John Costelloe's (Johnny Cakes ) died he was 47

The Brooklyn actor who played Johnny Cakes - the gay-fireman lover of a mob capo on "The Sopranos" - killed himself in a holiday tragedy that has stunned family and friends.
The front door to John Costelloe's Sunset Park home was still sealed with police stickers yesterday, more than a week after the rugged 47-year-old actor committed suicide.
Costelloe, a former FDNY firefighter, shot himself in the head in his basement bedroom on Dec. 16, cops and pals said.
"It's beyond me. This is too much for me to handle right now," the actor's dad, Michael Costelloe, 77, said yesterday.
Firefighter and former colleague Matt Dwyer couldn't believe his friend was gone. more

Harold Pinter ( playwright/director)died he was 78

Harold Pinter died he was 78. Pinter was a world-renowned English playwright, screenwriter, actor, director, poet, political activist, and president of the Central School of Speech and Drama. After publishing poetry as a teenager and acting in school plays, Pinter began his theatrical career in the mid-1950s as a rep actor using the stage name David Baron. During a writing career spanning over half a century, beginning with his first play, The Room (1957), Pinter wrote 29 stage plays; 26 screenplays; many dramatic sketches, radio and TV plays; poetry; some short fiction; a novel; and essays, speeches, and letters.


(10 October 1930 – 24 December 2008),

He is best known as a playwright and screenwriter, especially for The Birthday Party (1957), The Caretaker (1959), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), all of which he adapted to film, and for his screenplay adaptations of others' works, such as The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1970), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed almost 50 stage, TV, and film productions of his own and others' works. Despite frail health since 2001, he continued to act on stage and screen, the last being the critically-acclaimed October 2006 production of Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, during the 50th anniversary season of the Royal Court. In addition to continuing to write (mostly poetry), give interviews, speak about political issues, and attend theatrical and cinematic premieres of his own and others' works, he accepted the presidency of the Central School of Speech and Drama in October 2008.

Pinter's dramas often involve strong conflicts among ambivalent characters fighting for verbal and territorial dominance and for their own remembered versions of the past; stylistically, they are marked by theatrical pauses and silences, comedic timing, provocative imagery, witty dialogue, ambiguity, irony, and menace ("Biobibliographical Notes"). Thematically ambiguous, they raise complex issues of individual human identity oppressed by social forces, the power of language, and vicissitudes of memory. Like his work, Pinter has been considered complex and contradictory (Billington, Harold Pinter 388). Although Pinter publicly eschewed applying the term "political theatre" to his own work in 1981, he began writing overtly political plays in the mid-1980s, reflecting his own heightening political interests and changes in his personal life. This "new direction" in his work and his "Leftist" political activism stimulated additional critical debate about Pinter's politics. Pinter, his work, and his politics have been the subject of voluminous critical commentary .

Pinter was the recipient of nineteen honorary degrees and numerous other honors and awards, including the Nobel Prize in Literature and the French Légion d'honneur. Academic institutions and performing arts organizations have devoted symposia, festivals, and celebrations to honouring him and his work, in recognition of his cultural influence and achievements across genres and media. In awarding Pinter the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005, instigating some public controversy and criticism, the Swedish Academy cited him for being "generally regarded as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century." He received his nineteenth honorary degree from the Central School of Speech and Drama in absentia due to illness on 10 December 2008. On 25 December, his wife, Lady Antonia Fraser, announced that he had died, from cancer, on 24 December 2008.


Pinter was born on 10 October 1930, in the London Borough of Hackney, to "very respectable, Jewish, lower middle class," native English parents of Eastern-European ancestry; his father, Jack Pinter (1902–1997), was a "ladies' tailor" and his mother, Frances (née Moskowitz; 1904–1992), "kept what is called an immaculate house" and was "a wonderful cook".

Although he was a "solitary" only child, he "discovered his true potential" as a student at Hackney Downs School, the London grammar school "where Pinter spent the formative years from 1944 to 1948. … Partly through the school and partly through the social life of Hackney Boys' Club … he formed an almost sacerdotal belief in the power of male friendship. The friends he made in those days—most particularly Henry Woolf, Michael (Mick) Goldstein and Morris (Moishe) Wernick—have always been a vital part of the emotional texture of his life" (Billington, Harold Pinter 11; cf. Woolf). Significantly "inspired" by his English teacher, mentor, and friend Joseph Brearley, "Pinter shone at English, wrote for the school magazine and discovered a gift for acting" (Billington, Harold Pinter 10–11). He wrote poetry frequently and published some of it as a teenager, as he has continued to do throughout his career. He played Romeo and Macbeth in 1947 and 1948, in productions directed by Brearley (Billington, Harold Pinter 13–14). He especially enjoyed running and broke the Hackney Downs School sprinting record.



From 1956 until 1980, Pinter was married to Vivien Merchant, a rep actress whom he met on tour, probably best known for her performance in the original film Alfie (1966); their son, Daniel, was born in 1958 (Billington, Harold Pinter 54, 75). Through the early '70s, Merchant appeared in many of Pinter's works, most notably The Homecoming on stage (1965) and screen (1973), but the marriage was turbulent and began disintegrating in the mid-1960s (252–56). For seven years, from 1962 to 1969, Pinter was engaged in a clandestine affair with Joan Bakewell, which informed his play Betrayal (1978) (264–66). Between 1975 and 1980, he lived with historian Lady Antonia Fraser, wife of Sir Hugh Fraser (272–76), and, in 1975, Merchant filed for divorce ("People").

After the Frasers' divorce became final in 1977 and the Pinters' in 1980, in the third week of October 1980, Pinter married Antonia Fraser. Due to a two-week delay in Merchant's signing the divorce papers, however, the reception had to precede the actual ceremony, originally scheduled "to coincide with Pinter's fiftieth birthday" on 10 October 1980 (271–72).

Unable to overcome her bitterness and grief at the loss of her husband, Vivien Merchant died of acute alcoholism in the first week of October 1982 at the age of 53 (Billington, Harold Pinter 276). According to Billington, who cites Merchant's close friends and Pinter's associates, Pinter "did everything possible to support" her until her death and regrets that he became estranged from their son, Daniel, after their separation and Pinter's remarriage (276, 345). A reclusive gifted musician and writer (345), Daniel no longer uses the surname Pinter, having adopted instead "his maternal grandmother's maiden name,"

Pinter stated publicly in interviews that he was "very happy" in his second marriage and enjoyed family life with his six adult stepchildren and 17 step-grandchildren (Billington, Harold Pinter 388, 429–30; Dougary), and, after battling cancer for a long period, considered himself "a very lucky man in every respect" . According to Lyall, who interviewed him in London for her Sunday New York Times preview of Sleuth, Pinter's "latest work, a slim pamphlet called 'Six Poems for A.,' comprises poems written over 32 years, with 'A' being Lady Antonia. The first of the poems was written in Paris, where she and Mr. Pinter traveled soon after they met. More than three decades later the two are rarely apart, and Mr. Pinter turns soft, even cozy, when he talks about his wife" ("Still Pinteresque" 16). In his interview with Lyall, Pinter "acknowledged that his plays––full of infidelity, cruelty, inhumanity, the lot––seem at odds with his domestic contentment. 'How can you write a happy play?' he said. 'Drama is about conflict and degrees of perturbation, disarray. I've never been able to write a happy play, but I've been able to enjoy a happy life' ".

Pinter died, from cancer, on 24 December 2008.more

Eartha Kitt (Singer, actress) died she was 81

Eartha Kitt (Singer, actress) died, she was 81. Eartha Mae Kitt was an American actress, singer, and cabaret star. She was perhaps best known for her role as Catwoman in the 1960s TV series Batman, and for her 1953 Christmas song "Santa Baby". Orson Welles once called her the "most exciting woman in the world".
(January 17, 1927 – December 25, 2008)

Kitt was born Eartha Mae Keith on a cotton plantation in the tiny town of North, South Carolina. She had stated that her mother was of Cherokee and African-American descent, and her father, German and Dutch descent. She claimed she was conceived of rape. Kitt was raised by Anna Mae Riley, a black woman whom she believed to be her mother, but after Riley's death, she was sent to live in New York City with Mamie Kitt, reportedly Riley's sister. Eartha Kitt believed that Mamie Kitt was her biological mother; she had no knowledge of her father's identity, except that his surname was Kitt and that he was the son of the owner of the plantation on which she had been born. Kitt suffered terrible abuse and neglect at the hands of a family to whom Anna Mae Riley entrusted her, or "given away for slavery" as Kitt described in many interviews.


Kitt started her career as a member of the Katherine Dunham Company and made her film debut with them in Casbah (1948). A talented singer with a distinctive voice, her hits include "Let's Do It", "C'est si bon", "Just an Old Fashioned Girl", "Monotonous", "Je cherche un homme", "Love for Sale", "I'd Rather Be Burned as a Witch", "Uska Dara", "Mink, Schmink", "Under the Bridges of Paris", and her most recognizable hit, "Santa Baby". Kitt's unique style was enhanced as she became fluent in the French language during her years performing in Europe. She had some skill in other languages too, which she demonstrates with finesse in many of the live recordings of her cabaret performances.


In 1950, Orson Welles gave her her first starring role, as Helen of Troy in his staging of Dr. Faustus. A few years later, she was cast in the revue New Faces of 1952 introducing "Monotonous" and "Bal, Petit Bal," two songs with which she continues to be identified. In 1954, 20th Century Fox filmed a version of the revue simply titled New Faces. Welles and Kitt allegedly had a torrid affair during her run in Shinbone Alley, which earned her the nickname by Welles as "the most exciting woman in the world." In 1958, Kitt made her feature film debut opposite Sidney Poitier in The Mark of the Hawk. Throughout the rest of the 1950s and early 1960s, Kitt would work on and off in film, television and on nightclub stages. In 1964, Kitt helped open the Circle Star Theater in San Carlos, California. Also in the 1960s, the television series Batman, featured her as Catwoman after Julie Newmar left the role.

In 1968, however, Kitt encountered a substantial professional setback after she made anti-war statements during a White House luncheon. It was reported that she made First Lady Lady Bird Johnson cry. The public reaction to Kitt's statements was much more extreme, both for and against her statements. Professionally exiled from the U.S., she devoted her energies to overseas performances.


In the late 1990s she appeared as the Wicked Witch of the West in the North American national touring company of The Wizard of Oz. Kitt had a supporting role as Lady Eloise in the hit movie Boomerang co-starring Eddie Murphy. In 2000, Kitt again returned to Broadway in the short-lived run of Michael John LaChiusa's The Wild Party opposite Mandy Patinkin and Toni Collette. Beginning in late 2000, she starred as the Fairy Godmother in the National tour of Cinderella alongside Deborah Gibson and then Jamie-Lynn Sigler. In 2003, she replaced Chita Rivera in Nine. She reprised her role of the Fairy Godmother at a special engagement of Cinderella which took place at Lincoln Center during the holiday season of 2004.

One of her more unusual roles was as Kaa the python in a 1994 BBC Radio adaptation of The Jungle Book. Kitt lent her distinctive voice to the role of Yzma in Disney's The Emperor's New Groove and returned to the role in the straight to video sequel Kronk's New Groove and the spin-off TV series The Emperor's New School, for which she has won an Emmy Award and two Annie Awards for Voice Acting in an Animated Television Production. She had a voiceover as the voice of Queen Vexus on the animated TV series My Life as a Teenage Robot.

In recent years, Kitt's annual appearances in New York made her a fixture on the Manhattan cabaret scene. She would take the stage at venues such as The Ballroom and the Café Carlyle to explore and define her highly stylized image, alternating between signature songs (such as Old Fashioned Millionaire), which emphasized a witty, mercenary world-weariness, and less familiar repertoire, much of which she performed with an unexpected ferocity and bite that presented her as a survivor with a seemingly bottomless reservoir of resilience her version of "Here's to Life", frequently used as a closing number, was a sterling example of the latter. This side of her later performances was reflected in at least one of her recordings, Thinking Jazz, which preserved a series of performances with a small jazz combo that took place in the early 1990s in Germany and which included both standards ("Smoke Gets in Your Eyes") and numbers (such as "Something May Go Wrong") that seemed more specifically tailored to her talents; one version of the CD includes as bonus performances a fierce, angry Yesterdays and a live rendering "C'est Si Bon" that good-humoredly satirized her sex-kitten persona.

From October to early December, 2006, Kitt co-starred in the Off-Broadway musical Mimi le duck. She also appeared in the 2007 independent film And Then Came Love opposite Vanessa L. Williams.


After romances with the cosmetics magnate Charles Revson and banking heir John Barry Ryan III, she was married to Bill McDonald from June 6, 1960, to 1965. They had one child, a daughter, Kitt Shapiro (b. 1962). Eartha had two grandchildren, Jason and Rachel. Kitt lived in the Merryall section of New Milford, Connecticut for many years as well as Pound Ridge, New York, but had recently moved to Weston, Connecticut to be near her daughter's family. In 2007, she performed at the Hotel Carlyle in New York.

Kitt wrote three autobiographies – Thursday's Child (1956), Alone with Me (1976), and I'm Still Here: Confessions of a Sex Kitten (1989).

Kitt was the spokesperson for MAC Cosmetics Smoke Signals collection in August 2007. She re-recorded "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" for the occasion, was showcased on the MAC website and the song was played at all MAC locations carrying the collection for the month.

Eartha Kitt died of asthma on December 25, 2008. more

Ralph Young Singer died he was 90

Ralph Young died he was 90. Ralph was an American singer and actor. He was best known as the partner of Tony Sandler in the singing duo of Sandler and Young.

Ralph Young, one half of the celebrated international singing duo "Sandler & Young," passed away August 22, 2008. Young is on the right. The New York-born and raised Young died of unspecified causes at his home in Palm Springs, CA after a brief illness. From the 1960s through the early 90s, the tuxedo-clad duo released 22 albums, headlined major hotel and casino showrooms in both the U.S. and abroad, and made countless guest appearances on top-rated television variety shows. Young is survived by his wife, Arlene; his children, Neil, Arleen, Ron (Lisa), Guy (Bobbi), Lauren, Rachel (Jose); and his eight grand-daughters, Allison, Caitie, Darcy, Morgan, Riley, Jordan, Allie and Piper.

(July 1, 1918 – August 22, 2008)

Nick Reynolds folk, singer, died he was 75,

Nick Reynolds died he was 75. He was an American folk musician and recording artist. One of the founding members of The Kingston Trio group, whose largely folk-based material captured international attention during the late fifties and early sixties.
(July 27, 1933 San Diego, California - October 1, 2008 San Diego, California)

Growing up in Coronado, California, his passions as a boy growing up were tennis, skin-diving and singing with his family. His father, a Navy captain, was an avid guitar player who brought back songs from his travels around the world. He taught Nick the guitar and ukulele, and the family spent many nights singing and harmonizing for pure enjoyment. Nick enrolled in Menlo College in 1954 as a business major, and met Bob Shane in an accounting class. They soon started hanging out, drinking, and chasing women together, and this, in turn, led to playing music, initially as a way of being popular at parties — Shane's guitar and Reynolds' bongos became a fixture at local frat gatherings, and after a few weeks of this, Shane introduced Reynolds to Dave Guard.


"The Kingston Trio" was certainly largely inspired by "The Weavers," but carried the concept of a folk-group, especially one featuring a guitar/banjo combination, further into the mainstream of mid-to-late 50's popular music. In turn, the "Trio" became an early inspiration to countless groups, including "The Beach Boys" — whose striped shirts, on their first album cover, intentionally emulated what "The Kingston Trio" wore — and "Peter, Paul and Mary" — who owe their fundamental concept as a mainstream, folk/pop group, to its originators, "The Kingston Trio" and "The Weavers." This concept arguably reached its peak with "Crosby, Stills and Nash (both with and without Young)".

Shane returned to Hawaii for a time to work for his father's sporting goods company. Guard and Reynolds began playing with Joe Gannon on bass and singer Barbara Bogue, and became "Dave Guard & the Calypsonians". Reynolds then left for a time following his graduation and was replaced by Don McArthur in a group that was known as the Kingston Quartet, and in a resulting shuffle, Reynolds and Shane (back all the way from Hawaii) were brought back into the group, now rechristened the Kingston Trio. Their initial approach to music was determined by the skills that each member brought or, more accurately, didn't bring to the trio — Nick Reynolds sang a third above the melody, swapped his ukulele for a tenor guitar, and his bongos for a conga drum. Reynolds provided the group with an ebullient vocal style, superb harmonizing, and an ability to convey tender lyrics with a touching intimacy. The trio disbanded in 1967 but was revived in the seventies under the direction of original member Bob Shane, and continues to the present although Shane retired from performing in 2004. When the Trio disbanded, Nick moved to Oregon where he spent twenty years ranching and raising 4 children.

In 1981 the Trio reunited, featuring Bob Shane, Nick Reynolds, Dave Guard, John Stewart, George Grove, Roger Gambill. A PBS Reunion Special DVD was recorded, hosted by Tommy Smothers and featuring special guest Mary Travers. In 1983, Nick Reynolds (known within the group as "Budgie") collaborated with John Stewart and Lindsey Buckingham on a new album/CD Revenge of The Budgie with seven new recordings.

In the mid-eighties Reynolds moved back to California and rejoined the Trio in 1987/1988. He sang and played with them happily for another 11 years, then retired for the second time in December, 1999. Folk Music Archives interviewed the Trio in San Antonio and New York City when Nick Reynolds, a founding 1958 member performed his last full-time performance with the group during a concert with the San Antonio Symphony.

Nick Reynolds lived the last years of his life comfortably and well in Coronado, California with his wife Leslie. For eight years, Nick joined John Stewart to do a “Trio” fantasy camp in Scottsdale, Arizona. In addition to a dinner with a question and answer session, fantasy campers joined Reynolds and Stewart on stage to perform a song, becoming for that one moment a member of a "Kingston Trio," the group whose contributions to folk, pop, and world music constitute Nick Reynolds' musical legacy.

Nick Reynolds died on October 1, 2008, in San Diego, California from acute respiratory disease.

Milton Katselas, Acting Teacher and Director, Dies he was 75

Milton Katselas died he was 75. He was a Greek-American film director and famous Hollywood coach for The Beverly Hills Playhouse. He has taught such stars as Gene Hackman, Jason Beghe, Jenna Elfman, George Clooney, Alec Baldwin, Giovanni Ribisi, Tom Selleck, Michelle Pfeiffer, Ted Danson, Tony Danza, Jeffrey Tambor, Gene Reynolds, Tyne Daly, Mel Harris, Catherine Bell, Sofia Milos, Elizabeth Sung and many more.
(December 22, 1933 - October 24, 2008)

Milton Katselas was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S., to Greek immigrant parents, who had a tiny restaurant right outside the gates of a Westinghouse Electric plant. When Katselas was 14 years old, his father went into the movie theater business and ran a local theater company of Greek actors, and Milton himself would sing.

After high school, Katselas set off for Pittsburgh's Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon) to study theater. On a visit to New York, he sneaked in to watch Lee Strasberg's acting class where he also saw renowned director Elia Kazan on the street and chased him down. "I talked to him in Greek, and he talked with me", Katselas recalls. "He told me, `When you finish college, come see me.'" Katselas did. Following graduation in 1954, he began studying with Strasberg and serving as an apprentice to Kazan.

After working with several other big-name directors, including Joshua Logan, Joseph Anthony, and Sanford Meisner, Katselas struck out on his own, making his Off-Broadway his reputation as a theater director debut in New York, on the original 1960 production of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story. He was nominated for a Tony Award for the Broadway production of Leonard Gershe's Butterflies Are Free in 1969, and also directed the 1972 movie version starring Goldie Hawn, Edward Albert, and Eileen Heckart, who won an Academy Award for her role. The following year he reunited with Gershe and Albert for the film 40 Carats. His other credits include the Broadway shows Camino Real and The Rose Tattoo, local productions of The Seagull, Romeo and Juliet, and Streamers - all of which won him L.A. Drama Critics Circle awards for best direction. In 1983, Katselas directed a revival of Noel Coward's Private Lives, the only Broadway stage production in which Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton co-starred together. However, after the show was panned in its Boston tryout, Taylor, who was a producer, fired Katselas, yet he retained his directing credit for the Broadway run.

He also directed the screen adaptation of Mark Medoff's When You Comin' Back, Red Ryder?.

Katselas had also been active as a writer, painter and acting teacher for over twenty years. He wrote a book titled Dreams Into Action which garnished international attention and has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show discussing the book's success.

He was a long-time Scientologist, having been introduced to it in 1965, and had attained the Scientology state of Operating Thetan. A number of Hollywood celebrities were introduced to Scientology by means of Katselas' acting workshops Katselas died of heart failure on October 24, 2008 at the Los Angeles hospital Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. more

John Leonard, Critic, Dies he was 69

John Leonard the Critic died he was 69. John was an American literary, television, film, and cultural critic.

(February 25, 1939 – November 5, 2008)
John Leonard grew up in Washington, D.C., Jackson Heights, Queens, and Long Beach, California, where he graduated from Woodrow Wilson High School. Raised by a single mother, Ruth Smith, he made his way to Harvard University, where he immersed himself in the school newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, only to drop out in the spring of his sophomore year. He then attended the University of California at Berkeley.

An acerbic leftist, Leonard had an unlikely early patron in conservative leader William F. Buckley, who gave him his first job in journalism at National Review magazine in 1959. There, he worked alongside such young talents as Joan Didion, Garry Wills, Renata Adler and Arlene Croce. Leonard went on to be Drama and Literature Director for Pacifica Radio flagship KPFA in Berkeley, where he featured a then-little-known Pauline Kael and served as the house book reviewer, delighting in the torrent of galleys sent him by publishers. He worked as an English teacher in Roxbury, Massachusetts, as a union organizer of migrant farm workers, and as a community organizer for Vietnam Summer before joining The New York Times Book Review in 1967.

The paper promoted him to daily book reviewer in 1969 and made him the executive editor of the Times Book Review in 1971 at the age of 31. In 1975, he returned to the role of daily book reviewer, championing the work of women writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Mary Gordon. He was the first critic to review Nobel Prize-winner Toni Morrison and the first American critic to review Nobel Prize-winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez. From 1977 to 1980, Leonard wrote "Private Lives," a weekly column for the Times about his family, friends, and experiences.

Leonard was a voracious critical omnivore, writing on culture, politics, television, books and the media in many other venues, including The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Playboy, Penthouse, Vanity Fair, TV Guide, Ms. Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Newsweek, New York Woman, Memories, Tikkun, The Yale Review, The Village Voice, New Statesman, The Boston Globe, Washington Post Book World, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, American Heritage and Salon.com. He reviewed books for National Public Radio's Fresh Air and wrote a column for New York Newsday called “Culture Shock.” He hosted WGBH's First Edition, and reviewed books, TV and movies on CBS Sunday Morning for 16 years. Leonard taught creative writing and criticism at the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University. He told the story of Japanese author Kōbō Abe in every one of these venues.

Leonard wrote extensively about television in his career – for Life and The New York Times, both under the pen name Cyclops, for New York Magazine from 1984 to 2008, and in his 1997 book Smoke and Mirrors. In addition, he authored four novels and five collections of essays.

Leonard was co-literary editor of The Nation with his wife, Sue Leonard, from 1995 to 1998, and continued as a contributing editor for the magazine. He wrote a monthly column on new books for Harper's magazine and was a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review and The New York Review of Books. Leonard rated highest among literary critics in a 2006 Time Out New York survey of writers and publishers. He received the National Book Critics Circle’s Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.

Leonard died on November 5, 2008, of lung cancer, aged 69. He is survived by his his mother, Ruth, wife Sue, two children from his first marriage – Salon.com columnist Andrew Leonard and Georgetown University history professor Amy Leonard – and a stepdaughter, Jen Nessel, who heads the communications department at the Center for Constitutional Rights, as well as three grandchildren: Tiana and Eli Miller-Leonard and Oscar Ray Arnold-Nessel.
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