The 2012 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[-Jrabbit]

.

Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Tuesday, May 8, 2012 -- 8:39 AM EDT
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Maurice Sendak, Author of ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ Dies at 83

Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children’s book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83 and lived in Ridgefield, Conn.

The cause was complications from a recent stroke, said Michael di Capua, his longtime editor.

[Guynemer]

Mother****er.

[Uncle Sparky]

RIP

[Lorizael]

[ColdWizard]

Vidal Sassoon. Had him on my reserve list (22) and would have had him top 10 next year.

[molly bloom]

Can a hairdresser be a street fighting man ?

Yes:

Vidal Sassoon became world famous as a hairdresser, but to many in the UK Jewish community it was his opposition to fascism and antisemitism that was an inspiration and a source of great pride. As a teenager Vidal joined the 43 Group, an organisation set up after the war by 43 Jewish ex-servicemen to physically confront Oswald Mosley’s fascists. While modest about his role in the group, which at its peak had 1,000 members including Jewish and non-Jewish men and women, Vidal gave several interviews in later life in which he talked about his days as an anti-fascist street fighter (see for example Hope Not Hate and the Jewish Chronicle).

Vidal wrote the Foreword to Morris Beckman’s book The 43 Group, published in 1992, in which he explained how he felt as a young man, growing up in the East End of London, when he realised that fascism could not be ignored:

How could I forget Petticoat Lane, especially on Sundays? It was a maze of colourful humanity, a kaleidoscope of people wanting to buy and to be amused. Love could be bought with a kind word, and hate was for sale on every street corner. Fascism was beginning to run rampant. It was impossible to conceive that not more than a borough away, people with hate in their hearts were planning our downfall. Why? We were the stranger in their nest, a bird of a different culture, not indigenous to their mother land. This was enough to stir the angst of the unenlightened in a world where exploration of the other was a frightening experience. We were not only the stranger, we were also the Jew.

I do not know the exact day when we decided to return the hate in kind, but the horror of the images coming from Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald and seemingly so many other places triggered a sense of survival within the remaining Jewish population of Europe. Hearing of the heroics of Mordechai Anielewitz and his few thousand followers in the Warsaw ghetto nurtured our mood. They were young Jews who fought the Nazis with all the passion of Biblical Davids, who died fighting for their dignity.

‘Never Again!’ became a command not a slogan, and so the 43 Group was born.

http://hurryupharry.org/2012/05/10/the-cst-on-vidal-sassoon/

Vidal Sassoon, who has died aged 84 after suffering from leukaemia, became the most famous hairdresser of the 1960s, creating styles that caught and then boosted women's new feelings of personal freedom. In doing so, he changed the craft of hairstyling for ever.

Before Sassoon and his three-storey, glass-fronted Bond Street salon arrived, women were piling their hair up in beehives that were back-combed and lacquered into a consistency of candy floss: the fashionable stylist of the day was Raymond Bessone, "Mr Teasy-Weasy". Sassoon transformed women's hair with his geometric "wash-and-wear" cuts, so carefully shaped that a woman could shake her head and the style would fall back into place. And she needed a cut only once every six weeks, instead of the tortuous weekly visits that had been de rigueur until then.

Sassoon's client list soon included most of the young models and film stars of the day – including Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Terence Stamp and Mia Farrow, notably for her look in Rosemary's Baby (1968) – as well as most of London's fashionistas.

Although hairdressing was the trade that took Sassoon from a tenement block in the city's East End to a house in Beverly Hills and a considerable fortune, he was much more than a clever crimper. He was also a militant Zionist – though not a religious Jew – who at 17 joined the Jewish ex-servicemen of the 43 Group movement in street battles against Sir Oswald Mosley's fascists in London. In 1948 he went to Israel, worked on a kibbutz and joined the army there, fighting in the new nation's independence war.

Both experiences gave him a lifelong passion for human rights, and he later financed the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Sassoon was born in Whitechapel, but his carpet-salesman father left the family when Vidal was five. With his younger brother, Ivor, he lived in an orphanage for six years until his mother, Betty, remarried. She could not afford to keep him in school, and he left at 14 to become a shampoo boy at Cohen's Beauty and Barber shop, where he stayed for two years. The idea had been Betty's: "Her feeling was that I didn't have the intelligence to pick a trade myself."

In Israel he had wanted to attend college and become an architect, but his still-impoverished family called him home to London, and he returned to hairdressing, now with a greater sense of discipline. While learning the trade with Teasy-Weasy, he went to West End theatres and took elocution lessons to moderate his cockney accent. At the age of 26 he opened his first Bond Street salon, but it was so small that customers had to sit on the stairs while waiting. "Sassoon's", as it was soon known, prospered and became fashionable, and in 1958 he moved to bigger premises.

That year he also created the "shape", which became his signature cut – influenced by the Bauhaus designs he had studied – and in 1963 he devised the classic "bob" for fashion designer Mary Quant, who was doing for clothes what Sassoon was achieving in hairstyles.

The 1960s and swinging London, as Time magazine called it, had begun to jump. Carnaby Street, a previously nondescript thoroughfare near Liberty's department store, became the hub of fashion and a destination for visitors hoping to catch a glimpse of its pop star customers. Sassoon's salon was another element of this explosion of culture and style, but by 1964 he was already thinking bigger: he went international, opening his first salon in New York.

Within five years he had established salons in Toronto and in Beverly Hills, and his first hairdressing school, in London. In 1973, he launched his hair-care products for the trade market and by the mid-1970s had 14 salons and three schools in the US, Canada, Britain and Germany.

In the early New York days, Sassoon had battled the licensing process for hairdressers, who were forced to undergo examinations in technology, such as curling tongs, that Sassoon himself had rendered out-of-date. By 1975 he had more or less stopped cutting hair, although he appeared regularly in television advertisments for his hair-care products - boyish-looking and with a mid-Atlantic accent. His slogan, "If you don't look good, we don't look good," became a catchphrase.

His first marriage, in 1956 to Elaine Wood, his salon receptionist, ended in divorce in 1963. Four years later he married the Canadian actor Beverly Adams, and they had two sons and two daughters. Having moved to Los Angeles, the couple took up healthcare and published a bestselling book, A Year of Beauty and Health (1975). He even – briefly – had his own American television talk show, Your New Day (1980), with a characteristically upbeat emphasis on self-improvement.

In 1983 Sassoon embarked on a shortlived third marriage with Jeanette Hartford-Davis and sold his business to a company that was acquired two years later by Proctor & Gamble, but continued to promote the products bearing his name. Losing control of his firm later came to be his greatest regret.

In 1992 he married Ronnie (Rhonda) Holbrook, a designer, and they restored a classic 1960s modernist house in Beverly Hills with glass walls and a polished onyx floor. The dormant architect in Sassoon now had the time and money to indulge his fantasies. The couple and Quant looked back at his story for Craig Teper's documentary Vidal Sassoon: The Movie (2010).

Sassoon retained a great loyalty to London, where he loved to see Chelsea playing football. He claimed that "everything about morality and obligations" he knew had come from following the sport. In 2009 he was appointed CBE.

He is survived by Ronnie and three of his children. His daughter Catya, a model and actor, died in 2002.

• Vidal Sassoon, hairstylist and businessman, born 17 January 1928; died 9 May 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/fashion/2012/may/09/vidal-sassoon

[molly bloom]

Canadian actor/writer/producer Ronan O'Casey:

My father, Ronan O'Casey, known as Case to family and friends, has died aged 89. He was a distinguished actor, producer and writer who enjoyed a picaresque life and career to the full.

He was born in Montreal, Canada, to a poet father, Michael Casey, and actor mother, Margaret Sheehy, from Dublin, who had co-starred with the young James Joyce in his first stage role. Ronan began acting in his mother's company in Montreal at the age of eight and, following theatrical and vaudeville touring, moved to Dublin and then to London.

He found early success as a stylish character actor in such postwar films as The Mudlark (1950), Talk of a Million (1951) and Norman Wisdom's Trouble in Store (1953), going on to play the prisoner of Room 101 in 1984 (1956) and the sergeant in Nicholas Ray's war film Bitter Victory (1957). While starring in the West End in Detective Story he met my mother, the actor and singer Louie Ramsay, whom he married in 1956.

Case's comedy talents then brought him his best known role, as Jeff Rogers, Canadian son-in-law of Peggy Mount, in the sitcom The Larkins (1958-64). He also became host of ITV's charades gameshow Don't Say a Word (1963), before being cast as Vanessa Redgrave's lover, the "blow-up" of Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966).

He went behind the lens and as literary head of the production company Commonwealth United associate-produced Terry Southern's The Magic Christian (1969) with Ringo Starr, Peter Sellers and an Apple records soundtrack by Badfinger. Case and Louie divorced in 1979. After moving to the US in 1980 and marrying the writer Carol Tavris, he had roles in many US television shows, including LA Law, Easy Street, Falcon Crest and Dallas, and, with some irony for a lifelong atheist, became the Bishop of Santa Barbara in the soap of the same name.

In later years he wrote and staged a one-man play in Los Angeles on the poetry of William Butler Yeats, Yeats by O'Casey. Never short of a sparkling anecdote or spectacular profanity, Case became an evergreen feature of West Hollywood poker games, dog parks and farmers' markets, where he found choice ingredients for his superb cooking. He turned his acting skill to perfect use as a reader at the local Third St elementary school, where children joyously greeted him as "Mr Ronan".

He is survived by his beloved Carol, me, and his grandchildren, Jack, Conor and Ruby.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/may/09/ronan-o-casey-obituary

[SlowwHand]

Carroll Shelby as motored into the next world.

[Uncle Sparky]

Carroll Shelby as motored into the next world.

I could have sworn I had him on my list... RIP.

[-Jrabbit]

Another giant felled. RIP, Donald "Duck" Dunn, age 70.

http://wac.450f.edgecastcdn.net/80450F/ultimateclassicrock.com/files/2012/05/Donald-Duck-Dunn-Rick-Diamond.jpg

He is legend.

[Uncle Sparky]

http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/new...es-dies-at-83/
Carlos Fuentes dead at 83.

[Wezil]

'Terminator 3' actor Nick Stahl reported missing

Actor Nick Stahl, who played John Connor in "Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines," has been reported missing by his wife, who told police she has not seen him since May 9, according to news reports from Los Angeles.

Los Angeles police spokesman Richard French told the Los Angeles Times that Rose Murphy reported her husband missing on Monday morning.

Police said Stahl had been frequenting LA's skid row and officers on that beat had been told to be on the alert for Stahl, according to the LA Times report.

"We are tracking down a few leads and using internal sources with information we have to see if we can quickly locate him," said Detective Carmine S. Sasso, according to a report from PEOPLE.

Police said foul play is not suspected, according to the Times report.

"Of the 14,000 missing persons cases I've handled over the past four years, there's a very good percentage of those involving drug issues and a separation from families. The vast majority of them have been successfully solved. Hopefully this one will be too," PEOPLE quotes Sasso as saying.

Stahl, 32, began acting as a child but got his first big break in the 1993 Mel Gibson film "Man Without a Face," according to IMDB.com.

I suspect Brother Justin had something to do with it.

[-Jrabbit]

Last dance for disco queen Donna Summer, 63, passed away due to cancer.

RIP.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2145891/Queen-disco-Donna-Summer-dead-63-cancer-battle.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

[SlowwHand]

She was a pretty woman. R.I.P.

[Grandpa Troll]

She was a pretty woman. R.I.P.

QFT Brother!