This person died 2016 at age 69. He suffered a blow in a teenage brawl that caused his left pupil to be permanently dilated. He experimented with startling transformations, often playing up an androgynous image. In the 1980s he had a Broadway run in the demanding title role of “The Elephant Man”. Nirvana chose to sing one of his songs in their legendary brief set on “MTV Unplugged” in 1993. He was the Thin White Duke, Aladdin Sane, Major Tom, and Ziggy Stardust. Today’s dead celebrity is David B...
Jul 24, 2024•1 hr 23 min•Ep. 82
This person died in 2014 at age 85. In the 1930s, she was a determined child actress who sang and tap-danced her way to the height of Hollywood stardom. For at least 5 consecutive years, she was the most popular movie star in America. She was appointed as a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly by Richard Nixon. In 1972, she held a news conference in her hospital room after her mastectomy, encouraging women discovering breast lumps to not be afraid. She was the United States ambassador...
Jul 10, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 81
This person died in 2019, age 76. In 1958 when he was 14, his father died immediately after performing a roast for Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. His dry delivery piqued the interest of Tom Smothers, who offered him a job in the late 1960s as a writer on the “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.” He was roommates with Steve Martin for a number of years, and his younger brother is the renowned comedian and filmmaker Albert Brooks. His most famous and long-lived character was a witless, deadpan parody...
Jun 26, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 80
This person died in 2016 at age 69. In an acting career spanning more than 40 years, he played a panoply of fascinating characters. He had his early successes in stage works involving the Royal Shakespeare Company. Though he was never nominated for an Academy Award, he won many accolades, but shrugged off the value of awards in general. He gained a worldwide audience in “Die Hard,” playing Hans Gruber, the devious, well-spoken terrorist who took over the fictional Nakatomi Plaza. More recently, ...
Jun 12, 2024•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 79
This person died in 2016 at age 57. He won an Academy Award in 1985, and a Webby Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006. He was still a teenager when he was signed to Warner Bros Records, in a deal that included full creative control. His work inspired the formation of the Parents’ Music Resource Center, which pressured record companies into labeling albums to warn of explicit content. In 1993 he changed his stage name to an unpronounceable glyph, and for a while he was referred to as “The Artist Fo...
May 29, 2024•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 78
This person died in 2016 at age 99. She appeared as a nightclub manager in Orson Welles’ 1958 “Touch of Evil”, and the same year as a sexy alien in “Queen of Outer Space”. She appeared on scores of talk shows, game shows, comedy specials, and episodic dramas. In 1989, she was arrested for slapping a police officer. She was married at least eight times, and called everyone “Dahlink.” Today’s dead celebrity is Zsa Zsa Gabor. This episode originally published June 15, 2022. Famous & Gravy is cr...
May 15, 2024•52 min•Ep. 77
This person died in 2014 at age 86. She was a Tony-nominated stage actress, and a calypso dancer for a period of time. In 2011 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. She was a college professor and a ubiquitous presence on the lecture circuit, and also made several appearances on Sesame Street. Throughout her writing, she explored the concepts of personal identity and resilience through the multifaceted lens of race, sex, family, community and the collective past. In 1969 she publish...
May 01, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 76
This person died in 2021 at age 61. He almost joined the newspaper business as a young man, but deliberately botched an interview. By 1984, he spent four months opening for the comedian Sam Kinison. His sense of humor sometimes got him in hot water. A 2018 article about him said “The dedicated fan will identify two patterns in his television work: It is invariably funny, and it is invariably canceled.” He became familiar to millions as the Weekend Update anchor on “Saturday Night Live” from 1994...
Apr 17, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 75
This person died in 2014 at age 46. His mother was a former family court judge, and his father worked for the Xerox corporation. The New York Times once said “He does terminal uncertainty better than practically anyone.” He was a sleepy-looking man with uncombed hair who favored rumpled clothes. He was perhaps the most ambitious and widely admired American actor of his generation. He earned Oscar nominations for his performances in “The Master”, “Doubt”, and “Charlie Wilson’s War”, and won as Be...
Apr 03, 2024•59 min•Ep. 74
This person died in 2015 at age 76. He taught English at Westminster College in Pennsylvania, and was also a high school teacher. He directed the drama “Music of the Heart”, based on the true story of a woman who taught violin to underprivileged children in Harlem. He directed his first feature film In 1972, “Last House on the Left”. He also directed the first four movies of the “Scream” franchise starring Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox. His most famous creation was the serial killer Freddy Kru...
Mar 20, 2024•48 min•Ep. 73
This person died in 2015 at age 82. When he moved to California in the early 1960s, he befriended the poet Thom Gunn, began entering weight-lifting competitions, and joined the Hells Angels on motorcycle trips to the Grand Canyon. As a medical doctor and a writer, he achieved a level of popular renown rare among scientists. He first won widespread attention in 1973 for his book “Awakenings”, about a group of patients with an atypical form of encephalitis or “sleeping sickness” who experienced a ...
Mar 06, 2024•59 min•Ep. 72
This person died in 2022 at age 94. In 2009, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Although often simmering with repressed anger, his characters responded to injustice with quiet determination. He once wrote “I felt very much as if I were representing 18 million people with every move I made.” In a departure from acting, he directed the 1980 comedy “Stir Crazy”, starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. He was the first black performer to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. His actin...
Feb 21, 2024•58 min•Ep. 71
Special crossover episode! Imagine this: You’re on a desert island, and you can choose one actor or actress – and ONLY ONE – for whom you get their entire IMDb catalog to pass the time. It’s just you, a palm tree, a DVD player (streaming hasn’t reached this desert island), and the IMDb catalog of a single performer. Who would you choose? This thought experiment was first proposed by co-host Michael Osborne in our Bill Paxton episode, and now we take the experiment live. Today we bring you a cros...
Feb 07, 2024•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 70
This person died in 2022 at age 65. In his last year of college, he won a student Academy Award for a documentary. After his sister died of a rare autoimmune disease called systemic scleroderma, he became a board member of the Scleroderma Research Foundation. He was cast in the 1987 Richard Pryor film, “Critical Condition.” He directed “Dirty Work”, a comedy starring Norm Macdonald and Artie Lange. He said he was drawn to jokes with foul language and raw anatomical references because he wasn’t s...
Jan 24, 2024•55 min•Ep. 69
This person died in 2016 at age 60. She was just 19 years old when she acted in her most iconic role. She offered wry commentary in her books on the paradoxes and absurdities of the entertainment industry. Her first book was made into a movie directed by Mike Nichols. She had a recurring role on the British comedy “Catastrophe”. She dated Dan Aykroyd and was once married to Paul Simon. Her mother was the actress Debbie Reynolds. She played Princess Leia in the “Star Wars” movies. Today’s dead ce...
Jan 10, 2024•57 min•Ep. 68
This person died in 2021 at age 99. During World War II she drove a truck delivering soap, toothpaste and candy to soldiers. She began her career in radio by saying one word on a popular comedy show. In the early 1960s she was best known as a busy freelance guest with game shows as her specialty. She had a longstanding interest in animal welfare. Her television career spanned seven decades and holds the Guinness World Record as the longest ever for a female entertainer. One of her best known rol...
Dec 27, 2023•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 67
This person died in 2022 at age 83. She amassed number 1 hits, chart-topping albums, and four records that sold more than two million copies each. Her consistently benign music and initial squeaky-clean image caused many to compare her to Doris Day. More than anything else, she was likable, even beloved. For years she was a prominent advocate for cancer research, starting a foundation in her name. She played Sandy in the musical “Grease” alongside John Travolta and had a massive hit in the 1980s...
Dec 13, 2023•48 min•Ep. 66
This person died in 2018 at age 87. He wrote his most famous screenplay while teaching creative writing at Princeton University. Eight of his films each grossed more than $100 million domestically. He was called the world’s greatest and most famous living screenwriter. Even so, he was an outspoken critic of the movie industry, and made headlines when he declared, “Nobody knows anything.” He wrote ‘The Princess Bride’ and ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Today’s dead celebrity is William Gold...
Nov 29, 2023•58 min•Ep. 65
This person died in 2022 at age 88. He was once described by his coach as “the single most devastating force in the history of the game.” He took part in the 1963 March on Washington and was seated in the front row for Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech. In 2011, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He is remembered for his ability to enhance the talents of his Boston Celtics teammates even as he dominated the action, and to do it without bravado. He holds the record fo...
Nov 15, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 64
This person died in 2018 at age 82. His early passion was for football, and he played halfback at Florida State University. He was part Cherokee. He had an often turbulent career that spanned some 100 films and countless television appearances. He had a volatile temperament, but he himself projected an air of nonchalance and professed not to take his career too seriously. He was a self-mocking charmer with laugh-crinkled dark eyes, a distinctive mustache, and a hairy chest. He had box-office suc...
Nov 01, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 63
This person died in 2015 at age 93. He was a physically towering British movie actor with distinguished good looks, a Shakespearean voice, and aristocratic presence. His breakthrough film was the horror movie “The Curse of Frankenstein.” Though closely associated with horror, he maintained that of his roughly 250 movie and television roles, only 15 or so had been in horror films. Even into his 70s and 80s, he could strike fear in the hearts of moviegoers. He played the treacherous light-saber-wi...
Oct 25, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 62
This person died in 2022 at age 96. She once said “I wasn’t very good at being a starlet. I didn’t want to pose for cheesecake photos and that kind of thing.” She received two Oscar nominations before the age of 25. In the mid-1950s she found herself cast as either one of two types: as she put it, “bitches on wheels and people’s mothers.” She was nominated for a Tony Award at age 83, a testament to her extraordinary stamina and range. She captured the biggest audience of her career in the 1980s ...
Oct 18, 2023•59 min•Ep. 61
This person died in 2019 at age 52. He was born in Kingston, Jamaica but spent much of his childhood in Brooklyn. In the late 1980s, the influential music producer Rick Rubin signed his group. In 1991, he had an early brush with death when he was shot in the right eye. He was born with dwarfism and stood approximately 3 feet 8 inches tall. He was a member of the Houston-based rap group the Geto Boys, who’s biggest singles were ”Mind Playing Tricks on Me“ and “Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta”....
Oct 04, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep. 60
This person died in 2019 at age 70. His birth name was Edward Mahoney. He was the son of a police officer, and he was headed for that career himself when he dropped out of the New York Police Academy to move to San Francisco in pursuit of rock stardom – which he found in 1978. He struggled with drugs in the early 1980s, but he staged several comebacks, and found hits later that decade. He and his family had been the focus of a reality television show on AXS TV. His hits include “Baby Hold On” an...
Sep 20, 2023•54 min•Ep. 59
This person died in 2020 at age 86. Over the years he was a favorite among talk-show hosts, making at least 50 guest appearances on “The Tonight Show”. He made an art of playing characters who are “gloriously out of their depth” and gleefully self-unaware. He appeared in more than 700 films and television episodes over a half-century. He was nominated for Emmy Awards for his roles on “Modern Family” and “Everybody Loves Raymond”. He was a frequent collaborator with the director Christopher Guest...
Sep 06, 2023•58 min•Ep. 58
This person died in 2019 at age 52. His looks were often compared to James Dean. Before his breakout, his main credits had been a handful of soap operas. His mega-stardom was unexpected. In recent years, he made dozens of television appearances, including regular roles on the HBO prison drama “Oz” and the crime drama “Riverdale”. He played Dylan McKay, a bad-boy teenager who struggled with alcoholism on the hit TV show Beverly Hills 90210. Today’s dead celebrity is Luke Perry. Famous & Gravy...
Aug 23, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 57
This person died in 2012 at age 71. In the summer of 1961 she was a summer intern in the Kennedy White House; she once said she was probably the only intern that President Kennedy had never hit on. Her second husband was the Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein. She was a journalist, essayist, novelist, playwright, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, and a movie director — a rarity in a film industry whose directorial ranks were and continue to be dominated by men. Her box-office successes included “Yo...
Aug 09, 2023•1 hr 3 min•Ep. 56
This person died in 2016 at age 83. He was an accomplished stage actor as well as a screenwriter, a novelist, and the director of four movies in which he starred. He made his movie debut in 1967 in the celebrated crime drama, “Bonnie and Clyde.” He had haunted blue eyes and an empathy born of his own history of psychic distress. His rule for comedy was simple: Don’t try to make it funny; try to make it real. “I’m an actor, not a clown,” he said more than once. In 1971, he was nominated for a Gol...
Jul 26, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 55
This person died in 2016 at age 82. He was an unlikely and reluctant pop star, if in fact he ever was one. In the 1960s, he lived in a house on the Greek island of Hydra, where he wrote a pair of novels. He was 33 when his first record was released in 1967. In the early 1970s, his record company concocted an advertising campaign where they called him “the master of erotic despair.” Around 1994, he abandoned his music career and moved to Mt Baldy monastery, where he was ordained a Buddhist monk. ...
Jul 12, 2023•1 hr 8 min•Ep. 54
This person died in 2022 at age 68. His act fit comfortably into the category of “family entertainment.” He had a self-deprecating style that won him legions of fans, among them Johnny Carson, whose early support catapulted him to stardom. He had roles in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “Coming to America”. He hosted “ Family Feud ” for three seasons. He was nominated 3 times for a supporting actor Emmy, which he won in 2016. His comedy routine often centered around jokes about his own weight, wh...
Jun 28, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 53
