The 2013 Off Topic Celebrity Dead Pool

[-Jrabbit]

Oh my! I've actually met her...
RIP, MIndy.

[-Jrabbit]

Beatles collaborator Tony Sheridan, 72, has also died.

Tony Sheridan, the singer and guitarist who collaborated with the Beatles during the band's early days in Hamburg, died on Saturday at the age of 72, the UK's Telegraph reports.

Sheridan met John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Pete Best in Hamburg's red-light district in the early 1960s when the young group came to see his act every night after their own shows at a neighboring club. Sheridan took the band under his wing, advising them on their look (which at the time included black leather bomber jackets and cowboy boots) and introducing them to American R&B acts like Little Richard. The Beatles eventually served as Sheridan's backing band at the Top Ten Club and cut their earliest recordings accompanying him as the Beat Boys on recordings of "My Bonnie" and "When the Saints Go Marching In." (The album they recorded was later released outside Germany as Tony Sheridan and The Beatles.)

Sheridan, who is credited with being the first British musician to play the electric guitar on television, went on to tour with Chubby Checker, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry. In 1964, he released a solo album called Just a Little Bit of Tony Sheridan, which incorporated more blues and jazz influences. Sheridan returned to Hamburg in 1978 to headline the reopening of the city's famous Star Club, bringing Elvis Presley's TCB Band to accompany him. In 2002, he released his final solo album, Vagabond.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/ne...#ixzz2LE5bRRrG

RIP...

[Wezil]

Country Music Singer Mindy McCready has died today of apparent suicide.

Country music will do that to you. Too damn depressing.

[embalmer42]

One could say the same thing of some of Lou Reed's output.....


RIP Mindy

[-Jrabbit]

LA Lakers owner Jerry Buss has died at age 80...

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/nba--from-bread-line-to-lakers-owner--jerry-buss-left-a-lasting-impact-on-the-nba-161337054.html

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Richard Briers has died. Just a few days ago I'd put him on my draft list for 2014, after he revealed he had emphysema. Pah.

Anyway, lovely bloke and a favourite from my childhood.

Actor Richard Briers, best known for his role in TV's The Good Life, has died at the age of 79, his agent has said.

The star, who was also an accomplished stage actor, had been battling a serious lung condition for several years.

Briers died "peacefully" at his London home on Sunday, his agent added.

Briers recently blamed years of smoking for his emphysema.

"It's totally my fault," he said. "So, I get very breathless, which is a pain in the backside. Trying to get upstairs... oh God, it's ridiculous. Of course, when you're bloody nearly 80 it's depressing, because you've had it anyway."

His agent, Christopher Farrar, said: "Richard was a wonderful man, a consummate professional and an absolute joy to work alongside.

"Following his recent discussion of his battle with emphysema, I know he was incredibly touched by the strength of support expressed by friends and the public.

"He has a unique and special place in the hearts of so many. He will be greatly missed. Our thoughts and deepest sympathy go to his family at this sad time."

In 1970s BBC sitcom The Good Life, Briers and Felicity Kendal played a married suburban couple who try a self-sufficient lifestyle.

Briers also starred in shows including Marriage Lines, Ever Decreasing Circles, Monarch Of The Glen plus a role in Doctor Who and Torchwood.

He appeared in many films, most recently in British comedy film Cockneys versus Zombies, plus a cameo role in Run For Your Wife, based on Ray Cooney's 1980s stage farce.

Briers narrated the 1970s children's cartoon series Roobarb And Custard and also provided the voice for the character of Fiver in the animated feature Watership Down (1978).

"The nation has lost one of its most favourite actors of all time," said Michael Grade, who ran BBC One when Ever Decreasing Circles was on the air.

"He was up there with Ronnie Barker and Alan Bennett. He was just a treasure. He was so warm and so gently funny, and such a truthful actor."

Speaking to 5 live, Lord Grade added: "If you treated him like a star, I think he got embarrassed. He was one of those wonderful, genuine, professional actors with real star quality but humility to go along with it.

"There was nothing he couldn't do, and he always had a twinkle. You were always pleased to see him. It's just a shock and really, really sad."

"He is a centre-piece of our humorous culture and a magnificently talented man. I'm so deeply sad today that he has left us. He was a great person."

Actress Penelope Keith, who played the snobbish neighbour Margo to Briers' character Tom in The Good Life, said the actor's death was "an enormous loss".

"I look back with enormous affection and love for Dickie. He was the most talented of actors, always self-deprecating. I learnt an awful lot from him during our time on The Good Life," said Keith.

"He was a wonderful mentor, tutor and teacher although that would suggest he imposed himself on you, which he didn't.

"He was always courteous and he would speak to the crew - which was not always that common. And he was always nervous. It was the most enjoyable time - when I think of The Good Life, I smile."


Briers's godson, the actor and director Samuel West, whose mother Prunella Scales was in Marriage Lines, tweeted: "What a lot of joy he spread."

Scales described Briers as "very skilful, very professional, and off screen a dear friend and a very considerate colleague".

Comedian and writer Barry Cryer told 5 live Briers had been an "enormously popular, well-liked man", adding he was a "formidable actor and the most modest, you know, arrogant in his humility!".

After a long career in popular television, Briers joined Kenneth Branagh's Renaissance Theatre Company in 1987, and his career moved on to major classical roles.

He said at the time: "Ken offered me Malvolio in his production of Twelfth Night at the very time I had decided to expand my career when I realised I had gone as far as I could doing sitcoms. As soon as I worked with him, I thought he was truly exceptional."

After playing Malvolio, Briers took on the acting challenge of King Lear, followed by the title role in Uncle Vanya and Menenius in Coriolanus.

Peter Egan, his co-star in Ever Decreasing Circles, told the BBC: "I spent nearly 10 years just laughing. He was just the most magical comedian, a huge talent, has been a part of the nation's lives for over 50 years.

On film Branagh cast him as Bardolph in Henry V (1989), as Stephen Fry's father in the comedy Peter's Friends (1992), Don Leonato in Much Ado About Nothing (1993), the blind grandfather - playing opposite Robert De Niro's Creature - in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994).

Sir Kenneth said on Monday: "He was a national treasure, a great actor and a wonderful man. He was greatly loved and he will be deeply missed."

Stephen Fry tweeted: "How sad. He was the most adorable and funny man imaginable."

Briers was born in London on 14 January, 1934 and was inspired to be an actor by his mother, a music and drama teacher.

He trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and won a scholarship to Liverpool Playhouse in 1956. Two years later he made his first West End appearance in Gilt And Gingerbread.

His big screen career began with the British features Bottoms Up (1960), Murder She Said (1961), The Girl On The Boat and A Matter of Who (both 1962) and the multi-national The VIPs (1963), followed by Raquel Welch's spy spoof Fathom (1967).

'Really sad'
Other film credits included Michael Winner's A Chorus Of Disapproval (1989) and the big-screen version of the hit TV series Minder.

Briers returned to the stage many times in his career, and was particularly associated with the works of Alan Ayckbourn, including Relatively Speaking, Absurd Person Singular and Absent Friends.

He was formerly president of Parkinson's UK and later its honorary vice president.

"We're really sad to hear that Richard Briers has passed away. Richard was our honorary vice president and a great supporter of Parkinson's UK," the charity tweeted on Monday.

Briers was awarded the OBE in 1989 and a CBE in 2003. He married the actress Anne Davies in 1956 and had two daughters with her.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-21498077

[Uncle Sparky]

Richard Briers was an exceptional comic actor. RIP

[molly bloom]

Richard Briers was an exceptional comic actor. RIP

I've always found 'The Good Life' extremely entertaining- he had great timing and subtlety. And admirers like these:

"People don't realise how good an actor Dickie Briers really is," said John Gielgud. This was probably because of his sunny, cheerful disposition and the rat-a-tat articulacy of his delivery.

"You're a great farceur," said Coward, delivering another testimony, "because you never, ever, hang about."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2013/feb/18/richard-briers

[PLATO]

LA Lakers owner Jerry Buss has died at age 80...

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/nba--fr...161337054.html

Nice read. Thanks

[Uncle Sparky]

I've always found 'The Good Life' extremely entertaining- he had great timing and subtlety. And admirers like these:



http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-rad...richard-briers

Excellent link. Thank you.

[Bugs ****ing Bunny]

Kevin Ayers of Soft Machine has died.

Kevin Ayers, the founding member of 1960s psychedelic band Soft Machine, has died aged 68.

A pioneer of the genre, he worked with Brian Eno, Syd Barrett, John Cale, Nico and Robert Wyatt during his career.

Bernard MacMahon, director of his last UK label Lo-Max Records, confirmed to the BBC News website Ayers died in his sleep at his home in Montolieu, France.

"He was the moving embodiment of that sixties ideal of creativity, freedom of speech and free love," he said.

BBC Radio 6 Music presenter Stuart Maconie paid tribute to the musician, describing him as a "legendary English musician, a stalwart of the Canterbury music scene".

MacMahon described Ayers as a "character", adding: "You wouldn't forget him if you'd met him. He was father of the underground."

He added Ayers was very critical of his musical footprint.

"I think he always made music entirely for his own pleasure and satisfaction despite the fact that he had this long career. I don't think he had any interest in being a pop star," he said.

"Kevin was an artist and was plagued with massive insecurities about what he was doing.

"He would write material and people would hear what he was doing and would have to practically force him into the studio."

Ayres and Soft Machine toured the USA extensively with Jimi Hendrix but he left the band in 1968 after their first album.

Fellow founding member Wyatt said the band "lost its axis" after his departure.

Ayers released his first solo album, Joy of a Toy, in 1969 for Harvest EMI. The record is said to have influenced artists including Teenage Fanclub, Candie Payne and Euros Child.

He released 16 albums and headlined the Free Hyde Park Concert of 1974.

The late BBC DJ John Peel wrote in his autobiography that Ayers's talent was "so acute you could perform major eye surgery with it".

Ayers's father, BBC producer Rowan Ayers, created the BBC Two music programme The Old Grey Whistle Test, which gave a host of underground acts TV exposure while it aired between 1971 - 1987.

The musician is survived by two daughters and his sister Kate.

[ColdWizard]

Apparently I hit again. Damon Harris.

According to Billy Wilson of the Motown Alumni Association, former Temptations member Damon Harris (born Otis Robert Harris, Jr.) died Monday evening at the age of 62.

Wilson’s report didn’t reveal the cause of death, but Harris had been suffering from prostate cancer.

Harris was born on July 17, 1950 in Baltimore, Maryland. He took the place of Eddie Kendricks, one of the original lead singers of the Temptations group. He was only Twenty years old when he joined the group, and was the youngest member of The Temptations during his time with the group.

Wilson says Harris was such an effective replacement for Kendricks, that most people did not know it was Harris’ voice on the Grammy award-winning hits “Cloud Nine,” “Psychedelic Shack,” and other 70s Temptations hits. His tenure was from 1971 to 1975.

After leaving the legendary organization, Harris formed a Temptations tribute band named The Young Tempts (aka The Young Vandals).The group had a release that charted on the Isley Brothers label T-Neck. He also had a few minor regional hits in a group called Impact. Harris also put out an album titled “Damon Harris: Silk” in the 70s under Fantasy records; he re-released the album under his own accord in 1995.

The singer was diagnosed for cancer while making a comeback into the music industry.

[molly bloom]

Ayers and graces:

Kevin Ayers's debut solo album, Joy of a Toy, released in 1969, concluded with a song called All This Crazy Gift of Time. "All my blond and twilight dreams," sang Ayers in his signature, slightly wayward baritone, "all those strangled future schemes, all those glasses drained of wine ..."

In retrospect, it sounds like a statement of intent, though intent is perhaps too strong a word to apply to Ayers, whose singular songwriting talent was matched by a sometimes startling lack of ambition. "I lost it years ago; a long, long time ago," he told one interviewer in 2007, referring to his lack of ego and self-belief. "But, in a way, I don't think I've ever had it."

Ayers, who has been found dead at the age of 68 at his home in the medieval village of Montolieu in south-west France, was one of the great almost-stars of British rock. A founding member of Soft Machine, he was a key figure in the birth of British pastoral psychedelia, and then went on to enjoy cult status as a singer-songwriter in the late 1960s and early 70s. Among his champions were the late John Peel and the influential British rock journalist Nick Kent, who later wrote: "Kevin Ayers and Syd Barrett were the two most important people in British pop music. Everything that came after came from them."

Ayers was born in Herne Bay, Kent, the son of the journalist, poet and BBC producer Rowan Ayers, who later originated the BBC2 rock music programme The Old Grey Whistle Test. After his parents divorced and his mother married a civil servant, Ayers spent most of his childhood in Malaysia, where, he would later admit, he discovered a fondness for the slow and easy life.

At 12, he returned to Britain and settled in Canterbury. There, he became a fledgling musician and founder of the "Canterbury sound", an often whimsical English take on American psychedelia that merged jazz, folk, pop and nascent progressive rock.

Ayers's first band was the Wilde Flowers, whose line-up included various future members of Caravan as well as Robert Wyatt and Hugh Hopper, with whom he would go on to form Soft Machine in 1966. Alongside Pink Floyd, Soft Machine played regularly at the UFO club in London, becoming one of the key underground groups of the time.

In 1968, the group toured the US in support of the Jimi Hendrix Experience, a brush with rock stardom and relentless gigging that left the laid-back Ayers weary and disillusioned. He sold his Fender bass guitar to Hendrix's sideman Noel Redding, and fled to Ibiza with fellow Soft Machine maverick Daevid Allen. There he wrote the songs that would make up Joy of a Toy. It set the tone for much of what was to follow: Ayers's sonorous voice enunciating songs that ran the gamut from wilfully weird to oddly catchy, the whole not quite transcending the sum of the many varied and musically adventurous parts.

Ayers recorded four critically well-received albums for the British progressive rock label Harvest, the third of which, Whatevershebringswesing (1972), featured musical contributions from Robert Wyatt and Mike Oldfield and the orchestral arrangements of David Bedford. It included the dramatically melancholy Song from the Bottom of a Well and the catchy, more-roll-than-rock swagger of Stranger in Blue Suede Shoes, which became, if not quite a hit, a signature song of sorts in his subsequent live shows.

In his 2008 memoir, Changeling, Oldfield recalled the anarchic atmosphere of the recording sessions at Abbey Road studio, where, on a day that no other musician bothered to turn up, he more or less cut the backing track for Champagne Cowboy Blues single-handedly. "Eventually, Kevin rolled in. I said, 'I've done it, I've done a track!' He was a bit put out, I think, that I had taken over his studio time ... He did keep it as a backing track: he put some different words to it and it was put on the album."

Ayers signed to Chris Blackwell's Island label. The resulting album, The Confessions of Dr Dream and Other Stories (1974), was more focused by his standards, and marked the beginning of a creative partnership with guitarist Ollie Halsall. The following year, Ayers's appearance at the Rainbow Theatre in London alongside John Cale, Brian Eno and Nico was recorded for a subsequent live album entitled June 1, 1974.

In the late 1970s, as punk took hold in Britain, Ayers seemed to disappear from view, dogged by addiction and what often seemed like a general lack of interest in his own career. He made the lacklustre Diamond Jack and the Queen of Pain (1983) with a group of musicians he befriended in Spain, and the well-received Falling Up (1988) in Madrid.

For a while, he lived a reclusive life in the south of France, before being tempted back to the studio for an album, The Unfairground (2007), featuring contributions from a new generation of musician-fans that included members of Teenage Fanclub, Neutral Milk Hotel and Gorky's Zygotic Mynci.

"I think you have to have a bit missing upstairs," he once said, "or just be hungry for fame and money, to play the industry game. I'm not very good at it." That, of course, was part of his charm. He was a true bohemian and a fitfully brilliant musical drifter. After his death, a piece of paper was found by his bedside. On it was written a note, or perhaps an idea for a song: "You can't shine if you don't burn." He did both in his inimitable – and never less than charming – way.

He is survived by three daughters, Rachel, Galen and Annaliese, and his sister, Kate.

• Kevin Ayers, singer-songwriter and guitarist, born 16 August 1944; found dead 20 February 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2013/feb/20/kevin-ayers

May I ?

[molly bloom]

Elspet Gray, British actor and campaigner on mental health issues:

The acting career of Elspet Gray, who has died aged 83, was obscured but not extinguished by being so closely bound up with her marriage to the farceur Brian Rix. In 1951, Gray gave birth to a daughter, Shelley, who had Down's syndrome. In later life she was active alongside her actor-manager husband after he left the stage in 1977 to work for people with learning disabilities – initially through presenting a BBC television series, and then as secretary general of Mencap. However, she made periodic returns to the stage and maintained a screen presence: in 1979, for instance, she was a paediatrician guest in Fawlty Towers, and in 1994 the first bride's mother in Four Weddings and a Funeral.

As well as bringing up her subsequent three children, she visited Shelley every week in the residential home that she went to after the family had done their best to "muddle through" for five years. Both Gray and Rix had feelings of guilt about sending their child away, though they reckoned that she would get better attention in the residential home, and that it would be unkind to expose her to the attention she would have received had she been with her famous parents.

Rix, the leading exponent of farce in British theatre, television and cinema of the period, became an energetic campaigner and fundraiser, and Gray a powerful advocate for their cause. The current chief executive of Mencap, Mark Goldring, said that the eventual Lord and Lady Rix "made a formidable team in their determination to change the lives of people with learning disabilities".

The couple returned to the stage in a revival of the popular farce Dry Rot in 1988, and five years later in a presentation called Tour de Farce, describing the trials and tribulations of travelling players at various stages of history. Some of the material in Tour de Farce might have been regarded as on the bawdy side for the dignified and beautiful Gray, including the anecdote about a notice in one theatre warning the chorus girls that squatting on the wash basins to relieve themselves might cause a nasty accident: "Ladies have been badly lacerated."

But Gray and her husband had always been an unconventional couple. Rix, who came from a wealthy family, was running his own theatre company when, aged 25, he auditioned her. He recalled later that it had been a miserably cold and damp day and that he had a hangover, but he had been besotted immediately as she walked in and illuminated the scene. Years later he still remembered exactly what she had been wearing – a green, tweedish costume enhancing her red hair. He gave her a job in the Bridlington repertory company where he himself was working, and asked her to marry him. As she was only 19, she declined.

She did, however, live with him – a fairly bold course even for thespians at that time. It was while they were together in the bath that he proposed for the umpteenth time, and on that occasion she accepted. Rix toured his production of John Chapman's Reluctant Heroes and took it to the Whitehall theatre – it was the first of the many farces there, which made his reputation, and ran from 1950 to 1954. Gray was in the same production, and a film version followed. They settled in the capital and started their family.

Gray was born in Inverness, Scotland, and went to school at St Margaret's, Hastings, and the Presentation Convent, Srinagar, in the Kashmir Valley, before doing her theatrical training at Rada. Her first professional appearance came in 1947, in the play Edward, My Son, at the Grand theatre, Leeds, which transferred to His Majesty's theatre in the West End the following month, so providing her London debut.

Her next stage role after Reluctant Heroes came in another farce, Wolf's Clothing (1959), at Wyndham's, and at the Garrick in 1967 she took part in her husband's farce season, appearing in Uproar in the House and Let Sleeping Wives Lie.

Four years later she was in a tour of four plays by the farceur Vernon Sylvaine, and in 1973 went to the O'Keefe theatre in Toronto, in a production of Move Over Mrs Markham. In 1980 she appeared at Joan Littlewood's Theatre Royal Stratford East in the melodrama The Streets of London, and in 1983 was in Charley's Aunt with Griff Rhys Jones at the Lyric, Hammersmith.

Gray made her first film in 1949, and later featured in Goodbye, Mr Chips (1969). Her many television roles included Lady Collingwood in Catweazle (1971), Chancellor Thalia in the Doctor Who story The Arc of Infinity (1973), and Phyllis Bristow in eight episodes of the second world war drama Tenko (1984).

In The Black Adder (1982), the first series in which Rowan Atkinson set about subverting British history, he played the mythical Edmund, Duke of Edinburgh, and Gray his mother, Queen Gertrude of Flanders, the consort of Brian Blessed as Richard IV. Her final TV appearance came in an episode of Victoria Wood's sitcom Dinnerladies (1998).

Shelley died in 2005. Gray is survived by her husband, two sons and a daughter.

• Elspet Gray (Elspeth Jean MacGregor-Gray), actor, born 12 April 1929; died 18 February 2013

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/feb/19/elspet-gray

[-Jrabbit]

Bluesman Morris Holt, a.k.a. Magic Slim, has died at the age of 75. He was part of the Mississippi-to-Chicago blues migration of the 50s, one of the last of his brethren.



RIP, Slim.

http://journalstar.com/entertainment/music/magic-slim-holt-lincoln-bluesman-dies-at/article_22ee1a0f-69a4-558c-9b7c-48048cfce142.html