Rolling Obituary Thread: 2021

People Under the Stairs Rapper Double K Dead at 43

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/people-under-the-stairs-rapper-double-k-dead-1121555/

Allan Burns got an Oscar nomination for writing A Little Romance (1979), Diane Lane's film debut, which is very cute though Lawrence Olivier hams it up more than necessary

*Laurence

IMDB trivia says Allan Burns also created the character of Capn Crunch!?

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0122560/bio?item=nt0045118#trivia

cool if true

Hilton Valentine, guitarist of The Animals:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgTSfJEf_jM

RIP. Already noted upthread, btw.

cant keep up!

Marc Wilmore, writer on In Living Color and The Simpsons, among others; younger brother of Larry.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/amp/news/marc-wilmore-tv-writer-and-brother-of-comedian-larry-wilmore-dies-at-57

Andrew Brooks, Rutgers professor who led research on the first FDA-approved COVID-19 saliva test: https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/31/us/andrew-brooks-obituary-covid-saliva-test/index.html

SCREECH!

https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/dustin-diamond-dead-saved-by-the-bell-screech-1234897484/

holy shit

he lived in Grafton Wisconsin for a long time. I actually saw him twice at the Family Video but never said anything. wish I had a fun story about him, indeed everything I've heard about him from other folks I know who lived in Grafton is uh...not great

that's a shame. he had such a stereotypically grim former child actor adulthood - substance abuse, bad/unsuccessful standup career, bad/unsuccessful band, he did a porno, he wrote a tell-all book that pissed off the other cast members of Saved by the Bell, he was jailed for stabbing someone in a bar fight etc.

Let he amongst ye who hath never sinned cast the first stoner

I know a few people who saw his standup at various Wisconsin campuses, he was not very good but always pretty eager to meet people and sign stuff at the end

I had no idea he was so young

Elvis Costello's mother.

Indeed, and quite a detailed remembrance

https://www.elviscostello.com/#!/news/299589

Ricky Powell

https://www.complex.com/style/photographer-ricky-powell-dead-at-59

Toooooo young

fucking sucks. RIp ricky

Hal Holbrook, died 23 January and announced today

always a fave of mine, stood next to him once crossing the street in beverly hills, he had a good run

If you want to read a mean, gossipy obituary for a woman whose career was taken down by a mean, gossipy NY Times story 20 years ago:

I wrote our obituary for Jamie Tarses, who died on Monday at 56. As the first woman to run a TV network (ABC), she encountered sexism, weaponized industry gossip and scalding news media scrutiny.https://t.co/z4tWVnkHfK

— Brooks Barnes (@brooksbarnesNYT) February 1, 2021

Captain Tom, noted (redacted) of this parish.

Lol he’s dead now, you can’t libel him

he survived dengue fever, malaria and the onslaught of the imperial japanese army - but was killed by his family!

He's past the statue of limitations

https://image.assets.pressassociation.io/v2/image/production/5c9692d933aaf55b4e99f84da23fdb27Y29udGVudHNlYXJjaCwxNTk0OTc5MTEz/2.54604035.jpg

That was a short knight

oh right, sorry.

HRH Captain Sir Tom "Rodger" Moore, assassin of JFK and MLK, butcher of Nanjing, Lockerbie bomber, chief polluter at BP, Honorary life-president of Al Qaida, founder of NAMBLA, lead-singer of Staind, defiler of the innocents, destroyer of dreams, Donald Trump's real father, garden-walker-arounder, Medal "For the Tapping of the Subsoil and Expansion of the Petrochemical Complex of Western Siberia", Eschator of Munster, Baron Chiswick, Royal Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Fidget Spinner, Extra Knight of the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Egg-cracker, Grand Master and First and Principal Knight Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the Braggadocians, Personal Aide-de-Camp to Piers Morgan, Lord High Field Marshall of the United Kingdom, blessed be his name, RIP 🙏 🙏

He outlived host + panel on that Xmas 1983 episode of Blankety Blank, apart from Ruth Madoc and Sabina Franklyn. (To be fair, Beryl Reid was older than him).

are you guys actively trying to make the bosom manor jokes start up again as part of some kind of masochistic kink

I think the Queen automatically gets his Blankety Blank chequebook and pen. I don't make the rules.

I remember really rooting for Hal Holbrook to win an Oscar for Into the Wild; alas, it wasn't meant to happen. I always liked him, solid dude.

It's hit Hoff hard

pic.twitter.com/GxvrCWqV9P

— David Hasselhoff (@DavidHasselhoff) February 2, 2021

Woah

"Now let's go to Malibu and find out what David Hasselhoff thinks of Sir Moore's passing.. to you, David."

had assumed that the blankety blank clip was not online, but here it is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4PFNtE5EpA

he looks exactly like a retired army captain in his 60s

MJ, what about the other contestant?

I'm always plugging this movie, but I think Hal Holbrook gives a great performance in Gus Van Sant's Promised Land (almost but not quite his last non-TV role).

Always liked Holbrook. I expect that most obits will highlight All the President's Men, unless I'm forgetting something major. RIP.

unless I'm forgetting something major

Whichever Dirty Harry movie he was in (the third one, maybe?). Also, more seriously, didn't he get a lot of good writeups for playing Mark Twain on stage for like 40 years?

Holbrook was in a pretty important 1972 tv movie called That Certain Summer, probably the first American film to portray homosexuality in a positive or at least sympathetic light: “I’d robbed banks and kidnapped children and raped women and murdered people, you know, in any number of shows. Now I was going to play a gay guy and that was like considered a career ender. Oh, for Christ’s sake! What kind of culture do we live in?”

Clayton Eshleman, one of the most gifted poetry translators of our times, has died. If you've ever read César Vallejo or Aimé Césaire poems in English, there's a good chance he translated them.

yeah, those Vallejo translations are great. I submitted some writing to Sulfur and Eshleman wrote me a very long and nice rejection letter in which he tried to set me up with another poet in my city (who happened to be my ex)

Mark: I'm not going any deeper than what IMDb offers :) I can tell you that TREASURE ISLAND (1950) followed on BBC1, and then Jim'll Fix It. :/

(like)

Here's Hal as the stage manager in Our Town:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEoXuXRoOdY

Also, more seriously, didn't he get a lot of good writeups for playing Mark Twain on stage for like 40 years?

Longer than that, I think. He started in the 1950s when he was young and carried on doing it into the last decade, so maybe 60 years?

69 years, actually, according to the NYT

1948-2017

Whichever Dirty Harry movie he was in (the third one, maybe?)

The second one: Magnum Force, with one of the all-time ending kills.