The 2013 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Death of a football legend. If you can see the video footage, marvel at a goalkeeper playing on with a broken neck.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/23375452

Bert Trautmann, the German goalkeeper who won the FA Cup with Manchester City in 1956, has died at the age of 89.
Trautmann is best remembered for playing the final 17 minutes of City's Cup final win against Birmingham City with a broken neck.
He played more than 500 times for City between 1949-64, having first arrived in England as a prisoner of war.


Trautmann, who had survived two heart attacks this year, passed away near Valencia in Spain on Friday.
Bob Wilson, the former Arsenal goalkeeper and BBC Sport presenter, paid tribute to Trautmann in an interview with Radio 5 live
"I just adored what he did," said Wilson, 71. "I don't think I could have chosen a greater hero."
Wilson said Trautmann's bravery - "diving headlong at people's feet" - won him over, as did his "thorough decency" and "humanity".
Francis Lee, the former Manchester City player who later became the club's chairman, said: "He was one of the all-time great keepers.
"I knew Bert wasn't keeping well for the last six months but it has still come as a shock that he has passed on.
"I made my debut as a 16-year-old for Bolton against City with Bert in goal and I scored a header after a quarter of an hour. It convinced him, he later told me, that it was time to pack up."
Born in Bremen in 1923, Trautmann fought as a paratrooper in World War II before being captured on the Russian front.
Trautmann escaped captivity and returned to serve in France, but, after escaping from the French resistance, he was captured for a final time by the British Army and interned near Ashton-in-Makerfield, Lancashire.
Bert Trautmann (centre) after the 1956 FA Cup final
Trautmann is helped from the field after the 1956 FA Cup final, unaware he has broken his neck
Remaining in England following the the war in 1945, Trautmann began his English football career with non-league St Helens Town.
He signed for Manchester City in October 1949, but, with memories of the war still fresh, initially faced hostility from some supporters.
However, his bravery in the 1956 FA Cup final saw Trautmann become a hero to many fans after he broke several vertebrae in his neck when he collided with Birmingham's Peter Murphy with City leading 3-1.
The German was unaware how serious the injury was and played the rest of the match, only learning he had broken his neck three days later.
"I don't think he knew he'd broken his neck, not until they had the scans and X-rays," Lee added. "There was no way he was coming off because there were no subs in those days. He was as brave as a lion.
"He was on the Western Front as well the Eastern Front, so he saw a bit of action and a broken neck was not going to put him off."
Trautmann made a full recovery and, following his retirement in 1964, went on to manage Stockport County.
He also helped the German Football Association promote football development in Africa and Asia.
In 2004, he was awarded the OBE for his work with the Trautmann Foundation, which promoted sportsmanship and exchange programmes between young and amateur players in Germany and the UK.

[Wezil]

A Unique Pick for Hauldren Collider scores:

(CNN) -- Longtime White House journalist Helen Thomas has died at age 92 after a long illness, sources told CNN Saturday.

Thomas covered 10 presidents over nearly half a century, and became a legend in the industry.

She was a fixture at White House news conferences -- sitting front and center late in her career -- where she frequently exasperated government spokesmen with her pointed questions.

Thomas began covering the White House for United Press International when John F. Kennedy became president in 1961 and was a fixture there until her retirement in 2010.

She was a trailblazer and the considered the dean of the White House press corps because she was the longest-serving White House journalist.

Her career, however, came to an end under a cloud of controversy.

Thomas, then working for the media conglomerate Hearst as a syndicated columnist, was blasted for comments she made regarding Jewish people.

In 2010, a YouTube video surfaced showing her saying that Israel should "get the hell out of Palestine," and that the Jewish people should go home to "Poland, Germany ... and America and everywhere else."

Thomas apologized for her remarks, writing, "They do not reflect my heartfelt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance. May that day come soon."

She announced her retirement one week later.

[Wezil]

points for HC = (171 - 9) + (100 - 92) + 25

= 195 points.

[-Jrabbit]

RIP, Helen Thomas, a great journalist who gave a damn.

[molly bloom]

Britsh character actor Paul Bhattacharjee :

Paul Bhattacharjee, who has been found dead aged 53, was one of the country's leading British Asian actors, a key member of Jatinder Verma's Tara Arts, a regular at the Royal Shakespeare Company – he was last seen in the West End last year, playing Benedick opposite Meera Syal in the RSC's Much Ado About Nothing – and a popular television and film actor whose roles included Inzamam in the BBC soap EastEnders, an immigration officer called Mohammed in Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things (2002) and parts in the Bond movie Casino Royale (2006) and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011).

He was tall, slim and naturally funny, always meticulous in his movement and perfect in his articulation. He reminded me of an elegant bird – a heron, perhaps, or a flamingo. His eyes twinkled as much as they burned. He slowed things down, rather than speeded them up, but his slowness and deliberation were always an exemplary demonstration of good timing and manners as a performer.

In the mid-1970s, he was the go-to actor for Asian parts in new plays in the Royal Court's Theatre Upstairs, and it was always a guarantee of an element of class and distinction in the show that night if his name was on the bill. Bhattacharjee was last seen on 10 July leaving a rehearsal for a new play in the same building in Sloane Square, London, part of the new artistic director Vicky Featherstone's Open Court weekly rep season in which he had already played the president of Georgia. His body was found two days later in East Sussex

He was the only son of Gautam Bhattacharjee, a software researcher who was a member of the Communist party in India and was forced to leave the country after his part in the naval mutiny of 1942. In Britain, Gautam met Anne, who was herself from a migrant family of Russian Jews, and their son, Paul, was educated at state schools in Harrow, Middlesex.

In his teens, Paul was involved in anti-racist campaigns in London and met Verma, who became his great friend and mentor, in workshops they both attended in Southall. Verma recognised from the start a fellow spirit whose highly developed social conscience was linked to a remarkable artistic imagination. Tara Arts, Britain's first Asian theatre company, was formed by Verma in 1977 and Bhattacharjee was an actor and director with them over the next 10 years, notably in Yes, Memsahib (1979), which documented the formation of modern east Africa by colonial Indian "coolie" labour; Diwali (1980), which he directed, an epic story set against the annual festival of lights; Meet Me (1983), which highlighted mental illness in the Asian community; and The Little Clay Cart (1984), a delightful adaptation by Verma of an eighth-century classic as a fable on poverty and revolution.

One of his most crucial roles was that of Gandhi in a play Verma wrote, and Anthony Clark directed, for the Edinburgh festival fringe in 1982. Gandhi emerged in this play as the first modern Asian, Verma said, in the way we understand such a definition. The impression this experience made on Bhattacharjee never left him and informed his entire subsequent career.

He showed up tellingly in Murmuring Judges, the second of David Hare's "state of the nation" trilogy, at the National Theatre in 1991, but gravitated more naturally towards the RSC, where he played leading roles in John Marston's The Malcontent, the disputed Shakespearean history Edward III and Philip Massinger's The Roman Actor in the Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon, season of 2002 which Thelma Holt and Bill Kenwright later presented in the West End.

In the next two years he gave major leading performances as the dyspeptic, limping paterfamilias in a brilliant 2003 Young Vic revival of Harold Brighouse's Hobson's Choice, relocated to modern day Salford by Tanika Gupta and director Richard Jones, and as a very funny Malvolio in a 2004 West End Twelfth Night set in Kerala in southern India.

But perhaps his most unusual and remarkable performance was in Complicite's ensemble production, directed by Simon McBurney, of A Disappearing Number (2007), in which the mystery of maths at the highest level turned out to be a thing of real beauty. The hinge of the dramatic dissertation was the friendship, around the time of the first world war, between the Cambridge mathematician GH Hardy, who believed that mathematicians were only makers of patterns, like poets and painters, and the Brahmin vegetarian autodidact Srinivasa Ramanujan. The air of magical contrivance was sustained by encasing this friendship in the expositions of a narrator physicist – played by Bhattacharjee – and a Hardy disciple many years later.

Having toured with this highly acclaimed production to festivals in Vienna and Amsterdam, in 2008 he plunged into two years of EastEnders, before returning to the RSC in Dominic Cooke's Arabian Nights (2009) and the Much Ado with Syal which, in its modern Mumbai setting and gorgeous colouring, was an update, perhaps, on the famous 1976 RSC production (Judi Dench and Donald Sinden) set in the last days of the Indian Raj.

In the past decade he had appeared regularly, also, at the Tricycle theatre in Kilburn in Nicolas Kent's series of verbatim documentary dramas, notably as Moazzam Begg, one of the detainees of the US military in Guantanamo (2004), and in The Great Game: Afghanistan (2009) cycle of short plays and the two-part meditation on the nuclear threat, The Bomb (2012).

He came full circle to the Royal Court, even before the current season, with their first "off-piste" season in Peckham in late 2011, playing a surly, hangdog shopkeeper on a Battersea housing estate in Rachel De-lahay's lively debut play, The Westbridge. He was a break-through actor par excellence, associated with many innovations and adventures in our theatre, and fondly remembered for his television appearances, not only in EastEnders, but in many other shows including Spooks (2004-08) and The Bill (1992-2004).

He was divorced and is survived by his mother and his son, Rahul.

• Gautam Paul Bhattacharjee, actor, born 4 May 1960; found dead 12 July 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/jul/18/paul-bhattacharjee

[Wezil]

"found dead 12 July 2013"

It's been 8 days. Any cause of death mentioned Molly?

[Hauldren Collider]

A Unique Pick for Hauldren Collider scores:

Good riddance

RIP, Helen Thomas, a great journalist who gave a damn.

No.

[regexcellent]

**** Helen Thomas, she was an awful anti-semite and all around terrible person.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Comic actor and writer Mel Smith has died of a heart attack, aged 60, his agent has confirmed.

The British comedian - known for the sketch shows Alas Smith and Jones and Not The Nine O'Clock News - died at his home on Friday, Michael Foster said.

Smith formed a lasting partnership with co-performer Griff Rhys Jones with whom he set up the independent television company, Talkback Productions.

Rhys Jones described his friend of 35 years as a "brilliant actor".

In a statement on behalf of his wife, Pam, Mr Foster said: "Mel Smith, comedian and writer, died on Friday aged 60, from a heart attack at his home in north-west London."

An ambulance was called to Smith's home just after 09:00 BST where he was found to have died.

'A gentleman and a scholar'
Meanwhile, friends and colleagues have paid tribute to him.

"I still can't believe this has happened," said Rhys Jones.

"To everybody who ever met him, Mel was a force for life. He had a relish for it that seemed utterly inexhaustible."

He said the pair had never had an argument and "loved performing together", adding: "He inspired love and utter loyalty and he gave it in return. I will look back on the days working with him as some of the funniest times that I have ever spent."

He went on to describe Smith as a "gentleman and a scholar, a gambler and a wit".

The pair met, along with Rowan Atkinson and Pamela Stephenson, working on Not the Nine O'Clock News, which ran from 1979 to 1982.

The programme's creator, John Lloyd, told the BBC his friend had been ill for some time.

He said: "Mel did an extraordinary thing - he taught us all how to make comedy natural. He was a brilliant theatre director... Not only was he a great actor, he was a wonderful editor."

Smith and Rhys Jones together created Talkback Productions, which made a number of much-loved comedies - among them Da Ali G Show, I'm Alan Partridge and Never Mind the Buzzcocks.

"What that did is produce a gigantic raft of new material," Mr Lloyd said. "That, I think, is a contribution that will never go away."

They sold the company for £62m in 2000.

Experimental psychology
Their business partner and agent at Talkback, ITV director of television Peter Fincham, said Smith had "extraordinary natural talent".

"Life was always exciting around Mel," he said. "Being funny came naturally to him, so much so that he never seemed to give it a second thought.

"Mel and Griff were one of the great comedy acts and it's hard to imagine that one of them is no longer with us."

Atkinson, who starred in Bean - The Ultimate Disaster Movie, directed by Smith in 1997, paid tribute to a "lovely man of whom I saw too little in his later years".

"He had a wonderfully generous and sympathetic presence both on and off screen," he said.

Other friends and colleagues took to Twitter to send their condolences, with comedian and broadcaster Stephen Fry writing: "Terrible news about my old friend Mel Smith, dead today from a heart attack. Mel lived a full life, but was kind, funny and wonderful to know."

The son of a bookmaker from Chiswick, west London, Smith was already directing plays with friends at the age of six.

He went on to read experimental psychology at New College, Oxford, where he was involved with the dramatic society.

[-Jrabbit]

HC and regex, keepin' it classy.

[Krill]

"found dead 12 July 2013"

It's been 8 days. Any cause of death mentioned Molly?

Suicide IIRC, but not official yet: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/pe...e-8721136.html

[Wezil]

HC and regex, keepin' it classy.

Meh.

I was glad to see Osama go.

Kissinger's death will bring me some amount of pleasure.

If you truly think someone is a bad person then the earth gets lighter when they die.

[Wezil]

(CNN) -- Dennis Farina, the dapper, mustachioed cop-turned-actor best known for his tough-as-nails work in such series as "Law & Order," "Crime Story," "Miami Vice" and the film "Goodfellas," has died. He was 69.

"We are deeply saddened by the loss of a great actor and a wonderful man," said his publicist, Lori De Waal, in a statement. "Dennis Farina was always warm-hearted and professional, with a great sense of humor and passion for his profession. He will be greatly missed by his family, friends, and colleagues."

Farina, who had a long career as a policeman in his hometown of Chicago, got into acting through director Michael Mann, who used him as a consultant and cast him in his movie "Thief." That role led to others in such Mann-created shows as "Miami Vice" (in which Farina played a mobster) and "Crime Story" (in which he starred as Lt. Mike Torrello).

Farina also had roles, generally as either cops or gangsters, in a number of movies, including "Midnight Run" (1987), "Get Shorty" (1995), "The Mod Squad" (1999) and "Snatch" (2000).

In 2004, he joined the cast of the long-running "Law & Order" after Jerry Orbach's departure, playing Det. Joe Fontana, a role he reprised on the "L&O" spinoff "Trial by Jury." Fontana was known for flashy clothes and expensive car, a distinct counterpoint to Orbach's rumpled Lenny Briscoe.

Farina was on "L&O" for two years, partnered with Jesse L. Martin's Ed Green. Martin's character became a senior detective after Farina left the show.

In recent years, Farina was one of the stars of "Luck," the ill-fated HBO series about horse racing, and had an occasional role on the Fox series "New Girl."

Throughout his career, he was loyal to his hometown.

"My personality was formed by Chicago," Farina told Cigar Aficionado in 1999. "It's very American, very straightforward. If you can't find it, or make it there, you won't make it anywhere. It's a very honest place."

I always enjoyed his work.

[-Jrabbit]

Wow, RIP. Didn't see that one coming.

Especially loved his work in "Get Shorty" and "Bottle Shock."

[Wezil]

Snatch.

"Anything to declare?"

"Yeah. Don't go to England!"