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.
She was the oldest recorded person ever to live in New Hampshire, although the oldest person born in New Hampshire was Nellie Spencer (1869–1982), who lived to age 113 years 81 days. Ray was also the oldest person ever recorded born in Prince Edward Island and the third-oldest person ever born in Canada. Since the death of Maria de Jesus from Portugal, she was also the oldest person of European descent in the world. She also ranked as one of the 30 oldest verified supercentenarians in history.
Born in Bloomfield, Prince Edward Island, Canada to French Canadian (Acadian) parents, Sabin Arsenault and Lydie Anne Blanchard, Mary Josephine moved to the United States at age three. Her father died when she was 7 and her mother also died when she was 15. Mary went out on her own, working in factories in Maine. Later she married Walter Ray (in the 1920s; he died in 1967) and moved to New Hampshire. Later, Mary Jo retired to Florida at age 80. She lived there on her own until 100, when her family brought her back to New Hampshire. At age 102, she moved into a nursing home when the family felt they could no longer care for her at home. Her paternal grandmother, Agnès Arsenault, died at the age of 97 in 1909.
Mary Josephine Arsenault married Walter Ray circa 1923. The 1930 census listing for Walter Ray lists him as age 36, married at 28; and Mary Josephine as age 34 (it was in April), married at 27. Ray had two sons, both living: Robert, 86, of Pensacola, Florida and Donald, 85, of Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Her eight grandchildren are also still alive.[citation needed] In all, Ray has two sons, eight grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren, and five great-great-grandchildren.
Ray followed, as much as possible, the Red Sox baseball team. After watching baseball games, she often had cake and ice cream. At her 108th birthday celebration, she was greeted with the song "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" and a cake with the Red Sox symbol on it. Ray continued to buy Red Sox merchandise, and commented that she intended to continue doing so.[4]Fred Hale, who lived to be 113 years 354 days old, was also a fan of the team.[5]
Poffo started wrestling in 1948 at Karl Pojello's gym in Illinois.[2] His first match was in 1949 against Ruffy Silverstein.[2] He sometimes wrestled as The Masked Miser and managed other wrestlers as the Miser.[2] He became a villainous character for the first time in 1950.[2] In the mid-1950s, Bronco Lubich acted as his manager.[2] He won the NWA United States Heavyweight Championship (Chicago version) in 1958.[2]
He formed a villainous tag team with Chris Markoff called "The Devil's Duo" in 1966, and they were managed by Bobby Heenan.[2] In 1973, he formed the team "The Graduates" with Ken Dillinger.[2]
Poffo wrestled in the 1970s and 1980s under a mask as "The Carpet Bagger" for Emile Dupre's Atlantic Grand Prix Wrestling in the Maritime Provinces of Canada. He also bought into the promotion, when his sons were old enough to join.[2] He wrestled under a yellow mask with a dollar sign on the forehead and a blue sequined ring jacket with a big dollar sign on the back. In addition, Poffo ran International Championship Wrestling from 1979 to 1983 in Kentucky.[2]
His last match was in 1991 against Luis Martinez.[2]
He made a few appearances in World Championship Wrestling (WCW) in 1995 managing his son, Randy Savage. He was once attacked by "The Nature Boy" Ric Flair, who put him in a figure four leglock. In 1995, he was inducted into the WCW Hall of Fame.[2]
Poffo's parents were Italian immigrants.[3][1] Poffo was a catcher for the DePaul University baseball team.[2] In college, he studied physical education and was a competitive chess player.[2] While serving in the US Navy in 1945, he set a world record for sit-ups.[2] He completed 6,033 sit-ups in four hours and ten minutes.[2][4]
In college he met his future wife Judy,[2] whom he married on June 6, 1949. They were married for more than sixty years, and together they had two sons, Randy and Lanny.[2]
After retiring from professional wrestling, Poffo taught physical education in Illinois.[2]
David Brown, an urbane New Yorker whose publishing background was the foundation of a producing career in Hollywood, with films like “The Sting,” “Jaws,” and “The Verdict,” and on Broadway, died Monday at home in Manhattan. He was 93.
The cause was kidney failure after a long illness, said a friend, Alexandra Mayes Birnbaum.
A bon vivant, Mr. Brown was known equally for his mannerliness, his fine wardrobe, his distinctive mustache and his wife — Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. He was said to be an unusually courtly presence in the film business and a fan of writers.
“He had a great story sense,” said Richard D. Zanuck, his producing partner from 1972 to 1988, “and great connections with publishers and agents.”
Mr. Brown began his professional career as a journalist, contributing to magazines like The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s and Collier’s before becoming an editor himself. Before his wife landed there, he was the managing editor of Cosmopolitan. During the 1940s, he was also editor in chief of Liberty magazine.
In 1951, Richard Zanuck’s father, the producer Darryl F. Zanuck, hired Mr. Brown to head the story department at Zanuck’s studio, 20th Century-Fox, and Mr. Brown eventually rose to become executive vice president of creative operations. He and the younger Mr. Zanuck left Fox in 1971 for Warner Brothers, but the following year they set out to form their own production company.
“The Sting” (1973), was among their first films, and with George Roy Hill directing and Paul Newman and Robert Redford in leading roles, it won seven Academy Awards, including best picture. (The film was identified as “a Richard D. Zanuck-David Brown presentation,” though the two were not credited as producers.)
The following year they produced an early Steven Spielberg feature, “The Sugarland Express,” and hired Mr. Spielberg to direct a thriller about a predatory shark, adapted from a Peter Benchley novel, “Jaws.” It was a megahit in 1975 and is often cited as the movie that begat the idea of the summer blockbuster.
Together, Mr. Brown and Mr. Zanuck were the producers or executive producers of more than a dozen other films, including “The Verdict,” a legal drama directed by Sidney Lumet and starring Paul Newman; “Cocoon,” a fantasy directed by Ron Howard about senior citizens who stumble upon evidence of an alien visitation that functions as a fountain of youth; and “Driving Miss Daisy,” the adaptation of Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, set in the South of the 1950s, about an elderly Jewish woman and the black chauffeur who becomes her friend and confidant. Starring Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman and directed by Bruce Beresford, it won four Oscars, including best picture.
Even after the partnership dissolved and Mr. Brown started his own company, The Manhattan Project Ltd., he and Mr. Zanuck remained close. Mr. Brown’s other credits include “Chocolat,” “Angela’s Ashes,” “Kiss the Girls” and “Along Came a Spider.”
“He always said his job as a producer was to get the project to the point where it could attract a director,” said Kit Golden, a producer who worked with Mr. Brown at the Manhattan Project. “Once the director came aboard it was the director’s picture.”
Mr. Brown was born in Manhattan on July 28, 1916. His parents divorced when he was very young, and he was raised by his mother. He graduated from Stanford, where he intended to study physics but ended up in journalism. He earned a master’s degree from Columbia and worked for The Wall Street Journal and Women’s Wear Daily. He served in the Army during World War II.
Mr. Brown’s first two marriages ended in divorce. He met Helen Gurley in Los Angeles, where she was an advertising copywriter. They married in 1959; over the years he continued to use his journalism skills at Cosmopolitan, where his wife enlisted him to write the saucy cover blurbs. In addition to her, he is survived by a half-brother, Edward, of Montecito, Calif.
Mr. Brown’s stage credits came late in his career. Among them, on Broadway he produced “Tru,” a one-actor play about Truman Capote starring Robert Morse, and the musicals “Sweet Smell of Success” (2002), based on the Hollywood film about a press agent and a powerful columnist, and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” (2005), adapted from a movie with Steve Martin.
Mr. Brown became involved in the theater serendipitously. He had just finished making “The Verdict” and was interested in doing another courtroom film when an agent sent him “A Few Good Men,” a play about a military trial by a young, unknown playwright, Aaron Sorkin. Mr. Brown tried to buy the film rights, but Mr. Sorkin demurred, saying that that would make the stage rights less attractive for another producer. So Mr. Brown bought the stage rights, too.
The play, which starred Tom Hulce, opened in November 1989 and ran for nearly 500 performances. The film version, with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, was released in 1992,
“He was the last great gentleman producer,” Mr. Sorkin said in an interview Monday. “You’re not going to see his kind again.”
Joshua Andrew Koenig ,[1] also known as Josh Andrew Koenig or Andrew Koenig, has died he was 41, it is believe that the actor took his own life. Koenig was an American character actor, film director, editor, writer, and human rights activist. He was the son of actor Walter Koenig.[2]
Koenig played the role of The Joker in the critically successful 2003 fan filmBatman: Dead End.[6] Directed by commercial director Sandy Collora, the short received its first screening at the San Diego Comic-Con International.[7][8] Director Kevin Smith called it "possibly the truest, best Batman movie ever made".[9]
Onstage, he starred as the M.C. in the 2007 interactive theater play The Boomerang Kid[10] and performed with the improv group Charles Whitman Reilly and Friends.
Though he continued his performing career in the 2006 independent film The Theory of Everything (2006), Koenig worked increasingly behind the scenes. He wrote, produced and/or directed the shorts Good Boy (2003) and Woman in a Green Dress and Instinct vs. Reason (2004). Most recently he was working as an editor on a number of films and had been a video producer for the podcast Never Not Funny (2006-2010). His final role was in the film DaZe: Vol. Too — NonSeNse, in post-production at the time of his death, with Koenig portraying the role of Vice Chancellor.[6]
Andrew Koenig was the son of actor Walter Koenig and Judy Levitt.[11] Andrew's sister Danielle Koenig is married to stand-up comedian Jimmy Pardo.
Writer Harlan Ellison spoke of the young Andrew — by his given first name of Josh — as being the inspiration for his story Jeffty Is Five.
“
...I had been awed and delighted by Josh Koenig, and I instantly thought of just such a child who was arrested in time at the age of five. Jeffty, in no small measure, is Josh: the sweetness of Josh, the intelligence of Josh, the questioning nature of Josh.[12]
”
The story went on to win the 1977 Nebula Award and the 1978 Hugo Award for Best Short Story.
Koenig traveled to Burma in July 2007 and visited Burmese refugee camps in Thailand with his father as part of the U.S. Campaign for Burma. The following January, he protested the Communist Party of China's political and financial support of the military dictatorship in Burma during the 119th Tournament of Roses Parade, entering the parade and standing in front of a Chinese float promoting the 2008 Beijing Olympics after a pre-parade human rights march agreed to by parade officials was allegedly stifled by them. Koenig, who carried a sign reading "China: Free Burma" in both English and Chinese, was arrested and briefly held for his act of civil disobedience. Koenig's defense attorney was Bill Paparian, a fellow protester and former mayor of Pasadena, California, where the parade is held.[13]
"China sits on the UN Security Council and they have refused to condemn Burma. China purchases gas from Burma and sells them weapons that the military uses on the Burmese people. So they are really quite complicit, and that was the whole point of protesting the China float," Koenig explained.[14] Koenig also noted the Chinese government's implicit support of genocidal forces in Sudan, sweatshops and tainted export products, saying of the float, "China is putting on a good face because of the Olympics, but [it’s time to] send a message to the Chinese government that they have to not just change their face, but change the way they do things.”[15]The Pasadena Weekly quoted Koenig as stating, "Their free speech rights have been totally censored. As a country with a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, we need to continue to support and enforce ours, and [use it to] recognize the rights of human beings all over the world."[13] In February 2010, Koenig was reported missing by friends and family.[16] He was last seen near a bakery in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on February 14, and missed a scheduled flight back to the US on February 16.[17] According to his parents, Koenig left evidence that he was depressed prior to his disappearance.[18] On February 25, 2010, it was reported by CNN that his body was found by friends searching for him in Stanley Park in Vancouver.[19] Police later confirmed Koenig's body was found earlier in the day, and Koenig's father told reporters at an evening press conference that his son took his own life.[20]
Lionel Charles Jeffries died he was a British actor, screenwriter and film director.[2][3][4][5]Who died after after a long illness.
(10 June 1926 – 19 February 2010)
Jeffries attended the Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wimborne Minster, Dorset. In 1945, he received a commission in the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.[6] After his World War II service, for which he was awarded the Burma Star, he trained at RADA.[7] He entered repertory at the David Garrick Theatre, Lichfield for two years and appeared in early British television plays.
He built a successful career in British films mainly in comic character roles and as he was prematurely bald he often played characters older than himself, such as the role of father to Caractacus Potts (played by Dick Van Dyke) in the film Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968), although Jeffries was actually six months younger than Van Dyke, who was born on 13 December 1925. His acting career reached a peak in the 1960s with leading roles in other films like Two-Way Stretch (1960), The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960), First Men in the Moon (1964) and Camelot (1967).
In the 1970s Jeffries turned to writing and directing children's films, including the celebrated 1970 version of The Railway Children and The Amazing Mr Blunden. He was a member of the British Catholic Stage Guild.[3]
Jeffries had a dislike of television and its production values and shunned the medium for many years.[citation needed] Since the 1980s, however, he did appear on television, including Inspector Morse. He retired from acting in 2001.
Following a long illness, Jeffries died in a nursing home in Poole, Dorset, on 19 February 2010 at the age of 83. He was married to Eileen Mary Walsh from 1951 until his death. Their son and two daughters survive him.[6]
Jamie Gillis, the controversial but very popular 1970's adult film actor has died at the age of 66. Gillis was best known for numerous appearances with his then girlfriend, Serena, in many adult films, often with very extreme and hard content such as BDSM themes, playing dominant roles.
Gillis was actually trained to be a mainstream actor, and certainly was a powerful on-screen presence in any movie in which he appeared, but by the 1970's he seemed drawn to the world of adult films, although Gillis had made some film appearances in a few mainstream movies as well.
Gillis was born in New York, NY, and was a graduate of Columbia University. He once worked as a cab driver while trying to find work as an actor. He answered an ad in THE VILLAGE VOICE for a nude model once, and slowly began to find work in the adult entertainment industry.
Recently, Gillis had been suffering from cancer and finally died of the disease. Some reports claim that Gillis was actually bisexual, and he had starred in at least one all male film as well. While never as popular as either John Holmes or Ron Jeremy ever were, Gillis was still a highly recognizable star in many films, both adult and mainstream.
Jason Wood died he was 38. Woods was a Britishcomedian. A regular performer at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, he was best known for his comic musical impersonations of performers including Cher and Morrissey. He frequently headlined comedy clubs.[1]
(1972 – 20 February 2010)
In 2004 he took part in the first series of Strictly Come Dancing. He and his partner, professional dancer Kylie Jones, were the first to leave the competition.[1] He was a contestant on the second series of The Underdog Show.
Wood was gay. His show "My Anus Horribilis," its name a play on Queen Elizabeth's 1992 "Annus Horribilis" Christmas message, was about how "[The Christian right is] pushing the country backwards, and I wanted to point that out. It’s insane when they’re quoting Leviticus to outlaw gay sex, yet most people, who have never read the Bible, won’t know that book also threatens punishment for people who wear shirts of mixed fibre."[2] His Fringe show in 2006 attracted a damning one-star review by The Scotsman newspaper. He referred to this on subsequent posters, quoting, "A star – The Scotsman".[3] Wood died on 20 February 2010 aged 38.[1] Initial reports suggested he died in his sleep .[4]
Mary Josephine Ray[1][2] died she was 113. Ray was the world's second-oldest verified living person at the time of her death.[3] Following the death of Gertrude Baines on 11 September 2009, Ray became the oldest person living in the United States.
