R.I.P. CELEBRITY DEATHS 2020(NON WRESTLERS)

[jimsteel]

TV PIONEER LEE PHILLIP BELL PASSES AWAY

Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist Lee Phillip Bell passed away on February 25, 2020 at age 91, according to her children, William James Bell, Bradley Phillip Bell and Lauralee Bell Martin. “Our mother was a loving and supportive wife, mother and grandmother,” they said in a statement. “Gracious and kind, she enriched the lives of all who knew her. We will miss her tremendously.” Born in Chicago, Illinois on June 9, 1928, Bell was co-creator, along with her late husband William J. Bell, of Y&R in 1973 and B&B in 1987. Bell’s career as a broadcast journalist began in Chicago, where she hosted and produced her own show THE LEE PHILLIP SHOW, for CBS TV for over 30 years. A pioneer in the evolution of the afternoon talk show format, Bell was a trailblazer in the exploration of timely social issues and concerns. Additionally, she produced and narrated numerous award-winning specials and documentaries covering social concerns such as foster children, the subject of rape, children and divorce, and babies born to women in prison, to name a few. Bell interviewed heads of state such as Presidents Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan; film actors Judy Garland, Clint Eastwood and Jerry Lewis; musicians such as The Rolling Stones and The Beatles; television and stage stars such as Lucille Ball, Jack Benny and Oprah Winfrey; and many other politicians, authors, journalists, fashion designers and rock stars. She was awarded 16 regional (Chicago) Emmy awards and numerous Golden Mike awards. Bell is also the recipient of the Alfred I. Dupont/Columbia University Award for the special, THE RAPE OF PAULETTE, the first program in Chicago to explore the issue. In 1977, she was the first woman to receive the coveted Governors Award from the Chicago chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. In 1980, she was named “Person of the Year” by the Broadcast Advertising Club of Chicago and the “Outstanding Woman in Communications” by the Chicago YMCA. She also received the Salvation Army’s William Booth Award for her distinguished career in communications and social service. Bell won the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series as co-creator of The Young and the Restless in 1975 and was recipient of the Daytime Emmys’ Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007

[TTX]

RIP Clive.

[jimsteel]

Trader Joe's Founder Joe Coulombe Dead at 89


Joe Coulombe, the guy who founded Trader Joe’s, one of the most enduring grocery chains in the country, has died after a long illness.

Joe died at his home in Pasadena, Ca.

Joe was born in 1930, smack in the middle of the depression, and raised on an avocado ranch near San Diego, CA. He served in the Air Force and got a B.A. in economics and an MBA from Stanford. No slouch.

So here's the path to Trader Joe's. He worked at Rexall Drugs in 1958 and his job was to create a group of convenience stores ... similar to 7-Eleven. The first thing he did -- he worked in a grocery store for free ... just to get the hang of it. The chain was called Pronto Markets. Thing is ... Rexall really wasn't into it, so Coulombe bought the stores and ran them himself.

Joe jumped into the market biz at the same time 7-Eleven was exploding, and he decided to take a different approach. That's when he came up with the idea for Trader Joe's.

He opened his first store in Pasadena, and decorated it with a nautical decor after reading a book called "White Shadows in the South Seas." He was also inspired by the Jungle Cruise ride at Disneyland. Employees at the store wore Hawaiian shirts. They were called captain and first mates.

The concept of the store -- courting customers with sophisticated taste on a budget. The prices were reasonable and sometimes even low.

Joe sold the chain in 1979 to the German grocery retailer Aldi Nord and retired from the company 9 years later.

[Bazzy]

Darts Welsh BDO player from 1970/80s Ceri Morgan died aged 72

[jimsteel]

Luis Alfonso Mendoza, Spanish Voice Of Bugs Bunny And Gohan, Killed In Mexico

Tragic news out of Mexico: one of the country’s most successful voice actors and dubbing artists, Luis Alfonso Mendoza, was murdered in the Mexico City neighborhood of Portales Norte on Saturday afternoon. He was 55 years old.

Mendoza was the Spanish voice of Gohan on Dragon Ball, a role he’d held since 1996, as well as Looney Tunes characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. (It should be noted that he did the Latin America Spanish dubs, and that there are also European Spanish dubs for these same characters.)

According to media reports (in Spanish), Mendoza was killed during a dispute with a tenant who was renting studio space from him. The assailant also murdered Mendoza’s wife and brother-in-law. The attacker, who subsequently shot himself in the head in a suicide attempt, is alive, in “serious condition.”

[jimsteel]

Lynn Evans Mand, Singer of Hits With the Chordettes, Dies at 95

With Ms. Mand on lead vocals, the group reached No. 1 with the frothy “Mr. Sandman” in 1954 and No. 2 with “Lollipop” in 1958.

Lynn Evans Mand, who was plucked from obscurity to become the lead singer of the Chordettes, performing with them during the height of their fame in the 1950s and ’60s on songs like the instantly recognizable hits “Mr. Sandman” and “Lollipop,” died on Feb. 6 at a care facility in Elyria, Ohio. She was 95.

Her grandson Robert Evans II said the cause was a stroke.

The Chordettes began in the 1940s in Sheboygan, Wis., as an all-woman barbershop quartet. They appeared regularly on Arthur Godfrey’s popular radio and television shows.

In 1953 Ms. Evans, as she was known at the time, was a case worker for the Red Cross and sang with an amateur barbershop quartet in Youngstown, Ohio. One day the Chordettes came through town for a performance, and Ms. Evans had a chance to sit in.

The members of the group were so impressed with her voice that when the time came to replace one of the original Chordettes, Dorothy Schwartz, who was leaving to have a child, Ms. Evans was asked to audition for the spot. She won it.

“She sang so beautifully and expressively, very clear,” Marjorie Needham Latzko, another Chordette and a close friend of Ms. Evans’s, said in a phone interview. “You could understand every word.”

A year after Ms. Evans joined, the Chordettes had the first of several hits on Cadence Records, a label formed by Archie Bleyer, Mr. Godfrey’s former bandleader, after he and the host parted ways. (Mr. Bleyer later married one of the Chordettes, Janet Ertel.)

That song was “Mr. Sandman,” a frothy pop tune written by Pat Ballard featuring rhythmic nonsense syllables (“bum-bum-bum-ba-bum…”) and the memorable line “Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream.”

[jimsteel]

Claudette Nevins, Stage Actress in 'Plaza Suite' and 'The Great White Hope,' Dies at 82

She also worked often on television, with recurring roles on 'Melrose Place' and 'JAG.'
Claudette Nevins, who starred in the original production of Neil Simon's Plaza Suite on Broadway and in a national tour of The Great White Hope, has died. She was 82.

Nevins died Feb. 20 in hospice care at her home in Los Angeles, her family announced.

In recurring roles for television, Nevins portrayed Constance Fielding, the mother of Doug Savant's Matt, on Melrose Place and played Special Agent Clayton Webb's (Steven Culp) mom on JAG.

Years earlier, she portrayed Andy Griffith's wife in 1970-71 on the short-lived CBS show Headmaster, the actor's first series after he quit The Andy Griffith Show.

The daughter of a fur salesman, Claudette Weintraub was born on April 10, 1937, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and raised in Brooklyn. She attended the High School of Performing Arts in New York and graduated from NYU in 1957.

The red-haired Nevins made it to Broadway opposite George C. Scott and Marian Seldes in The Wall in 1960 and a year later starred in the 3D horror feature The Mask.

In 1966, she served as Lee Remick's standby/replacement in the original production of Wait Until Dark, then played several characters alongside Scott, Maureen Stapleton and Bob Balaban in Plaza Suite, directed by Mike Nichols.

Soon after, Nevins starred as Ellie (Jane Alexander's role on Broadway and the 1970 movie) alongside Brock Peters in the national Broadway tour of The Great White Hope. That gig brought her to Los Angeles, where she would become a member of the Matrix Theatre Company.

Nevins also worked on the daytime soap opera Love of Life and the animated Return to the Planet of the Apes, had regular roles on Police Story and Husbands, Wives & Lovers and showed up on other series like The Bob Newhart Show, M*A*S*H, One Day at a Time, Barnaby Jones, Police Squad!, L.A. Law, Picket Fences and Beverly Hills, 90210.

Her film résumé also included Sleeping With the Enemy (1991), Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) and Something's Gotta Give (2003).

[jimsteel]

Joyce Gordon Dies: Pioneering Actress And SAG Leader Was 90

Actress Joyce Gordon, the first woman to serve as President of a branch of the Screen Actors Guild, has died. She was 90. As an actor, she was best known as a pioneering performer in early TV commercials and network promos. But her true calling was as a union leader and supporter of her fellow actors.

In the 1950s, she became the first woman to do network promos, and the first woman announcer for a political convention on network television. In 1959, during Howard Keel’s SAG presidency, she was part of the first dozen branch members to serve on the guild’s national board – the sole woman in that group of 12. In 1966, she was elected president of SAG’s New York branch, a first for a woman in any branch of the guild.

In all, she served the union for more than four decades, was a trustee of the SAG-AFTRA Motion Picture Players Welfare Fund, and a longtime proponent of merger between SAG and AFTRA, which was consummated in 2012.

“Joyce was everything you could want in a SAG-AFTRA member and leader: intelligent, talented, unceasingly dedicated to her fellow performers, and a warm and generous friend,” said SAG-AFTRA President Gabrielle Carteris. “Her stature as a pitchwoman and voiceover talent was indispensable in convincing the advertising industry to take seriously the concerns of commercial performers in the early days of that contract.

[jimsteel]

Nick Apollo Forte Dies: ‘Broadway Danny Rose’ Actor Was 81
Nick Apollo Forte, a longtime cruise ship and cabaret singer most widely known for his co-starring role in Woody Allen’s 1984 comedy Broadway Danny Rose, died Wednesday in Waterbury, CT. He was 81.

His death was announced by his family. No cause of death was given, but the family thanked his doctor and staff for “many years of caring for Nick with love, respect and dignity.”

Forte, according to his family, began his musical career at age 15 under the stage name Nicky Redman. He opened for Della Reese at the Apollo Theater in 1957, after which he changed his stage name to Nick Apollo Forte to honor the venue.

After years of traveling the United States as a musician and entertainer, Forte was tapped by Allen to play alcoholic lounge singer Lou Canova in Broadway Danny Rose, which starred the director and Mia Farrow. With his newfound fame, Forte would appear on numerous talk shows including The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.

Forte also appeared on CBS’ The Ellen Burstyn Show in 1987. In 2016, Forte made a cameo appearance as himself on HBO’s Billions.

[jimsteel]

'Inside the Actors Studio' Host James Lipton Dead at 93

"Inside the Actors Studio" host and veteran TV writer James Lipton has died ... TMZ has learned.

Lipton passed away peacefully Monday morning at his home. His wife, Kedakai Turner, tells TMZ ... "There are so many James Lipton stories but I’m sure he would like to be remembered as someone who loved what he did and had tremendous respect for all the people he worked with."

The man had a storied career in and around television and film. Of course, he served as the Dean Emeritus of the Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University in NYC for several years. And, he was responsible for spearheading his famous talk show, "Inside the Actors Studio" -- James interviewed actors, big and small, to pick their brains about the craft.

It was filmed in front of a live audience full of student actors, some of whom got a chance to ask questions from time to time. He started the show in 1994 and finally retired in 2018 after 22 seasons. The program continues to this day, however, with other hosts.

Lipton has interviewed stars like Ben Affleck, Halle Berry, Jeff Bridges, Morgan Freeman, Ian McKellen, Eddie Murphy, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall, Ron Howard, Anthony Hopkins, Jim Carrey, Al Pacino, Gwyneth Paltrow, Willem Dafoe, Brad Pitt, Henry Winkler, Betty White, Naomi Watts, Chris Rock, Whoopi Goldberg, Hugh Grant and on and on and on.

One of Lipton's more memorable guests was Bradley Cooper, who was once an Actors Studio student, and asked a pretty good question of Sean Penn about revisiting a character he'd played before. He asked that in 1999, and returned as the interviewed guest in 2011.