Walt Bellamy (1939 - 2013)

Bellamy chose to play basketball at Indiana University. “In the summer after my junior year of high school I played with some guys from Indiana,” he said. “Indiana at the time was the closest school to the South that would accept African-Americans. It was an easy transition for me to make. Not that I was […]

Paul Blair (1944 - 2013)

Blair was born in Cushing, Oklahoma but grew up in Los Angeles where he attended Manual Arts High School. An accomplished athlete, he played basketball, baseball and track while a student. Blair was originally signed by the New York Mets as an amateur free agent in 1961. After spending the 1962 season in their farm […]

Joan Fontaine (1917 - 2013)

Joan de Havilland was born in Tokyo, Japan, to English parents. Her father, Walter Augustus de Havilland (August 31, 1872 – May 23, 1968), was educated at the University of Cambridge and served as an English professor at the Imperial University in Tokyo before becoming a patent attorney with a practice in Japan. Her mother, […]

Eleanor Parker (1922 - 2013)

Eleanor Parker Born on June 26, 1922, in Cedarville, Ohio, she later moved with her family to East Cleveland, Ohio, where she attended public schools and graduated from Shaw High School. After high school, at the age of 18, she was signed by Warner Brothers in 1941. She was cast that year in the film […]

Gia Allemand (1983 - 2013)

Gia Marie Allemand was born to Eugene and Donna Allemand in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens, New York City, and grew up in the borough of Staten Island and nearby in suburban Long Island, where she graduated from Lindenhurst High School in 2001. Allemand’s parents separated in 1992, later divorcing; Donna Allemand married Tony […]

Lisa Robin Kelly (1970 - 2013)

Lisa Robin Kelly was born in Connecticut and raised there in the town of Southington. She made her debut in a 1992 episode of Married… with Children entitled “Kelly Doesn’t Live Here Anymore”. She appeared again in 1997 on episodes of Charmed and Silk Stalkings, as well as in direct-to-video and TV movies, such as […]

August Schellenberg (1936 - 2013)

According to his official website, Schellenberg was born and lived in Montreal, Quebec until moving to Toronto, Ontario in 1967. He was of Mohawk and Swiss-German descent. He established himself in Toronto until 1995. He lived in Dallas, Texas with his wife, actress Joan Karasevich. He was the father of three daughters, two with Karasevich. […]

Elmore Leonard (1925 - 2013)

Leonard was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Flora Amelia (née Rive) and Elmore John Leonard, Sr. Because his father worked as a site locator for General Motors, the family moved frequently for several years. In 1934, the family settled in Detroit.  He graduated from the University of Detroit Jesuit High School in […]

Sid Bernstein (1918 - 2013)

Sid Bernstein was born in New York City in 1918, and was adopted by a Russian Jewish family. He studied journalism at Columbia University, before working in a ballroom and joining the US Army in 1943. During World War II, he was stationed in Britain, and also served in France with the 602nd Anti-Aircraft Artillery […]

Julie Harris (1925 - 2013)

Harris was born Julia Ann Harris in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, the daughter of Elsie L. (née Smith), a nurse, and William Pickett Harris, an investment banker. She graduated from Grosse Pointe Country Day School, which later merged with two others to form the University Liggett School. In New York City she attended The Hewitt School. […]

Muriel Siebert (1928 - 2013)

Siebert began her career working at various brokerages. In 1967, she founded her own eponymous firm, Muriel Siebert & Co., Inc., beginning by doing research for institutions, and buying and selling financial analyses. That same year, she applied for a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Of the first ten men she asked to […]

David Frost (1939 - 2013)

David Frost David Paradine Frost was born in Tenterden, Kent, on 7 April 1939, the son of a Methodist minister of Huguenot descent, the Rev. Wilfred John “W. J.” Paradine Frost, and his wife, Mona (Aldrich); he had two elder sisters. While living in Gillingham, Kent, he was taught in the Bible class of the […]

Frederik Pohl (1919 - 2013)

Pohl was the son of Frederik George Pohl (a salesman of Germanic descent) and Anna Jane Mason. Pohl Sr. held various jobs, and the Pohls lived in such wide-flung locations as Texas, California, New Mexico and the Panama Canal Zone. The family settled in Brooklyn when Pohl was around seven.  He attended Brooklyn Technical High […]

Saul Landau (1936 - 2013)

A graduate of Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School, he also earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in history from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Later he worked towards, but never completed, a doctorate at Stanford University.  He donated his early papers and films to the Wisconsin Center for Film and Television Research. Landau authored 14 books, produced […]

Ray Dolby (1933 - 2013)

Dolby was born in Portland, Oregon, the son of Esther Eufemia (née Strand) and Earl Milton Dolby, an inventor. He was raised in San Francisco and attended Sequoia High School (class of 1951) in Redwood City, California. As a teenager in the decade following World War II, he held part-time and summer jobs at Ampex […]

Marcella Hazan (1924 - 2013)

Hazan was born in 1924 in the village of Cesenatico in Emilia-Romagna.  She earned a doctorate in natural sciences and biology from the University of Ferrara. In 1955 she married Victor Hazan, an Italian-born, New York-raised Sephardic Jew who subsequently gained fame as a wine writer, and the couple moved to New York City a […]

Tom Clancy (1947 - 2013)

Tom Clancy was born at Franklin Square Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, on April 12, 1947, and grew up in the Northwood neighborhood. He was the second of three children to Thomas Clancy, who worked for the United States Postal Service, and Catherine Clancy, who worked in a store’s credit department. His mother worked in order […]

Phil Chevron (1957 - 2013)

Chevron grew up in Santry, a suburb of Dublin. Beginning in the late 1970s, he was lead singer and co-founder of the punk rock group The Radiators from Space, receiving some critical acclaim but little widespread popularity or financial success. Following a temporary breakup of the band in 1981, he lived in London for a […]

Oscar Hijuelos (1951 - 2013)

Hijuelos was born in Morningside Heights, Manhattan, to Cuban immigrant parents, Pascual and Magdalena (Torrens) Hijuelos, both from Holguín, Cuba. His father worked as a hotel cook. As a young child, he suffered from acute nephritis after a vacation trip to Cuba with his mother and brother José, and was in St. Luke’s Convalescent Hospital, […]

Hans Riegel (1923 - 2013)

Johannes Peter “Hans” Riegel (10 March 1923 – 15 October 2013) was a German entrepreneur who owned and operated the confectioner Haribo since 1946.  Born in Bonn, he was the oldest son of the company’s founder Hans Riegel, Sr., who invented the gummy bear in 1922. After his graduation from the Jesuit boarding school Aloisiuskolleg, […]

Ed Lauter (1938 - 2013)

Of both German and Irish descent, Lauter was born and raised in Long Beach, New York, the son of Sally Lee, a 1920s Broadway actress and dancer, and Edward Matthew Lauter. After graduating from high school, he majored in English Literature in college and received a B.A. degree in 1961 from the C.W. Post campus […]

Tom Foley (1929 - 2013)

Foley was born in Spokane, Washington, the son of Helen Marie (née Higgins), a school teacher, and Ralph E. Foley, a Superior Court Judge. He was of Irish Catholic descent. In 1946, he graduated from the Jesuit-run Gonzaga Preparatory School in Spokane. He went on to attend Gonzaga University in Spokane and the University of […]

Bill Young (1930 - 2013)

Young was born in Harmarville, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh, in 1930. He had Irish, German, and Swiss ancestry. He grew up in a Pennsylvania coal town in a shotgun shack. His father abandoned the family and a flood washed away their home at age 6. An uncle had a hunting camp in Florida, so […]

Lou Scheimer (1928 - 2013)

Early in Filmation’s history, Scheimer also contributed a number of guest or secondary voices for the various productions. Amongst these was the voice of N’kima, Tarzan’s monkey companion in Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle (1976–81).  Scheimer played a significant role in the creation of the cartoon He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and Bravestarr. […]

Jovanka Broz (1924 - 2013)

She was born on 7 December 1924 to an ethnic Serbian farming family in Pećane, in the kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians, present day Croatia. World War II broke out when she was nearly 15-years-old. The family was forced to flee the Ustasha regime that took power in the newly created Nazi-puppet Independent State […]

Noel Harrison (1934 - 2013)

He was born in Kensington in London in 1934. His mother Collette Thomas was the first of Rex Harrison’s six wives; they divorced in 1940. Harrison lived with his mother’s parents in Bude, North Cornwall, during World War II. At fifteen his mother took him out of school at Radley to live in the Swiss […]

Sir Anthony Caro (1924 - 2013)

Caro was born in New Malden, England to a Jewish family and was the youngest of three children. When Caro was 3, his father, a stockbroker, moved the family to a farm in Churt, Surrey. Caro was educated at Charterhouse School where his housemaster introduced him to Charles Wheeler. In the holidays he studied at […]

Marcia Wallace (1942 - 2013)

Marcia Wallace Marcia Karen Wallace was born in Creston, Iowa on November 1, 1942, the eldest of three children of Arthur “Poke” Wallace and wife Joann. Her father owned and operated “Wallace Sundries”, a general merchandise store, where Marcia, her sister Sharon, and brother Jim would often help out. While in high school, a teacher […]

Charlie Trotter (1959 - 2013)

For five years after college, he worked and studied in Chicago, San Francisco (at the California Culinary Academy), Florida and Europe.  Trotter was the host of the 1999 PBS cooking show The Kitchen Sessions with Charlie Trotter, in which he details his recipes and cooking techniques. He likened cooking to an improvisational jazz session in […]

John Tavener (1944 - 2013)

Tavener was born on 28 January 1944 in Wembley, London. His parents ran a family building firm and his father was also an organist at St Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Frognal, Hampstead. At the age of 12, Tavener was taken to Glyndebourne to hear Mozart’s The Magic Flute, a work he loved for the rest […]