In 2024, we've experienced the loss of several luminaries in the world of entertainment. These beloved figures—actors, comedians, musicians, singers, and coaches—have touched our lives with their talent, passion, and dedication. They've left an indelible mark on our hearts and shaped the world of entertainment in ways that will continue to inspire and influence generations to come.
Among the incredible actors who bid farewell this year, we mourn the loss of a true chameleon who effortlessly.
Actress Blanca Sánchez died she was 63. Sánchez died from a severe decrease in platelet levels in her blood. She was hospitalized for over a month at a medical center in Mexico City for serious kidney problems before passing, a passing that shocked doctors and her family.
Nine years ago the legendary actress received a kidney transplant and it was only a few months ago when it began to cause issues.
Blanca’s career began at age 11 with the soap opera nights of anguish. Among her most important telenovelas, she is remembered as the mother of both Quinceañera Thalia (1987) and Light and Shadow (1989). Other films include Time to Die, When the children leave, I am Chucho el Roto and Mama Dolores.
Yvonne Zanos has been fighting for consumers at KDKA since 1997. She lost her own personal battle with cancer. Yvonne passed away surrounded by family following a courageous two-year battle with ovarian cancer. She had just turned 60-years-old on Wednesday.
Born Yvonne Marquer, she grew up in the South Hills and graduated from Bethel Park High School and Bethany College.
Her magnetic smile attracted the notice of modeling agencies. She portrayed a warmth and occasional quirkiness that was easy to see.
Whether she was warning people about a scam -- letting them know about the latest product recalls or putting projects to the test in her "Does It Really Do That" segments, Yvonne loved to have fun and it showed.
A brief modeling career led to her selection as runner-up in the Miss Pennsylvania pageant. She took over the title when the winner went on to become Miss America.
She also caught they eye of former Pitt football star Jim Zanos. Their marriage led to two daughters, and five grandchildren -- four granddaughters and a grandson.
As a mother, she never tired of telling stories of her two daughters and their families.
Though she has worked as KDKA's consumer editor since 1997, this was actually her second stint at KDKA. Yvonne made her television debut on "Evening Magazine" in 1977.
Yvonne's humanitarian stories helped her win a prestigious Gabriel Award and many other honors. She was nominated several times for Mid-Atlantic Emmys and recently won the Patti Burns Award for excellence; but what really made her happy was helping others.
Yvonne's love for children carried over into her annual appearance on our Children's Hospital Free Care Fund telethon.
Her work for needy families also helped to feed thousands of needy residents through the KDKA Turkey Fund.
She fought off this increasingly debilitating illness to raise a record amount for the KDKA Turkey Fund this past Thanksgiving – despite a recession. It would be the final triumph for the reporter who has helped so many.
Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2007, Yvonne appeared as honorary chair of the Walk to Break the Silence on Ovarian Cancer in October.
Yvonne covered her private pain to deliver messages of hope to fellow survivors. She fought through the pain and exhaustion of her final months to visit schools and community organizations best described as heroic.
Yvonne shared her compassion, determination to make a difference and, of course, her laughter up to the very end.
WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) — Jean Biden, who raised her son Vice President Joe Biden to believe in what he called "America's creed ... everyone is your equal," died Friday after falling seriously ill in recent days. She was 92.
In a statement, the vice president said she died in Wilmington surrounded by her family and loved ones. She had suffered a broken hip in a fall in March 2009.
"Together with my father, her husband of 61 years who passed away in 2002, we learned the dignity of hard work and that you are defined by your sense of honor," he said in the statement. "Her strength, which was immeasurable, will live on in all of us."
Joe Biden Jr. was first elected to the Senate in 1972, shortly before his 30th birthday. His mother helped out by organizing coffee klatches — part of a family effort that also included Biden's father, sister and brothers.
"Those of you who have met my mom, you know she's fairly politically astute, and she still runs the show," the vice president quipped shortly after she fell last year.
The former Catherine Eugenia Finnegan was born July 7, 1917, in Scranton, Pa. In 1941, she married businessman Joseph Biden Sr., with whom she had four children. The couple moved from Scranton to Claymont, Del., in 1953, when their eldest son, Joe, was 10 years old. Joseph Biden Sr. died in 2002 at age 86.
According to Biden's 2007 autobiography, "Promises to Keep," his mother had some reservations about whether he should risk a promising career as a young lawyer to enter politics.
"You're not going to run for Senate and ruin your reputation, are you?" he recalled his mother asking.
"And once Mom was reassured that my future was safe, win or lose, she would do anything," Biden wrote.
Biden was elected vice president as Barack Obama's running mate. In his speech at the Democratic National Convention in August 2008, he paid tribute to his mother, who was in the audience.
"My mother's creed is the American creed: No one is better than you," he said. "Everyone is your equal, and everyone is equal to you. My parents taught us to live our faith, and to treasure our families. We learned the dignity of work, and we were told that anyone can make it if they just try hard enough."
Biden said he also learned honor and loyalty from his mother.
"When I got knocked down by guys bigger than me, and this is the God's truth, she sent me back out the street and told me, 'Bloody their nose so you can walk down the street the next day.' And that's what I did."
Raised in a family with a strong Irish Catholic tradition, Jean Biden leaned on her faith in comforting her eldest son after his wife and daughter were killed in a car crash in December 1972, the month after he was elected to the Senate. His two sons were seriously injured.
"After the accident, she told me, 'Joey, God sends no cross that you cannot bear,'" Biden recalled.
In his autobiography, Joe Biden recalled being mocked by a seventh-grade nun for his stuttering, an incident that sent his mother to his school in a fury, her children in tow.
"If you ever speak to my son like that again, I'll come back and rip that bonnet off your head. Do you understand me?" she told the nun.
Joe Biden also recalled how when his mother couldn't find a pair of cufflinks for him to wear to an eighth-grade dance, she fashioned a pair from nuts and bolts, which left him mortified.
"Now look, Joey, if anybody says anything to you about these nuts and bolts, you just look them right in the eye and say 'Don't you have a pair of these?'" she told him.
Folk artist Stephen Huneck, whose whimsical paintings, sculptures and woodcut prints of dogs celebrated his love of animals and won him a worldwide fan base, has died. He was 60.
Huneck, of St. Johnsbury, committed suicide Thursday in Littleton, N.H. His wife said he was despondent after being forced to lay off employees at his Dog Mountain studio and dog chapel.
"Like many Americans we had been adversely affected by the economic downturn," Gwen Huneck wrote in a letter Friday announcing his death.
"Stephen feared losing Dog Mountain and our home. Then on Tuesday we had to lay off most of our employees. This hurt Stephen deeply. He cared about them and felt responsible for their welfare," she wrote.
Two days later, he shot himself in the head while sitting in a parked car outside the office of his psychiatrist, she said.
"He was one of the most creative and active members of the Vermont crafts community," said Jennifer Boyer, co-owner of the Artisans Hand craft gallery in Montpelier. "I appreciate how much energy he put into his works, which were whimsical and sardonically funny. He really had a unique sense of humor."
A native of Sudbury, Mass., he started out whittling wooden sculptures and later dog-themed furniture, like the wooden pews eventually installed in the chapel, which he built in 2000, a miniature version of the 19th-century churches that dot Vermont's landscape.
Built of wood harvested from his 175-acre Dog Mountain property, it had vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows with images of dogs pieced into them.
"Welcome all creeds, all breeds. No dogmas allowed," says the sign outside.
"When dogs pull up in here, they may never have been here before, but it's like they saw the 'Disneyland' sign," said Huneck in a 2008 interview with The Associated Press. "They just get so excited, so happy," he said.
Dog lovers would make the trip to Vermont just to see the chapel, many writing handwritten notes to their long-gone pets and affixing them to the interior walls, where they remained.
Huneck's books, about his beloved Labrador retrievers, including "Sally Goes to the Beach," ''Sally Goes to the Farm" and "Sally Gets a Job," featured woodcut prints accompanied by quirky captions.
"They were totally unique, very insightful, particularly for dog lovers," said Irwin Gelber, executive director of the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum, a library and art center where Huneck frequently gave readings. "He seemed to create works and captions that just captured that expressed every dog lover's insights into owning and loving animals."
He pioneered conversion franchising, persuading independent real estate agents to come under the umbrella of big corporation for more clout. He sold the company after seven years for $89 million.
Arthur E. Bartlett, a consummate salesman and co-founder of the real estate behemoth Century 21, died New Year's Eve at his Coronado home after a long bout with Alzheimer's disease and other sicknesses, his daughter Stacy Bartlett Renshaw said. He was 76.
A firm believer in the power of the large, corporate brand, Bartlett pioneered the concept of conversion franchising, in which he persuaded independent real estate agents across the country to don the signature mustard-colored jacket and market themselves as Century 21 salespeople.
The formula worked. Seven years after starting the company at the age of 38 with Marshall Fisher, he sold it to Trans World Corp. for $89 million in cash and stock. These days Century 21 is a subsidiary of Realogy Corp. based in Parsippany, N.J., and a global company with 7,700 independently owned offices in 67 countries and territories.
"He really was one of the true pioneers, visionaries, who recognized early on the power of franchising and branding for growing and expanding a business," said Matthew R. Shay, president of the International Franchise Assn. in Washington, D.C. "He recognized there was a built-in market to expand his brand by going after people who were already in the industry."
Bartlett was born in Glens Falls, N.Y., on Nov. 26, 1933, the second of three children of Raymond, a truck driver for General Mills, and Thelma, a hairdresser.
The family moved to Long Beach in the 1940s. Bartlett attended Long Beach City College but did not graduate, and worked part-time at a men's clothing store. He left school to join the Army but was discharged shortly after joining when doctors discovered an old football injury that rendered him unable to serve.
He met his future wife, Collette, at a party, and the couple married in 1955. The pair had one daughter, Stacy.
Bartlett then worked as a salesman for the Campbell Soup Co. and later for the real estate company Forest E. Olson in the San Fernando Valley, first as an agent and later as branch and district manager. Before forming Century 21, he co-founded Four Star Realty and Comps Inc., which he later sold.
Bartlett first learned of the concept of real estate franchising from Fisher, one of his former Forest Olson employees who was working at a rival real estate company, CJS. Over a chance encounter at a diner, Fisher explained the concept and Bartlett became intrigued. In 1971, the pair opened the first Century 21 in Santa Ana.
Through "sheer force of personality and determination," Shay said, Bartlett was able to convince thousands of smaller, independent real estate companies to become Century 21 businesses.
Bartlett believed that franchising was the right way for a small entrepreneur to survive. His aim was to build the company into a national force, marketing the brand on television and radio, giving what was once a local endeavor national attention.
"Correct or not, consumers have confidence in the big, brand name," Bartlett told The Times in 1982. "Franchising has been the savior of free enterprise in this country. It has given the small businessman a way to survive."
After selling Century 21, Bartlett tried carrying his franchising success into the home repair business, founding Mr. Build International, which sold remodeling franchises to contractors. The company did not take off the same way Century 21 did and is no longer in operation, his daughter said. He also served as the president of the Larwin Square shopping center in Tustin and invested in residential real estate throughout the Southland.
His wife, Collette, died in 2002. Bartlett married his second wife, Nancy, his former assistant, in 2005. Besides his wife and his daughter, he is survived by his granddaughter Bella Collette Renshaw, his stepson Larry Wells, his brother Ray and his sister Millie Schneider.
In his free time Bartlett enjoyed collecting classic cars -- including a 1934 Ford Coupe and a 1957 Thunderbird -- as well as boating and taking road trips with his family. He was also a gun enthusiast and enjoyed target shooting at local ranges.
Radical feminist Mary Daly, the iconoclastic theologian who proclaimed, "I hate the Bible," and retired from Boston College rather than allow men to take her classes, has died. She was 81.
Daly died Sunday of natural causes at Wachusett Manor nursing home in Gardner, Mass., said her longtime friend, Nancy Kelly.
Daly's tumultuous career at the Jesuit-run Boston College ended after three decades when she refused to open her classroom to men, believing women did not freely exchange ideas if men were present. Men, she said, "have nothing to offer but doodoo." But Emily Culpepper, a friend and professor at the University of Redmond in California, said Daly was not anti-male.
"She was anti-male domination, which is a different thing," Culpepper said.
Poet Robin Morgan called Daly "the first feminist philosopher."
"She really pushed the boundaries, and that drove some people bananas," Morgan said. "But that kind of intellectual courage is, in fact, what usually moves the species forward, even if it gets trampled on in its own time."
Daly grew up in Schenectady, N.Y., the only child of an ice cream freezer salesman and telephone operator. She received her bachelor's degree from the College of Saint Rose, then a master's degree at Catholic University of America. She later earned doctorates at Notre Dame and the University of Fribourg in Switzerland before becoming a professor at Boston College in 1966.
Daly's career at BC ended in 2001, when she retired to settle a lawsuit. Daly sued BC after the school tried to force her to retire over her refusal to accept men in her classes. She had agreed to privately tutor men who wanted to take her classes.
Daly wrote about her intellectual formation in a 1996 article in the New Yorker "Sin Big," in which she recalled being mocked by a male classmate, and altar boy, at her parochial school because she could never "serve Mass" because she was a girl.
"(T)his repulsive revelation of the sexual caste system that I would later learn to call 'patriarchy' burned its way into my brain and kindled an unquenchable Rage," she wrote.
Daly described herself as a pagan, an eco-feminist and a radical feminist in a 1999 interview with The Guardian newspaper of London. "I hate the Bible," she told the paper. "I always did. I didn't study theology out of piety. I studied it because I wanted to know."
Her first book, "The Church and the Second Sex" in 1968, criticized the church as a product and fount of sexism amid the growing women's movement. Five years later, she wrote "Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation." Her other books included "Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy" in 1984.
Gloria Steinem called Daly "a brilliant writer, a brilliant theoretician," who enabled women to move beyond the oppression of male-dominated religious hierarchies to see "that there's God in themselves and in all living things."
"She was enough ahead of her time so that I believe she will be appreciated far beyond it," she said.
TOKYO (AP) — Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only person officially recognized as a survivor of both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings at the end of World War II, has died at age 93.
Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip for his shipbuilding company on Aug. 6, 1945, when a U.S. B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on the city. He suffered serious burns to his upper body and spent the night in the city.
He then returned to his hometown of Nagasaki, about 300 kilometers (190 miles) to the southwest, which suffered a second U.S. atomic bomb attack three days later.
On Aug. 15, 1945, Japan surrendered, ending the war.
The mayor of Nagasaki said "a precious storyteller has been lost," in a message posted on the city's Web site Wednesday. Yamaguchi died Monday morning of stomach cancer, the mass circulation Mainichi, Asahi and Yomiuri newspapers reported.
Yamaguchi was the only person to be certified by the Japanese government as having been in both cities when they were attacked, although other dual survivors have also been identified.
"My double radiation exposure is now an official government record. It can tell the younger generation the horrifying history of the atomic bombings even after I die," Yamaguchi was quoted as saying in the Mainichi newspaper last year.
In his later years, Yamaguchi gave talks about his experiences as an atomic bomb survivor and often expressed his hope that such weapons would be abolished.
He spoke at the United Nations in 2006, wrote books and songs about his experiences, and appeared in a documentary about survivors of both attacks.
Last month he was visited in the hospital by filmmaker James Cameron, director of "Titanic" and "Avatar," who is considering making a movie about the bombings, according to the Mainichi.
Immediately after the war, Yamaguchi worked as a translator for American forces in Nagasaki and later as a junior high school teacher.
Japan is the only country to have suffered atomic bomb attacks. About 140,000 people were killed in Hiroshima and 70,000 in Nagasaki.
Yamaguchi is one of about 260,000 people who survived the attacks. Some bombing survivors have developed various illnesses from radiation exposure, including cancer and liver illnesses.
Certification as an atomic bomb survivor in Japan qualifies individuals for government compensation, including monthly allowances, free medical checkups and funeral costs.
Actress Blanca Sánchez died she was 63. Sánchez died from a severe decrease in platelet levels in her blood. She was hospitalized for over a month at a medical center in Mexico City for serious kidney problems before passing, a passing that shocked doctors and her family. 
