Berenice Abbott (1898 - 1991)

Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio and brought up there by her divorced mother. She attended the Ohio State University, but left in early 1918.  In 1918 she moved with friends from OSU to New York’s Greenwich Village, where she was ‘adopted’ by the anarchist Hippolyte Havel. She shared an apartment on Greenwich Avenue with […]

Martha Graham (1894 - 1991)

Graham was born in Allegheny City – later to became part of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – in 1894. Her father George Graham practiced as what in the Victorian era was known as an “alienist”, a practitioner of an early form of psychiatry. The Grahams were strict Presbyterians. Dr. Graham was a third-generation American of Irish descent. […]

Lee Remick (1935 - 1991)

Remick was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, the daughter of Gertrude Margaret (née Waldo), an actress, and Francis Edwin “Frank” Remick, who owned a department store. Her maternal great-grandmother, Eliza Duffield, was an English-born preacher and her paternal grandfather was of Irish ancestry. Remick attended the Swaboda School of Dance, The Hewitt School and studied acting […]

Donald Dunn (1941 - 2012)

Donald Dunn As the bass player on dozens of the most soulful hits in the history of pop music, Donald “Duck” Dunn often found himself out on the road playing to fans who had assumed he was black like the stars he supported, notably Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Sam & Dave. When audiences encountered […]

George Lindsey (1928 - 2012)

George Lindsey George Lindsey, the actor who portrayed the country-bumpkin mechanic Goober Pyle on “The Andy Griffith Show,” died Sunday after a brief illness, his family said. He was 83. Lindsey’s character Goober Pyle joined the hit sitcom in 1964 as the cousin of Gomer Pyle, played by Jim Nabors. When the show ended four […]

Dick Clark (1929 - 2012)

Dick Clark Host and TV producer Dick Clark has died. He was 82. Spokesman Paul Shefrin said the “American Bandstand” creator had a heart attack Wednesday morning at Saint John’s hospital in Santa Monica, a day after he was admitted for an outpatient procedure. Long dubbed “the world’s oldest teenager” because of his boyish appearance, […]

Jonathan Frid (1924 - 2012)

Jonathan Frid Jonathan Frid, a Shakespearean actor who found unexpected — and by his own account unwanted — celebrity as the vampire Barnabas Collins on the sanguinary soap opera “Dark Shadows,” died last Saturday, April 14, in Hamilton, Ontario. He was 87. He died from complications of a fall, said Kathryn Leigh Scott, who played […]

Halston (1932 - 1990)

Roy Halston Frowick was born on April 23, 1932 in Des Moines, Iowa, the second son of a Norwegian-American accountant James and his seamstress wife Hallie. Halston developed an interest in sewing from his mother, and he began creating hats and altering clothes for his mother and sister as a boy. He graduated Benjamin Bosse […]

Alberto Moravia (1907 - 1990)

Alberto Pincherle (the pen-name “Moravia” was the surname of his paternal grandmother) was born in Via Sgambati in Rome, Italy, to a wealthy middle-class family. His Jewish Venetian father, Carlo, was an architect and a painter. His Catholic Anconitan mother, Teresa Iginia de Marsanich, was of Dalmatian origin.  The family he was born in had […]

Reinaldo Arenas (1943 - 1990)

Arenas was born in the countryside, in the northern part of the Province of Oriente, Cuba, and later moved to the city of Holguín. In 1963, he moved to Havana to enroll in the School of Planification and, later, in the Faculty of Letters at the Universidad de La Habana, where he studied philosophy and […]

Alice Marble (1913 - 1990)

Born in the small town of Beckwourth, Plumas County, California, Marble moved with her family at the age of five to San Francisco. A tomboy, she excelled in many sports, including baseball; but her brother persuaded her to try the more ladylike tennis. She quickly mastered the game, playing in Golden Gate Park. She suffered […]

Pearl Bailey (1918 - 1990)

Bailey was born in Southampton County in southeastern Virginia, to Joseph and Ella Mae Ricks Bailey. She was reared in the Bloodfields neighborhood of Newport News, Virginia.  She made her stage-singing debut when she was 15 years old. Her brother Bill Bailey was beginning his own career as a tap dancer, and suggested she enter […]

Ronnie Montrose (1947 - 2012)

Ronnie Montrose It wasn’t prostate cancer that killed guitar legend Ronnie Montrose. He beat that gremlin into the dirt, as he did so many obstacles to his career and musical expression. But Montrose, who was immensely proud of being a “survivor,” simply couldn’t vanquish the clinical depression that plagued him since he was a toddler. […]

Sheldon Moldoff (1920 - 2012)

Sheldon Moldoff Shelly was much in demand throughout the forties, working for DC on many strips.  One of his favorites was one he created — The Black Pirate, featured in Action Comics. In 1953, he became Bob Kane’s main ghost and I guess I need to explain that working arrangement… Kane never drew Batman on […]

Paulette Goddard (1910 - 1990)

Goddard was the only child of Joseph Russell Levy (1881–1954), who was Jewish, and the son of a prosperous cigar manufacturer from Salt Lake City, and of Alta Mae Goddard (1887–1983), who was Episcopalian and of English heritage. They married in 1908 and separated while their daughter was very young, although the divorce did not […]

Lina Romay (1954 - 2012)

Lina Romay Romay was born Rosa Maria Almirall on June 25, 1954, in Barcelona, Cataluna, Spain. Her cinematic pseudonym was taken from a singer/actress in mambo king Xavier Cugat‘s band in the 1940s. Following graduation from high school, Romay studied the arts, married actor/photographer Raymond Hardy (they later divorced), and began acting in stage productions. […]

Elyse Knox (1917 - 2012)

Elyse Knox As a B-movie actress in the 1940s, Elyse Knox was perhaps best known for the only horror film she ever made, “The Mummy’s Tomb,” with Lon Chaney Jr. as the monster who kidnaps her. She later recalled working through the night on the abduction and graveyard scenes with Chaney, miserable in heavy makeup […]

Mary Martin (1913 - 1990)

Martin was born in Weatherford, Texas. Her life as a child, as she describes it in her autobiography My Heart Belongs, was secure and happy. She had close relationships with both her mother and father, as well as her siblings. Her autobiography details how the young actress had an instinctive ear for recreating musical sounds. […]

Keith Haring (1958 - 1990)

Keith Haring was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on May 4, 1958. He was raised in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, by his mother Joanne Haring, and father Allen Haring, an engineer and amateur cartoonist. He had three younger sisters, Kay, Karen and Kristen. Haring became interested in art at a very early age spending time with his father […]

Robert Hegyes (1951 - 2012)

Robert Hegyes who played Juan Epstein, the Sweathog voted Most Likely to Take a Life, on the 1970s sitcom “Welcome Back, Kotter,” died on Thursday in Edison, N.J. He was 60. The cause was cardiac arrest, a spokesman for John F. Kennedy Medical Center in Edison, where Mr. Hegyes was pronounced dead, told Reuters. Broadcast […]

Bob Weston (1947 - 2012)

Bob Weston The long-lasting pop band Fleetwood Mac is also one of the most controversial, its several changes of style and personnel often arising from romantic entanglements rather than musical differences. Bob Weston, who has died aged 64 of a gastrointestinal haemorrhage and cirrhosis of the liver, was the band’s lead guitarist in the early […]

Fred Milano (1939 - 2012)

Fred Milano Fred Milano, one of the original members of Dion and the Belmonts, who wove his backup tenor tones into the musically seamless harmonies of 1950s and ’60s hits like “A Teenager in Love” and “Where or When,” died on Sunday at a hospital on Long Island. He was 72 and lived in Massapequa, […]

Greg Giraldo (1965 - 2010)

Greg Giraldo Greg Giraldo, a comedian famous for his stinging insult humor, disgruntled rants and frequent appearances on Comedy Central’s highly watched roast series, died on Wednesday at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J. He was 44. Mr. Giraldo had been hospitalized since Saturday night after he was found unconscious in a […]

Anne Meara (1929 - 2015)

Meara was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of parents of Irish descent, Mary (née Dempsey) and Edward Joseph Meara, a lawyer. She was raised in Rockville Centre, New York on Long Island, an only child. When Anne was 11 years old, her mother committed suicide.  When she was 18, Meara spent a year […]

Patrick Macnee (1922 - 2015)

The elder of two sons, Macnee was born in Paddington, London in 1922 to Daniel Macnee (1877-1952) and Dorothea Mary Hastings (1896-1984). His father trained race horses in Lambourn, and was known for his dress sense; he had served as an officer in the Yorkshire Dragoons in the First World War. His maternal grandmother was […]

Amanda Peterson (1971 - 2015)

Peterson was born Phyllis Amanda Peterson to Dr. James and Sylvia Peterson. A native of Greeley, Colorado, she was the youngest of three children; her older siblings are sister, Anne Marie, and her brother, James Jr. Eventually, Peterson became known professionally as Amanda Peterson and was called “Mandy” by friends and family.  While living in […]

Omar Sharif (1932 - 2015)

Omar Sharif, whose surname means “noble” or “nobleman” in Arabic, was born on 10 April 1932, as Michel Demitri Chalhoub in Alexandria, Egypt, to a Melkite Greek Catholic family of Lebanese descent. His father, Joseph Chalhoub, a precious woods merchant originally from Zahle, moved to Egypt in the early 20th century, particularly Alexandria, where Omar […]

Roger Rees (1944 - 2015)

Rees was born in Aberystwyth, Wales, the son of Doris Louise (née Smith), a shop clerk, and William John Rees, a police officer. He studied art at the Camberwell College of Arts and the Slade School of Fine Art, turning to acting when he was painting backdrops at the Wimbledon Theatre and was asked to […]

Joan Sebastian (1951 - 2015)

Joan Sebastian was born in the rural town of Juliantla in Guerrero, and began composing at the age of seven. His mother had enrolled him to a school near Guanajuato when he was eight years old, and later returned to his hometown three years later.  At age fourteen, his mother sent him away to a […]

Alex Rocco (1936 - 2015)

Rocco was born as Alexander Federico Petricone in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1936, but raised in nearby Somerville, the son of Mary (née DiBiase; October 1909–August 1978) and Alessandro Sam Petricone. He was of Italian descent.  According to organized crime turncoat Vincent Teresa, Alex was a hanger-on with the Winter Hill Gang of the Boston area. […]