was 93.

Gaynor, who received top billing over The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. 16, 1964, and was famed costume designer Bob Mackie‘s first celebrity client, died Oct. 17 of natural causes, her team announced in a statement.

With her hazel eyes, tight curls and exuberant singing and dancing, the feisty Gaynor stood out in such movies as My Blue Heaven (1950) with Betty Grable and Dan Dailey; in Irving Berlin’s There’s No Business Like Show Business (1954), opposite Ethel Merman and Marilyn Monroe, her eventual successor at 20th Century Fox; and in the Cole Porter MGM musical Les Girls (1957) with Gene Kelly.

Gaynor also starred in Anything Goes (1956) with Bing Crosby and Donald O’Connor, The Joker Is Wild (1957) with Frank Sinatra and Happy Anniversary (1959) with David Niven and Patty Duke.

In 1957, Gaynor was involved in a fierce competition to win the role of Navy nurse Nellie Forbush in Joshua Logan’s South Pacific, the long-awaited adaptation of the sensational Rodgers & Hammerstein Broadway musical.

“I was filming The Joker Is Wild with Frank Sinatra and got the call that I’d be auditioning for Oscar Hammerstein at the Beverly Hills Hotel ballroom for South Pacific,” she told Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune in 2013. “I did ‘Honey Bun,’ I did ‘A Cockeyed Optimist.’ I did everything but strip.

“Oscar’s way, way at the other side of the ballroom. Why? I don’t know. But he walked over afterward. … You know when you do good? You feel like, ‘Well, at least I didn’t make a fool of myself.’ Oscar took my hand and said: ‘Thank you very much, Miss Gaynor. You’ve been a wonderful sport.”

She went on to famously sing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” and “Some Enchanted Evening” in the 1958 film, and the exotic World War II-set musical became the third highest-grossing movie ($17.5 million, or $147 million today) of the year. She also was nominated for a Golden Globe for best actress (comedy or musical).

Gaynor made her last noteworthy film appearance in Stanley Donen‘s Surprise Package (1960), a musical comedy that also starred Yul Brenner. With the Hollywood musical fading into obscurity, she retired from the movies after just one more film, the Kirk Douglas-starring For Love or Money (1963). She was in her early 30s.

Partnered with husband/manager Jack Bean, she smartly trained her sights on Las Vegas. Dressed in glittery Mackie costumes and accompanied by a team of handsome male dancers, she began singing, dancing and telling jokes in Vegas in 1961 and eventually acquired a stake in the Flamingo Hotel.

After what the Catholic Church called a “lascivious” 13-minute performance of her act on the Sullivan show — she was introduced as “Hollywood’s Mitzi Gaynor!!!” — the Beatles requested her autograph. (During rehearsals, they also asked to borrow her hair dryer.) They were all on the show broadcast from a Miami hotel, seen by 70 million viewers; a week earlier, Sullivan had introduced the Fab Four to America for the first time.

In 1968, Gaynor reportedly was earning $45,000 a week in Vegas. Also that year, she starred on her first TV special, Mitzi, for NBC. Five years later, she headlined the first of her six annual specials for CBS, including Mitzi and a Hundred Guys; Mitzi … A Tribute to the American Housewife; Mitzi … Zings Into Spring; and Mitzi … What’s Hot, What’s Not.

Gaynor said she regularly was approached to star in a weekly network variety show but refused. “Gene Kelly once told me, ‘Only do event television,'” she said.

After all her years working on TV, she finally won an Emmy in 2008, for her PBS special Mitzi Gaynor: Razzle Dazzle! The Special Years.

She was born Francesca Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber in Chicago on Sept. 4, 1931. Her mother was a dancer and her father a cellist, and she took her first dance class at age 8. An only child, she and her parents moved to Elgin, Illinois, then to Detroit and finally to L.A. when she was 11, to follow her dance teacher. At age 13, then known as Mitzi Gerber, she convinced Edwin Lester, the impresario of the Los Angeles Civic Light Opera, that she was 16 and landed a role in the musical Song Without Words.

While in The Great Waltz, she was spotted by a Fox producer, signed to a contract by studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck and had her last name changed to Gaynor. In My Blue Heaven, she stood out in several send-ups of TV commercials in the film. Fox was grooming her to be the next Grable, and in quick succession, she starred in the Jeanne Crain sorority story Take Care of My Little Girl (1951); Golden Girl (1951), set amid the California Gold Rush; the comedy We’re Not Married! (1952) with Monroe; Bloodhounds of Broadway (1952); Down Among the Sheltering Palms (1953); The I Don’t Care Girl (1953); Three Young Texans (1954); and The Birds and the Bees (1956)‚ an RKO remake of The Lady Eve.

In September 2022, she received a Legacy Award from the Cinecon Classic Film Festival in Hollywood.

She was married to Bean, who started out as a public relations executive at MCA, from 1954 until his death in 2006...

RIP: JAY POPA

 I recently lost a dear friend with the passing of Jay Popa. Anyone who is a big band fan is familiar with the website The Big Band Alliance, which Jay and his brother Chris run. Jay had a big heart, and I count him as a friend. Here is his beautiful obituary...

Everyone should have a devoted son, loving brother, and best pal like James Michael Popa, known to family and friends as “Jay.” After a brave two-year battle with esophageal cancer that metastasized to his liver and bones, Jay passed away August 17, 2024 at age 70.

He was born in and grew up in Alliance, and was a gentle, kind, generous, thoughtful, and humble person to all, with a beautiful soul.

All his life Jay liked to draw and, even while in ill health recently attended art classes at the North Canton Public Library. His favorite color was gold. While he appreciated stylish designs, furniture and decorations, he preferred shopping at Goodwill and other thrift stores. He enjoyed music ranging from the Motown sound of The Supremes and The Temptations to the big bands of Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller, and spent time (especially after he retired) watching dozens of old and new TV shows such as “Dark Shadows,” “NCIS,” and “The Masked Singer.” Comedies like “The Three Stooges,” “The Munsters,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and “Laverne and Shirley” made him laugh. And he loved dogs.

A graduate of Alliance High School and Bowling Green State University, he had a long career as a Computer Programmer with Central Trust (later Bank One) in Canton, then, after moving to Columbus, worked for Riverside Methodist Hospital there.

He was preceded in death by his father, Aurel Howard Popa (1993); his mother, Mildred Carol Crist Popa (2020); and several aunts and uncles including Tillie Stahl (1999) and Sophie Teeters (2014).

Those left to cherish his memory are two brothers, Stephen of Aloha, Oregon, and Christopher (Jose Luis) of Chicago, Illinois; several cousins including Carolyn Frank of Alliance, Cheryl Citino of Salem, Margie (Danny) Engle of Salem, and Diane (David) Kieffer of Delaware, Ohio; and other extended family members.

Thank you to Dr. Amir Iqbal and the ladies of the Oncology and Palliative Care departments at Aultman Alliance Community Hospital, as well as the staff of Aultman Woodlawn in Canton and Christopher J. Graff of Cassaday-Turkle-Christian Funeral home in Alliance...

The Big Band Alliance

RIP: KATHRYN CROSBY

Kathryn Crosby, a 1950s Hollywood starlet who gave up her film career to marry Bing Crosby, the Oscar-winning actor, radio star and mellifluous “White Christmas” crooner, and as his widow became chief protector of his legacy, died Sept. 20 at her home in Hillsborough, Calif. She was 90.The death was announced in a statement by publicist B. Harlan Boll, who did not note a cause.

Throughout her childhood and adolescence, Kathryn Grant — as she was then known — dominated the Texas beauty contest circuit between Houston and Corpus Christi. A 5-foot-3, auburn-haired stunner, she was crowned “Golden Girl of the Texas Baseball League,” “Miss Buccaneer-Navy” (dressed in pirate motif) and “Queen of the Houston Rodeo and Fat Stock Exposition,” for which she was teased among rivals and friends alike as “Miss Fat Stock.”

She had met Crosby in 1953, a year after she was named first runner-up in the Miss Texas pageant and landed a Paramount studios contract. She was 20 at the time and was on the studio lot, breathlessly ferrying a load of petticoats to the wardrobe department, when she rushed past Crosby, then 50 and a recent widower. He was leaning against the doorjamb of his dressing room, casually whistling a tune.

"Howdy, Tex,” he asked with bemusement. “What’s your hurry?”

Crosby had been a box-office juggernaut on the lot for two decades, an audience favorite not only for his vaudeville-style “Road” movies with Bob Hope but also for his Oscar-winning turn as a singing priest in “Going My Way” (1944). In her spare time between walk-on roles, the starstruck young Kathryn filed dispatches for newspapers back home under the title “Texas Gal in Hollywood” and soon returned to Crosby to request an interview.

“You a reporter?” Crosby asked.

“I’m a columnist,” she said.

“The dickens you are,” he replied. “I didn’t know they came so pretty.”

Crosby agreed to the interview, then invited her to tea and later to dinner. She described an instant and mutual infatuation between herself and Crosby, who exuded a languorous sex appeal with his piercing blue eyes and the virile romantic baritone voice that had sold hundreds of millions of records, among them “Please” and “Pennies From Heaven.”

Their courtship lasted nearly four complicated years. Crosby disappeared from her life for months at a time and jilted her twice, only to emerge with reinvigorated ardor. As he pursued other on-set romances, including with actresses Grace Kelly and Inger Stevens, Kathryn was determined to focus on her own pursuit of stardom.

After being dropped by Paramount, she was picked up by Columbia studios and promoted as a versatile leading lady. She had a featured role as a card dealer in the anti-corruption drama “The Phenix City Story” (1955) and co-starred opposite Audie Murphy in the western “The Guns of Fort Petticoat,” Jack Lemmon in the military comedy “Operation Mad Ball” and Tony Curtis in the drama “Mister Cory,” all in 1957.

She was a princess in “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” (1958), a trapeze artist in “The Big Circus” (1959) and, in perhaps her best performance, a surprise witness in “Anatomy of a Murder” (1959), holding her own in a cross-examination showdown with a slick attorney played by George C. Scott.

By the time Bing Crosby eloped with her to Las Vegas in 1957, Kathryn, a Methodist, had converted to Catholicism at his insistence but extracted a promise that she could continue her career after their marriage. But he soon reneged, preferring she stay at home as he wound down into semi-retirement and managed his many business interests and investments, ranging from baseball teams to thoroughbred horses to real estate.

She ultimately went along. Mrs. Crosby later said she wished to give her husband a life vastly different from his anguished and thoroughly dysfunctional first marriage, to actress Dixie Lee, whose alcoholism left him so despairing that he often stayed away from home, leaving her and his children to fend for themselves.

By the early 1960s, Bing and Kathryn had left Southern California and settled in a 24-room Norman-style mansion in Hillsborough, an upscale suburb of San Francisco. She had three children with Bing — including actress Mary Frances Crosby, whose character shot J.R. on the TV series “Dallas” — and spent five years completing a degree in registered nursing. She also was a public-school teacher, host of a morning TV talk show in San Francisco, and the author of a rosy 1967 memoir (“Bing and Other Things”).

She modeled clothes for designer Jean Louis, did occasional summer stock with Bing’s approval, accompanied her husband and children on bird-hunting and fishing expeditions and helped him manage his constellation of properties across the West and in Mexico. She vivaciously sang duets with Bing on TV specials, including his annual Christmas show, and appeared with their children in Minute Maid frozen orange juice commercials, a product Bing endorsed.

As a more contented spouse and father, Bing spent a great deal more time with his second family than he had with his first, Mrs. Crosby said. Nevertheless, she said, he could be a controlling and mercurial perfectionist at home, even as he tried to live up to the laid-back Mr. Lucky persona he had long cultivated — the charming and carefree all-American fellow who just happened to have a voice of peerless emotional resonance.

“He doesn’t exactly lose his temper in the traditional way,” Mrs. Crosby told an interviewer. “He just gets very quiet. That’s when I start wondering what I’ve done. You see, Bing will never say what is bothering him.”

With her nursing credentials, she looked closely after Bing’s well-being amid health setbacks, including after he plummeted 20 feet from a sound stage in March 1977 while rehearsing a TV show, seriously injuring his back. “She really took care of him,” said jazz critic Gary Giddins, an authoritative Bing biographer. Because she was emotionally stable and the family disciplinarian, he added, “She also allowed him to be the kind of father he had not been in the first marriage.”

In October 1977, he was on a golfing trip in Spain with friends when he died suddenly, at age 74 after a heart attack, just after completing a round of play.

Mrs. Crosby gradually restarted her acting career, mostly with touring theater companies and also in a cabaret act that paid tribute to Bing.

To tell her own story, Mrs. Crosby wrote “My Life With Bing” (1983) and “My Last Years with Bing” (2002). Of all the roles she would play — on screen and stage and in private life — she said there was one that made all the others possible. “I want you to understand,” she once told People magazine, “that my position in this world rests on being Mrs. Bing Crosby.

RIP: JAMES EARL JONES

James Earl Jones, a commanding presence onscreen who nonetheless gained greater fame off-camera as the sonorous voice of Star Wars villain Darth Vader and Mufasa, the benevolent leader in The Lion King, died Monday. He was 93.

Jones, who burst into national prominence in 1970 with his powerful Oscar-nominated performance as America’s first Black heavyweight champion in The Great White Hope, died at his home in Dutchess County, New York, Independent Artist Group announced.

The distinguished star made his big-screen debut in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and was noteworthy in many other films, including Claudine (1974) opposite Diahann Carroll; Field of Dreams (1989), as the reclusive author Terence Mann; and The Sandlot (1993), as the intimidating neighborhood guy Mr. Mertle.

For his work on the stage, Jones earned two best actor Tony Awards: for originating the role of Jack Jefferson — who was based on real-life boxer Jack Johnson — in 1968 in Howard Sackler’s Great White Hope and for playing the patriarch who struggles to provide for his family in a 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning production of August Wilson’s Fences.

Jones, the recipient of an honorary Oscar at the 2011 Governors Awards and a special Tony for lifetime achievement in 2017, was one of the handful of people to earn an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony and the first actor to win two Emmys in one year.

“You cannot be an actor like I am and not have been in some of the worst movies like I have,” the self-deprecating star said when he was given his Academy Award. “But I stand before you deeply honored, mighty grateful and just plain gobsmacked.”

Jones’ rise to become one of the most-admired American actors of all time was remarkable considering he suffered from a debilitating stutter as a child.

James Earl Jone's last role was 2021's Coming 2 America, and he retired shortly after finishing that role...

RIP: PETER MARSHALL

Peter Marshall, who won four Emmys hosting the first incarnation of the long-running game show Hollywood Squares, has died at the age of 98, TVLine has confirmed. Marshall died on Thursday of kidney failure at his home in Encino, California “surrounded by loved ones,” his family said in a statement.

After an early career in comedy and on Broadway, Marshall signed on to host what was then titled The Hollywood Squares in 1966, after Bert Parks hosted the initial pilot for NBC. Marshall thought he would only spend 13 weeks as the host, but that turned into 16 years, with Marshall emceeing the show — which featured celebrities like Paul Lynde answering trivia questions as “squares” in a giant tic-tac-toe board — from 1966 to 1981. Along the way, he won four Daytime Emmys for his hosting work.

After Hollywood Squares’ initial run ended, Marshall went on to appear in the 1982 film musical Annie and on TV shows like CHiPs, Fantasy Island and The Love Boat. He later returned to Hollywood Squares for a week in 2002, serving as the center square and also hosting an episode.

Hollywood Squares returned to TV in 1986 with a new version hosted by John Davidson, with Joan Rivers serving as the permanent center square. After that version ended in 1989, the format was revived once again in 1998, with Tom Bergeron as host and Whoopi Goldberg as the center square. That version wrapped up in 2004.

Peter Marshall also appeared in movies in Annie (1982) as the radio singer. In recent years he hosted many nostalgia shows on PBS...

RIP: GENA ROWLANDS

Gena Rowlands, the wife and muse of John Cassavetes whose unvarnished abilities found in such films as Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night and Gloria put her in the pantheon of acting legends, died Wednesday. She was 94.

Rowlands died surrounded by family members at her home in Indian Wells, California. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease in 2019.

Rowlands received Oscar nominations for her performances in A Woman Under the Influence (1974), where she played an isolated, emotionally vulnerable housewife who lapses into madness, and Gloria (1980), where she sparkled as a pissed-off child protector who rails against the Mob.

She lost out to Ellen Burstyn of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Sissy Spacek of Coal Miner’s Daughter in those Academy Award races. Her greatness wasn’t formally acknowledged by the Academy until she received an honorary Oscar at the 2015 Governors Awards.

“You know what’s wonderful about being an actress?” Rowlands said at the ceremony. “You don’t just live one life — yours — you live many lives.”

Cassavetes directed his wife in A Woman Under the Influence and Gloria as well as in Shadows (1959), A Child Is Waiting (1963), Faces (1968), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), Opening Night (1977) and Love Streams (1984). He wrote all but one of those dramas as well, and together, the couple kick-started the independent film movement in America.

Survivors include their son, writer-director Nick Cassavetes, for whom Rowlands starred as a lonely widow in Unhook the Stars (1996) and as an elderly woman with dementia in The Notebook (2004). She also appeared in her son’s She’s So Lovely (1997), based on a script from John Cassavetes.

Her daughters, Zoe Cassavetes and Xan Cassavetes, are writer/directors as well.

At her best when playing beleaguered heroines, Rowlands often downplayed her corn-fed Midwestern beauty, subverting her good looks when the part called for it — as in Opening Night, when she portrayed the aging and insecure stage actress Myrtle Gordon.

Rowlands attended the University of Wisconsin but left to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in in New York. It was there that she met Cassavetes, an alum a year ahead of her who spotted Rowlands in a student production of J.B. Priestley’s Dangerous Corner.

Four months after they met, she and Cassavetes were married in 1954 and were together until he died from cirrhosis in February 1989. He was 59.

Rowlands‘ first professional stage appearance came in a Provincetown Playhouse drama. She also did live TV and was cast by producer-director Joshua Logan in 1956 to play a young woman who falls in love with an older man (Edward G. Robinson) in Paddy Chayefsky’s Middle of the Night.

After 18 months with the play, Rowlands signed with MGM and made her feature debut as Jose Ferrer’s confident wife in the drama The High Cost of Loving (1958). She went on to perform in the Dalton Trumbo Western Lonely Are the Brave (1962) with Kirk Douglas, in The Spiral Road (1962) opposite Rock Hudson and in Tony Rome (1967) with Frank Sinatra.

Rowlands also won three Emmy Awards (from eight nominations), with one for playing the first lady in 1987’s The Betty Ford Story and another for portraying a waitress in a diner who is romanced by another Cassavetes regular, Ben Gazzara, in 2002’s Hysterical Blindness.

Her more recent film appearances came in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth (1991) — the first film she made after Cassavetes‘death — Silent Cries (1993), Hope Floats (1998), The Weekend (1999), The Skeleton Key (2005) and Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks (2014). She retired from acting in 2014....

RIP: BOB NEWHART

Bob Newhart, whose stammering, deadpan unflappability carried him to stardom as a standup comedian and later in television and movies, has died, according to a statement from his longtime publicist Jerry Digney. He was 94.

Digney said Newhart died in Los Angeles on Thursday morning after a series of short illnesses. He called the star’s passing an “end of an era in comedy.”

Over the course of five decades, Newhart’s popularity rarely waned, whether it was as the recording star of the comedy album “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” (the first comedy album to win the Grammy for album of the year), the lead in two top-rated television sitcoms, or a supporting actor in movies including “Catch-22” (in which he played the timid Maj. Major), “Cold Turkey” and “Elf.”

He remains best known for the television shows, “The Bob Newhart Show” (1972-78) and “Newhart” (1982-90), both of which were built around his persona as a reasonable man put-upon by crazies.

Born George Robert Newhart in Oak Park, Illinois on September 5, 1929, Newhart was originally an accountant and advertising copywriter.

In 2022, he mused about his time as an accountant, joking, “in my case, I don’t think it’s amazing that a bad accountant could become a comedian.” He added that “there’s something about numbers and music and comedy, I’m not sure what it is,” going on to mention some comedy contemporaries that has an interest in music like he did.

He first rose to fame with his comedy album, 1960’s “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart.” The album was a phenomenon of its time and one of the best-selling albums of the year. It was No. 1 for 14 weeks on Billboard’s album chart and a multiple Grammy Award-winner, beating out Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte and Nat “King” Cole for album of the year. He also hit No. 1 with the follow-up, “The Button-Down Mind Strikes Back!”

“The Bob Newhart Show” debuted in 1972. (This is not to be confused with his Peabody and Emmy Award-winning variety show of the same name that aired for one season beginning in 1961.) He played a Chicago psychologist, Bob Hartley, who ministered to a host of eccentric patients.

In “Newhart,” he took on the role of Vermont innkeeper Dick Loudon, who tried to maintain his sanity while surrounded by comical locals.

In both cases, his characters found refuge with their wives, played by Suzanne Pleshette in “The Bob Newhart Show” and Mary Frann in “Newhart.”

The latter show’s finale remains one of the most famous in television history. In the final “Newhart” episode, Newhart’s town is purchased by a Japanese millionaire. Golfers at a new course regularly batter the inn with their drives, and one day – in the midst of an argument with townspeople – Newhart is hit by a golf ball. After a quick fade to black, he awakens… as Hartley, his character from “The Bob Newhart Show,” in bed with Pleshette.

“Honey, wake up! You won’t believe the dream I just had,” he tells her, to uproarious audience laughter.

The finale of "Newhart," which brought back the characters of Dr. Bob Hartley, Newhart's character on "The Bob Newhart Show," and his wife Emily played by Suzanne Pleshette. 

“That was my wife Ginny’s idea,” Newhart explained to Parade magazine in 2013. “She said, ‘You should end the show by waking up in bed with Emily and explain a dream you had about owning an inn in Vermont.’ We used it!”

The actor was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for his “Newhart” series three times in the outstanding lead actor category. He didn’t win an individual acting Emmy until 2013, when he was recognized in the outstanding guest actor category for his portrayal of Professor Proton on “The Big Bang Theory.”

He was nominated for a total of nine Emmys throughout the course of his career.

Newhart was a frequent guest on the era’s variety and talk shows, and a regular fill-in host on the “Tonight Show,” switching out for his friend Johnny Carson 87 times.

Newhart never really retired, continuing to make television appearances in recent years on “Big Bang” and “Young Sheldon,” along with “Hot in Cleveland” and “The Librarians.”

Other film work from the star included turns in “Horrible Bosses” and “In & Out.”

RIP: SHELLEY DUVALL

Shelley Duvall, the big-eyed, waifish performer who won the Cannes actress award for Robert Altman‘s “3 Women” and endured Stanley Kubrick’s intense directing techniques to star in “The Shining,” died Thursday in Blanco, Texas, Variety confirmed with her partner Dan Gilroy. She was 75.

Duvall was known for working with director Altman, who cast her in “Brewster McCloud” as her first screen role. She went on to appear in his films “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” and “Thieves Like Us” before starring as part of the ensemble cast of “Nashville” in 1975. After gaining attention in “Nashville,” Altman cast her in “Buffalo Bill and the Indians,” then gave her unusual screen presence a chance to shine in “3 Women,” for which she won the Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actress as well as a BAFTA nomination.

Also in 1977, Duvall played a Rolling Stone journalist in Woody Allen’s “Annie Hall,” and met Paul Simon on the set. They dated for two years.

Duvall starred as Olive Oyl in Altman’s “Popeye” in 1980, a role that she seemed born to play, with her giant eyes. Her unnerving performance as a health spa worker in “3 Women” led Kubrick to cast her as Wendy Torrance, the wife of Jack Nicholson’s character in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining,” based on the Stephen King novel.

“The Shining” required more than a year of shooting, and throughout, the legendarily demanding director pushed Duvall to her limit. Some of her scenes in “The Shining” required more than 100 takes, with the baseball sequence landing in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most takes of a scene with dialogue.

Years later, she talked about the difficult shoot with the Hollywood Reporter. “After a while, your body rebels. It says: ‘Stop doing this to me. I don’t want to cry every day.’ And sometimes just that thought alone would make me cry. To wake up on a Monday morning, so early, and realize that you had to cry all day because it was scheduled — I would just start crying. I’d be like, ‘Oh no, I can’t, I can’t.’ And yet I did it. I don’t know how I did it. Jack said that to me, too. He said, ‘I don’t know how you do it.’“

Among her other roles were Terry Gilliam’s “Time Bandits” and the comedy “Roxanne” with Steve Martin.

During the 1980s, Duvall produced a series of children’s anthology shows based on classic stories. “Faerie Tale Theatre,” “Tall Tales & Legends,” “Nightmare Classics” and “Bedtime Stories” boasted notable directors including Tim Burton, Francis Ford Coppola and Ivan Passer and guest stars like Robin Williams, Jamie Lee Curtis, Elliot Gould, Laura Dern, Molly Ringwald and Ed Asner.


In recent years, she lived a reclusive life, her appearance on “Dr. Phil” in 2016 garnered negative publicity for sensationalizing her struggles with mental health. In 2021, she was interviewed by the Hollywood Reporter writer Seth Abramovitch, who traveled to Texas and found her happy to reminisce over her career and fondly regarded in her community in the Texas Hill Country, despite her eccentricities...

RIP: DONALD SUTHERLAND

Donald Sutherland, the beloved actor who starred in scores of films from The Dirty Dozen, MASH and Klute to Animal House and Ordinary People to Pride & Prejudice and The Hunger Games franchise and won an Emmy for Citizen X, died Thursday in Miami after a long illness. He was 88.

The 2017 Honorary Oscar recipient also is the father of Emmy-winning 24 and Designated Survivor actor Kiefer Sutherland and veteran CAA Media Finance exec Roeg Sutherland. CAA confirmed the news to Deadline.

In some of his most well-known roles, he perfected a laconic, wry and dead-serious delivery as such characters as the cool-headed amateur murder investigator John Klute, opposite Jane Fonda’s terrified, erratic call girl Bree Daniels, in Klute; as the Hawkeye Pierce in the film MASH, where he played opposite Elliott Gould’s cut-up Trapper John; and in Nicolas Reog’s Don’t Look Now as skeptical John Baxter, who does not believe the claims of wife Laura (Julie Christie) that their recently dead daughter is reaching out from the other side.

In one early change-of-pace characterization, Sutherland played a sadistic fascist in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1976 epic 1900, in which his character gleefully swings a child by the heels, bashing the boy’s head against a wall.

Born on July 17, 1935, in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, Donald Sutherland amassed some 200 film and TV credits spanning more than 60 years, from guesting on episodes of 1960s series including Suspense, The Avengers, Court Martial and The Odd Man to last year’s Paramount+ drama Bass Reeves. His big break in movies came with Robert Aldrich’s star-packed 1967 World War II drama The Dirty Dozen, playing Vernon Pinkley opposite Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson, George Kennedy, Telly Savalas and others. A hit in theaters, it remains a seminal American war movie.

His next big role was as Capt. Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce in Robert Altman’s 1970 Korean War dramedy MASH. The alternatively harrowing and hilarious film earned five Oscar nominations including Best Picture, winning for Ring Lardner Jr.’s biting screenplay, and fueled the 1972-83 CBS series in which Alda Alda played Hawkeye.

Sutherland followed that with another star-laden war movie, 1970’s Kelly’s Heroes, playing Sgt. Oddball alongside Clint Eastwood, Don Rickles, Savalas and others. That led to perhaps his biggest star turn, in the 1971 Alan J. Pakula crime drama Klute. He starred opposite Fonda as New York Detective John Klute, who is hired to find a chemical company executive who has disappeared. Fonda won her first Oscar for the role, and Andy Lewis & Dave Lewis were nominated for their Original Screenplay.

Sutherland’s next big movie was Nicolas Roeg’s psychological thriller Don’t Look Now, which he followed up with the 1974 international espionage comedy S*P*Y*S, reteaming with Gould, and 1975’s Hollywood-set Day of the Locust. Starring with William Atherton, Karen Black and Burgess Meredith, he played accountant Homer Simpson, who covets Black’s aspiring actress Faye Greener.

With his film career in high gear, Sutherland starred in yet another big-name war movie in The Eagle Has Landed (1976), with Michael Caine and Robert Duvall, and then had a small role in the 1977 John Landis-directed farce The Kentucky Fried Movie, penned by future Airplane! filmmakers David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker.

1978 would see Sutherland headline three disparate films: heist comedy The Great Train Robbery with Seaon Connery and Lesley-Anne Down; horror thriller remake Invasion of the Body Snatchers with Brooke Adams and Jeff Goldblum; and the beloved early-’60s fraternity romp Animal House, also directed by Landis

He had a supporting but key role in the latter, playing Faber College English lit Professor Dave Jennings. His deadpan character bores his classes with lectures on John Milton in one scene and is sleeping with student Katy (Karen Allen) in the next. She was the girlfriend of Boon (Peter Riegert), one of the Delta Chi fraternity members. The cast also included John Belushi, Tim Matheson, Stephen Furst, Bruce McGill, KEvin Bacon, Amadeus Oscar winner Tom Hulce and John Vernon.

Sutherland is survived by his wife Francine Racette; sons Roeg, Rossif, Angus, and Kiefer; daughter Rachel; and four grandchildren. A private celebration of life will be held by the family. Donald made his last movie and television appearances in 2023...

RIP: JANIS PAIGE

Janis Paige, an exuberant nightclub performer who starred on Broadway in “The Pajama Game,” swung from a chandelier with Fred Astaire in the movie “Silk Stockings” and played a flirtatious waitress who tempts Archie Bunker to stray from his marriage vows on the sitcom “All in the Family,” died June 2 at her home in West Hollywood. She was 101.

Her death was confirmed by her friend Stuart Lampert, who said she had been in hospice but did not cite a specific cause.

Although Ms. Paige appeared in westerns and melodramas, she was best known as a scene-stealing comic actress in parts that often brandished her mile-long legs and flashing eyes. Film critic Alton Cook of the New York World-Telegram and Sun described her as “one of the most deft and engaging of our girl clowns.”

Talent scouts spotted her singing opera at the Hollywood Canteen, a club that catered to servicemen on leave during World War II. Within a year, she was under contract to Warner Bros. studios and cast in the film “Hollywood Canteen” (1944) as a hostess and aspiring actress who bewitches a wolfish soldier (Dane Clark). When he asks for a date, she fends him off with dramatic flourish: “I give so much of myself to my art, and there’d be so little left for you.”

She also played a gangster’s moll and chanteuse in the melodrama “Her Kind of Man” (1946) and had decorative roles in “Winter Meeting” (1948), starring Bette Davis, and “Wallflower” (1948) as the glamorous sister of studious Joyce Reynolds.

There were plenty of musical comedies in the mix, often with co-stars Jack Carson or Dennis Morgan. In the western “Cheyenne” (1947), she played a dancehall chanteuse who performs atop a bar.

Her other films included “Two Guys from Milwaukee,” “The Time, the Place and the Girl” (both 1946) and “Romance on the High Seas” (1948). The last marked the movie debut of Doris Day, whose studio career waxed as Ms. Paige’s rapidly waned.

Ms. Paige became a major Broadway star playing the union grievance committee leader in “The Pajama Game” (1954), a musical romance set amid labor-management tensions at a pajama factory. The show, which ran two years, won the Tony Award for best musical, provided an early showcase for the modern dance choreography of Bob Fosse, and featured a bevy of hit songs by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross.

Ms. Paige was turned down for the 1957 film version, which featured her Broadway co-star, John Raitt, opposite Day. “For the movie, they needed a box office name,” she told the Associated Press years later. “They wanted Frank Sinatra to play John Raitt's role. Frank considered it and turned it down. I would have played my role.”

“I never get devastated about things like that,” she added. “I’m lucky to have had the show. I always felt that way. There’s nothing like the original.”

The musical’s success — and her headline act at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub in Los Angeles — made Ms. Paige a household name. She had a starring role on “It’s Always Jan” (1955), a short-lived CBS sitcom about a widowed cabaret star raising a young daughter. She also won a supporting role as a flamboyant Hollywood actress opposite Astaire and Cyd Charisse in “Silk Stockings” (1957).

The film was based on a 1955 Broadway musical adaptation of the 1939 movie “Ninotchka,” a romantic comedy starring Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas. Ms. Paige provided the movie with some much-needed juice — especially her droll rendition of Cole Porter’s “Stereophonic Sound,” choreographed by Hermes Pan and culminating in Ms. Paige and Astaire gliding across the room, suspended from a chandelier.

“It was hard work, believe me,” she later told the Miami Herald, describing weeks of rehearsals. “I was one mass of bruises. I didn’t know how to fall … because I was never a classic dancer.”

She added that she was too intimidated by Astaire to refuse his idea for the chandelier sequence. “He showed me and said, ‘You think you can do that?’ And I said, ‘Sure, I can do that.’ Not knowing if I was going to fall on my face or not. I didn’t.”

She returned to Broadway in 1963 for “Here’s Love,” Meredith Willson’s musical adaptation of the 1947 Christmas film “Miracle on 34th Street.” In the role Maureen O’Hara originated on screen, Ms. Paige played a cynical working mother whose young daughter clings to an abiding faith in Santa Claus.

In 1968, Ms. Paige took over from Angela Lansbury in Jerry Herman’s long-running Broadway musical comedy “Mame,” playing a bohemian socialite caring for her orphaned nephew. “She looks glowingly well and sings, dances and acts with a sweet enthusiasm, but not perhaps the bittersweet enthusiasm Miss Lansbury presented,” New York Times theater critic Clive Barnes wrote. “She is less of a character but, as some compensation, perhaps more of a performer.”

In the movie comedy “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” (1960), Ms. Paige had a vivid supporting role as an actress who slaps theater critic David Niven for giving her a bad review. She was part of Bob Hope’s USO shows and was a television stalwart, with appearances on variety shows, afternoon soap operas such as “General Hospital” and series including “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Trapper John, M.D.” and “St. Elsewhere.”

Most memorable was a guest role on “All in the Family,” as a diner waitress with hungry eyes for Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker. Archie was a comically lovable bigot who, whatever his many faults, seemed devoted to his bighearted wife, Edith. Feeling neglected because of his wife’s volunteer work, he is susceptible to Ms. Paige’s unsubtle invitation to her home.

Ms. Paige told the Herald that she received mounds of angry letters for almost wrecking the Bunkers’ TV marriage. “My God, they hated me,” she said. “I had hate mail: ‘How dare you come between Archie and Edith? How dare you do this?’ And other people would write, ‘It’s about time he kissed somebody else, and I would have kissed you, too, if I had been there.’ ”

Donna Mae Tjaden was born in Tacoma, Wash., on Sept. 16, 1922. She was 4 when her parents separated and was raised by her mother and grandparents. Her mother encouraged her show business ambitions, which took her to Hollywood within a year of completing high school.

Her marriages to restaurateur Frank Martinelli Jr. and TV producer Arthur Stander ended in divorce. She was married to Ray Gilbert, the Oscar-winning lyricist of “Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,” from 1962 until his death in 1976. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available...

RIP: BARBARA RUSH

Barbara Rush, the classy yet largely unheralded leading lady who sparkled in the 1950s melodramas Magnificent Obsession, Bigger Than Life and The Young Philadelphians, has died. She was 97.

Rush, a regular on the fifth and final season of ABC’s Peyton Place and a favorite of sci-fi fans thanks to her work in When Worlds Collide (1951) and It Came From Outer Space (1953), died Sunday, her daughter, Fox News senior correspondent Claudia Cowan, confirmed to Fox News Digital.

“My wonderful mother passed away peacefully at 5:28 this evening. I was with her this morning and know she was waiting for me to return home safely to transition,” Cowan said. “It’s fitting she chose to leave on Easter as it was one of her favorite holidays and now, of course, Easter will have a deeper significance for me and my family.”

A starlet at Paramount, Universal and Fox whose career blossomed at the end of the Hollywood studio system, Rush also played opposite Frank Sinatra in Come Blow Your Horn (1963) and Robin and the 7 Hoods (1964), the last of the Rat Pack movies. Filming on the latter was stopped twice, once when President Kennedy was assassinated and again when Sinatra’s son was kidnapped.

In Douglas Sirk’s 1954 remake of Magnificent Obsession, Rush portrayed the adorable sister of Oscar nominee Jane Wyman, whose character is blinded in an accident caused by a reckless playboy (Rock Hudson).

Rush, Hudson and Sirk had warmed to the task by collaborating on the tongue-in-cheek film Taza, Son of Cochise (1954), in which the actors played Native Americans, and the three would work together again in the Ireland-set love story Captain Lightfoot (1955).

Rush portrayed the harried wife of James Mason, whose life unravels when he becomes addicted to cortisone, in Nicholas Ray’s controversial Bigger Than Life (1956), and she exceled as a disappointed socialite driven away by would-be lawyer Paul Newman in The Young Philadelphians (1959).

Rush also was seen as the despairing wife whose husband (Kirk Douglas) is having an affair (with neighbor Kim Novak) in Strangers When We Meet (1960), and she romanced Dean Martin and Richard Burton, respectively, in The Young Lions (1958) and The Bramble Bush (1960).

Rush never received an Oscar or Emmy nomination; she was given a Golden Globe in 1954 as most promising female newcomer for her performance in It Came From Outer Space, where she played the fiancee of an astronomer (Richard Carlson) as well as her seductive alien duplicate.

But who needs trophies? She was acknowledged in the 1975 film Shampoo when Warren Beatty’s Beverly Hills hairstylist and ladies man asked for references when applying for a business loan, bragged, “Well, I do Barbara Rush.”

The high-society Hollywood figure was married to actor Jeffrey Hunter (The Searchers) and legendary showbiz publicist Warren Cowan. Barbara Rush pretty much retired by 2007, but she continued to make appearances until around 2019 at movie conventions...

RIP: LOUIS GOSSETT JR

Louis Gossett Jr., Star of ‘An Officer and a Gentleman’ and ‘Roots,’ Died at 87/

The Brooklyn native also appeared in the original Broadway production of 'A Raisin in the Sun' and wrote a song with folk legend Richie Havens.

Louis Gossett Jr., the tough guy with a sensitive side who won an Oscar for his portrayal of a steely sergeant in An Officer and a Gentleman and an Emmy for his performance as a compassionate slave in the landmark miniseries Roots, died Friday. He was 87.

In a statement obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, his family said, “It is with our heartfelt regret to confirm our beloved father passed away this morning. We would like to thank everyone for their condolences at this time. Please respect the family’s privacy during this difficult time.”

With his sleek, bald pate and athlete’s physique, Gossett was intimidating in a wide array of no-nonsense roles, most notably in Taylor Hackford’s Officer and a Gentleman (1982), where as Gunnery Sgt. Emil Foley he rides Richard Gere’s character mercilessly (but for his own good) at an officer candidate school and gets into a memorable martial arts fight.

He was the second Black man to win an acting Oscar, following Sidney Poitier in 1964.

For the role, the 6-foot-4 Gossett trained for 30 days at the Marine Corps Recruitment Division, an adjunct of Camp Pendleton north of San Diego. “I knew I had to put myself through at least some degree of this all-encompassing transformation,” Gossett wrote in his 2010 biography, An Actor and a Gentleman.

In 1959, Gossett played George Murchison in the original Broadway production of Lorraine Hansberry’s domestic tragedy A Raisin in the Sun, then segued to Daniel Petrie’s 1961 Columbia film adaptation along with his stage co-stars Poitier and Ruby Dee, launching his career in Hollywood.

It was his eloquent portrayal as Fiddler, an older slave who teaches a young Kunta Kinte (LeVar Burton) to speak English on the eight-part ABC miniseries Roots, that earned him his first significant dose of national recognition. Eighty-five percent of the U.S. population tuned in for at least a portion of Roots, and the finale drew more than 100 million viewers in January 1977.

“All the top African-American actors were asked, and I begged to be in there,” Gossett once said. “I got the best role, I think. It was wonderful.”

Gossett also starred in the critically acclaimed telefilm Sadat (1983), in which he played the assassinated Egyptian leader (Sadat’s widow, Jehan, personally chose him for the part), and he portrayed a baseball immortal in Don’t Look Back: The Story of Leroy “Satchel” Paige in a 1981 telefilm.

During his 60-year-plus career, Gossett excelled in a number of non-stereotypical racial roles, playing a hospital chief of staff on the 1979 ABC series The Lazarus Syndrome and the title character Gideon Oliver, an anthropology professor, on a 1989 set of ABC Mystery Movies. He work up until last year and appeared in the movie musical remake of  "The Color Purple"...