The Off Topic 2008 Celebrity Dead Pool

[Wezil]

*bump* for the home stretch

[-Jrabbit]

We should also begin trolling for participants in the 2009 Dead Pool...

[Ming]

Hell... I can just submit the same list as this year... since everybody on it is STILL ALIVE

[Winston]

Didn't anyone have architect Jørn Utzon (Sydney Opera House) on their list? He died on Saturday, aged 90.

[-Jrabbit]

That list will look better and better with each passing year, Ming...

[Straybow]

That's a better looking Santa Bugs than the other

[Wezil]

Sunny von Bulow is done napping.

NEW YORK - Heiress Martha (Sunny) von Bulow has died after almost three decades in a coma that prosecutors tried to blame on her husband.

Spokeswoman Maureen Connelly says the 76-year-old von Bulow died Saturday at a nursing home in New York City.

Von Bulow spent the past 28 years in a coma after what prosecutors alleged was two murder attempts by her husband, Claus.

He was ultimately acquitted of charges he tried to kill her by injecting her with insulin at their estate in Newport, R.I.

His trials were among the most sensational of the 1980s.

http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2008/12/06/7656146-ap.html

[-Jrabbit]

Yeah, the other one went through a really unfortunate Photoshop session a few years back.

[Tuberski]

Paul Benedict, the actor who played the eccentric English neighbor Harry Bentley on the sitcom "The Jeffersons," was found dead Monday at his home on Martha's Vineyard, Mass. He was 70.

Authorities were investigating the cause of death, said his brother, Charles.

Benedict's oversized jaw and angular features were partly attributed to acromegaly, a pituitary disorder that was first diagnosed by an endocrinologist who saw Benedict in a theatrical production.

He underwent medical treatment to prevent the disease from spreading while he continued to act -- and used his facial features for comic effect.

As an actor, Benedict built a career portraying loony characters in films such as "The Goodbye Girl" (1977), "The Man with Two Brains" (1983) and "The Addams Family" (1991). He also appeared in the Christopher Guest comedies "This Is Spinal Tap" (1984), "Waiting for Guffman" (1997) and "A Mighty Wind" (2003). On the PBS children's show "Sesame Street," Benedict was the Mad Painter who painted numbers everywhere.

But he was mainly known for his role as Bentley on "The Jeffersons," which ran on CBS from 1975 to 1985. He left in 1981 to pursue other projects but returned in 1983. Benedict later said he hadn't expected the show to last more than a season and only agreed to the part because producer Norman Lear kept asking him to reconsider.

The accented speech that he used even offstage led many to assume that Benedict was British, but in fact he was born Sept. 17, 1938, in Silver City, N.M. He was the youngest of six children; his father a doctor, his mother a journalist.

"When I was 5 years old, from the first time I went to the movies, I knew I wanted to be an actor," Benedict told The Times in 1992.

After growing up in Boston, Benedict attended the city's Suffolk University and began his acting career in the 1960s in the Theatre Company of Boston, performing alongside such future stars as Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman and Al Pacino.

On Broadway, he appeared opposite Pacino in Eugene O'Neill's two-character play "Hughie" in 1996 and played the mayor in a 2000 revival of "The Music Man."

As a stage director, he was known for taking a work in progress or a new play and laboring with a playwright to infuse it with "intelligence, sympathy and warmth -- and of course, humor," The Times reported in 1992.

His breakthrough show as a director was "Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune" in 1987, closely followed by "The Kathy & Mo Show: Parallel Lives" in 1989, both two-person sleepers that became off-Broadway hits.

ACK!

[SlowwHand]

RIP. I liked him that show.

[-Jrabbit]

Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Saturday, December 6, 2008 -- 12:55 PM ET
-----

Sunny von Bulow, Heiress at Center of Attempted Murder Trials, Dies

Martha (Sunny) von Bulow, the American heiress who was first
married to an Austrian playboy prince and then to a
Danish-born man-about-society who was twice tried on charges
of attempting to murder her, died on Saturday after being in
a coma for decades, a family spokeswoman said.

[Tuberski]

Breaking News Alert 2:

Wezil beat you by 6 hours.

ACK!

[-Jrabbit]

Oops. Caught in a crosspost.

[Guynemer]

Originally posted by Ming
Hell... I can just submit the same list as this year... since everybody on it is STILL ALIVE

Likewise. I even picked famous doctors in their ****ing NINTIES--Dr. Henry Heimlich, Dr. James Watson--and not a whiff of the Grim Reaper around them. God DAMN it.

[SlowwHand]

Famous doctors?!? Well, hell. They probably take medicine. Eat healthy. All that garbage.
You meathead!