Pat Hingle (1924 - 2009)

Hingle was born Martin Patterson Hingle in Miami, Florida (some sources say Denver, Colorado), the son of Marvin Louise (née Patterson), a schoolteacher and musician, and Clarence Martin Hingle, a building contractor. Hingle enlisted in the U.S. Navy in December 1941, dropping out of the University of Texas. He served on the destroyer USS Marshall […]

Joseph L. Trueblood (1956 - 2003)

Joseph L. Trueblood (December 26, 1956 – June 13, 2003), a 46-year-old white male, was executed by lethal injection at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, Indiana on June 13, 2003. Trueblood was found guilty of the 1988 murder of Susan Bowsher, a 23-year-old white female, Ashlyn Bowsher, a 2½-year-old white female, and William […]

Carlos DeLuna (1962 - 1989)

DeLuna was charged with killing a gas station attendant, 24-year-old Wanda Lopez, on the evening of February 4, 1983, in Corpus Christi, Texas. The young woman died from multiple stab wounds, apparently from a buck knife. Lopez was killed while on the phone with the police, having just called 911 to report a suspicious person […]

Charles Brooks Jr. (1942 - 1982)

Brooks was raised in a wealthy family in Fort Worth, Texas. He attended I.M. Terrell High School (named after its first principal Isaiah Milligan Terrell), where he played football.  He had a prior criminal history, having served time at the United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth for illegal possession of firearms.  On December 14, 1976, Brooks went […]

Fanny Brice (1891 - 1951)

Fanny Brice She was really Fannie Borach, daughter of a saloon-keeper on Forsythe Street in the crowded Lower East Side, where she was born in 1892. Her first appearance on any stage took place when she was 13 at Keeney’s Theatre in Brooklyn, where she won an amateur night contest singing, “When You Know You’re […]

Walter Brennan (1894 - 1974)

Walter Brennan In many ways the most successful and familiar character actor of American sound films and the only actor to date to win three Oscars for Best Supporting Actor, Walter Brennan attended college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, studying engineering. While in school he became interested in acting and performed in school plays. He worked some […]

Charles Boyer (1899 - 1978)

Charles Boyer Born in Figeac, France, he was a distinguished performer who appeared in more than 80 films between 1920 and 1976. He began his career in the theater and made his big screen debut in was “L’homme du large” (1920). Relocating to America, he became a US citizen in 1942 and performed on Broadway, […]

Stephen Boyd (1931 - 1977)

Stephen Boyd Stephen Boyd was born William Millar on July 4, 1931, at Glengormley, Northern Ireland, one of nine children of Martha Boyd and Canadian truck driver James Alexander Millar, who worked for Fleming’s on Tomb Street in Belfast. He attended Glengormley & Ballyrobert primary school and then moved on to Ballyclare High School and […]

Ernest Borgnine (1917 - 2012)

Ernest Borgnine Film and television actor Ernest Borgnine, who won an Academy Award for his portrayal of a lovelorn butcher in 1955’s “Marty,” has died at age 95, his manager said Sunday. The thick-set, gap-toothed Borgnine built a reputation for playing heavies in early films like “From Here to Eternity” and “Bad Day at Black […]

Richard Boone (1917 - 1981)

Richard Boone  Richard Boone, the actor best known for his role as the hired gun Paladin in the ”Have Gun Will Travel” television series, is dead at the age of 63. A spokesman at Craig Funeral Home in St. Augustine said today that Mr. Boone’s body was to be cremated and a private service held. […]

Ray Bolger (1904 - 1987)

Ray Bolger Ray Bolger, the loose-limbed song-and-dance man who became known to millions as the Scarecrow in ”The Wizard of Oz,” died yesterday of cancer in Los Angeles. He had his 83d birthday last Saturday and lived in Beverly Hills. Among his many roles on stage, screen and television in a career than spanned six […]

Mel Blanc (1908 - 1989)

Mel Blanc Mel Blanc, the voice of Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Barney Rubble, Daffy Duck and countless other animated vertebrates, died Monday afternoon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He was 81 and had been hospitalized since May 19 suffering from heart disease and related medical problems, said hospital spokesman Ron Wise. With Blanc when he died […]

Bill Bixby (1934 - 1993)

Bill Bixby whose long career in television included starring roles in three popular series, died on Sunday at his home in Century City. He was 59. The cause was prostate cancer, said Pamela Golum, a spokeswoman for the NBC-TV show “Blossom.” Mr. Bixby, the show’s director, was on the job until last week. In the […]

Joey Bishop (1918 - 2007)

Joey Bishop Bishop was the least flamboyant of the Rat Pack and no match for the others — Dean Martin, Peter Lawford, Sammy Davis Jr. and Sinatra himself — in their dedication to hell raising. But he shared in their phenomenal success in the early 1960s, when they headlined music and comedy shows at the […]

Fred Berry (1951 - 2003)

Fred Berry The African-American actor Fred Berry, who has died aged 52, found fame as the high school student Rerun Stubbs in the popular, 1970s US television show, What’s Happening!! He was well into his 20s when he joined the sitcom, and continued to play the role well into his 30s. The show began in […]

Milton Berle (1908 - 2002)

Milton Berle Comedy legend Milton Berle was born as Milton Berlinger in New York City on July 12, 1908. He started his career by impersonating Charlie Chaplin at as a young boy. After winning a Chaplin look-alike contest at the age of 5, he began landing film roles. Berle appeared in numerous silent films, including […]

Edgar Bergen (1903 - 1978)

Edgar Bergen American ventriloquist and radio comedian whose career in vaudeville, radio, and motion pictures spanned almost 60 years. Bergen was best known as the foil of his ventriloquist’s dummy Charlie McCarthy. The Edgar Bergen-Charlie McCarthy Show was a permanent fixture on American network radio from 1937 until 1957. Other characters created by Bergen, such […]

Jack Benny (1894 - 1974)

Jack Benny Actor, Producer, Comedian. He is best remembered for his comically inept violin playing (he was actually a very good violin player), his carefully constructed image as a penny-pincher, and for never being older than 39. His most famous joke was as a man confronted by a robber who demands “Your money or your […]

William Bendix (1906 - 1964)

William Bendix William Bendix made a career out of playing lovable big lugs, although he also occasionally got to play sinister and tragic roles with equal success. He was born in New York City, in a cold-water flat at Third Avenue and 45th Street in 1906, the only son of Oscar Bendix and the former […]

Wallace Beery (1885 - 1949)

Wallace Beery In 1902, 16-year-old Wallace Beery joined the Ringling Brothers Circus as an assistant to the elephant trainer. He left two years later after a leopard clawed his arm. Beery next went to New York, where he found work in musical variety shows. He became a leading man in musicals and appeared on Broadway […]

Frank Baum (1856 - 1919)

Frank Baum Born in New York in 1856, Frank Baum had his first best-selling children’s book with 1899’s Father Goose, His Book. The following year, Baum scored an even bigger hit with The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and went on to write 13 more Oz books before his death in 1919. His stories have formed […]

Richard Basehart (1914 - 1984)

Richard Basehart Mr. Basehart, who starred as Admiral Nelson in the television series ”Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” narrated the closing ceremonies of the Olympics on Aug. 12 and suffered the first of several strokes hours afterward, his lawyer, Bruce Stiglitz, said yesterday. He died in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where […]

Lionel Barrymore (1878 - 1954)

Lionel Barrymore Born on April 12, 1878 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as Lionel Herbert Blythe. He was the oldest child of stage perfomer Maurice Blythe who had gained fame as Maurice Barrymore and his wife Georgina Drew the daughter of celebrated actor John Drew. Lionel along with his sister Ethel and brother John, all aspired for […]

Lynda Lyon Block (1948 - 2002)

Lynda Cheryle Lyon was born February 8, 1948, in Orlando, Florida, to Francis (Frank) Stephen Lyon and Berylene Elisabeth Owen. Lynda, and her sister Denyce (born 1952), lost their father when she was 10, when he died of heart failure. Lynda and her mother were never close, and Block claimed that her mother was both […]

Wanda Jean Allen (1959 - 2001)

Wanda Jean Allen was born in 1959, the second of eight children. Her mother was an alcoholic; her father left home after Wanda’s last sibling was born and the family lived in public housing and scraped by on public assistance.  At the age of 12, Allen was hit by a truck and knocked unconscious, and […]

Christina Marie Riggs (1971 - 2000)

Christina Marie Riggs (September 2, 1971 – May 2, 2000) was a murderer executed in Arkansas by lethal injection. She was convicted of the November 4, 1997, murder of her two young children, Justin Dalton Thomas and Shelby Alexis Riggs. The children were killed in their beds at the family’s Sherwood, Arkansas home. The murder […]

Betty Lou Beets (1937 - 2000)

Born Betty Lou Dunevant to Margaret Louise Smithwick (April 20, 1917 – June 16, 1993) and James Garland Dunevant (September 15, 1912 – February 14, 2003), Beets was hearing-impaired since her childhood and claimed she was sexually abused by her father. According to her supporters, all of her marriages were also plagued with sexual abuse […]

Gene Barry (1919 - 2009)

Gene Barry Born Eugene Klass to parents of Russian-Jewish ancestry, he acted in drama productions and studied music while attending New Utrecht High School. He made his Broadway debut in the 1942 musical “The New Moon”, and appeared in several more stage productions throughout the decade which include “Rosalinda” (1942 to 1944), “The Merry Widow’ […]

Karla Faye Tucker (1959 - 1998)

Karla Tucker was born and raised in Houston, Texas, the youngest of three sisters. Her father Larry was a longshoreman. The marriage of her parents was very troubled, and Tucker started smoking cigarettes with her sisters when she was eight years old. At the age of 10, her parents divorced, and during the divorce proceedings, […]

Elizabeth Edwards (1949 - 2010)

Mary Elizabeth Anania, the daughter of Mary Elizabeth Thweatt Anania (March 11, 1923 – January 25, 2012) and Vincent Anania (April 22, 1920 – March 1, 2008), grew up in a military family, moving many times and never having a hometown. Her father, a United States Navy pilot, was transferred from military base to military […]