The son of legendary rap producer Dr Dre has been found dead at his home in Woodland Hills on Saturday morning.
Andre Young Jr., 20, was unresponsive when his mother went to check on him around 10 A.M., calling 911 to alert paramedics.
Young’s cause of death is pending completion of a toxicology report.
His father, Andre Young Sr, is better known to the world as “Dr. Dre”, an award winning producer who shot to fame as a pioneer of the influential gangsta rap group NWA, and becoming co-owner of West Coast record label Death Row records.
Later, he became popular for his discovery and production for white rap artist Eminem.
We are still having a hard time believing that LeRoi Moore, saxophone player from the Dave Matthews Band, passed away yesterday afternoon. Moore had been suffering from head wounds he received in a ATV accident on his farm, in backwoods Virgina last June. He suddenly took a turn for the worse and died in Los Angeles Tuesday. There were sudden complications in his condition. He was 46.
“LeRoi Moore, saxophonist and founding member of Dave Matthews Band, died unexpectedly Tuesday afternoon, August 19, 2008, at Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center in Los Angeles from sudden complications stemming from his June ATV accident on his farm near Charlottesville, Virginia. Moore had recently returned to his Los Angeles home to begin an intensive physical rehabilitation program.”
Moore was a founding member of the band and a vital part of its jazz-infused sound. Moore was classical trained, but always claimed jazz was his main influence. Lead singer Dave Matthews has credited Moore with doing the arranging on most of the bands’ songs.
“But at this stage I don’t really consider myself a jazz musician,” Moore said in the biography. Playing with the Dave Matthews Band was “almost better than a jazz gig,” he said. “I have plenty of space to improvise, to try new ideas.”
LeRoi and his trademark sunglasses will be missed by his many fans. LeRoi and his special touch on songs such as “Crush” and “Ants Marching” can never be replaced. Rest in peace music man.
The legendary musician died early Sunday morning at his home in Memphis, Tennessee.
His wife found him on the floor near a treadmill inside his home. He was was taken to Baptist East Hospital in Memphis, where he was pronounced dead at 2:08 a.m.
Many might known Isaac from his music. Younger readers might know him best as the voice of “Chef” on South Park, a role he left because it conflicted with his Scientology beliefs.
Comedian Bernie Mac died this morning in Chicago after a long hospitalization from pneumonia.
Mac, whose real name is Bernard McCullough, passed away early this morning at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. He was 50 years old.
“Actor/comedian Bernie Mac passed away this morning from complications due to pneumonia in a Chicago area hospital,” his publicist, Danica Smith, said in a statement from Los Angeles.
She said no other details were available and asked that his family’s privacy be respected.
The comedian suffered from sarcoidosis, an inflammatory lung disease that produces tiny lumps of cells in the body’s organs, but had said the condition went into remission in 2005. He recently was hospitalized and treated for pneumonia, which his publicist said was not related to the disease.
The day before he died, Mac’s rep insisted he was stable, in no danger and expected to be released within the week, even though it was clear Mac was on his death bed.
This is a tremendous shock to me — this man will be missed greatly.
source: Actor and comedian Bernie Mac dies at age 50 [associated press]
Estelle Getty, best known for playing Sophia on TV’s “The Golden Girls,” has died. She was 84.
Getty, who suffered from advanced dementia, died at about 5:30 a.m. Tuesday at her Hollywood Boulevard home, said her son, Carl Gettleman of Santa Monica.
“She was loved throughout the world in six continents, and if they loved sitcoms in Antarctica she would have been loved on seven continents,” her son said. “She was one of the most talented comedic actresses who ever lived.”
“The Golden Girls,” featuring four female retirees sharing a house in Miami, grew out of NBC programming chief Brandon Tartikoff’s belief that television was ignoring its older viewers. Three of its stars had already appeared in previous series: Bea Arthur in “Maude,” Betty White in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and Rue McClanahan in “Mama’s Family.” The last character to be cast was Sophia Petrillo, the feisty 80-something mother of Arthur’s character.
“Our mother-daughter relationship was one of the greatest comic duos ever, and I will miss her,” Arthur said in a statement.
When she auditioned, Getty was appearing on stage in Hollywood as the carping Jewish mother in Harvey Fierstein’s play “Torch Song Trilogy.” In her early 60s, she flunked her “Golden Girls” test twice because it was believed she didn’t look old enough to play 80. “I could understand that,” she told an interviewer a year after the show debuted. “I walk fast, I move fast, I talk fast.” She came prepared for the third audition, however, wearing dowdy clothes and telling an NBC makeup artist, “To you this is just a job. To me it’s my entire career down the toilet unless you make me look 80.” The artist did, Getty got the job and won two Emmys.
“The only comfort at this moment is that although Estelle has moved on, Sophia will always be with us,” White said in an e-mail to The Associated Press after Getty’s death was announced.
Sad, if not entirely unexpected, news.
It’s amazing that it’s been more than twenty years since that show debuted. An amusing fact not mentioned in the obit: Getty was two years younger than Bea Arthur, whose mother she played.
Source: ‘Golden Girls’ actress Estelle Getty dies at 84 [CNN]
Dorian Leigh, who combined pristine blue eyes, curling eyelashes, an arresting intelligence and intoxicating sexuality to become one of history’s most photographed models — perhaps the first to truly merit the adjective super — died Monday in Falls Church, Va. She was 91.
The death was announced by her grandson Thibaut Dubois.
Ms. Leigh graced seven Vogue covers in 1946, according to a New Yorker magazine article of the time, and in the next six years appeared on more than 50 more covers of various magazines, Playbill reported.
Her images in Revlon’s “Fire and Ice” nail polish and lipstick campaign in the 1950s — “For you who love to flirt with fire …who dare to skate on thin ice” — were shot by Richard Avedon and became Madison Avenue legend.
“Dorian was truly the best model of our time,” Eileen Ford, the doyenne of the modeling agency industry, said in an interview with The Roanoke Times in 1997. “She instinctively knew what every photographer wanted, and she came alive just at the moment the shutter clicked.”
Cecil Beaton wrote in his book “Photobiography” (1951) that Ms. Leigh was as demanding as the eminent photographers who shot her, including Louise Dahl-Wolfe and Irving Penn.
He said she could convey many moods, including “the sweetness of an 18-century pastel, the allure of a Sargent portrait, of the poignancy of some unfortunate woman who sat for Modigliani.”
Ms. Leigh’s mystique was enhanced by her many romances, which included five marriages — counting the one in Mexico to a Spanish marquis who turned out to be already married. There were also the many real or imagined affairs with famous writers, musicians and photographers, eagerly tabulated by gossip columnists. Ms. Leigh was definitely attractive, standing 5 feet 5 inches, with an hourglass figure and an alluring smile.
source: Dorian Leigh, Multifaceted Cover Girl of the ’40s, Dies at 91 [ny times]
A supermodel plunged to her death Saturday afternoon by leaping from her Lower Manhattan apartment window in an apparent suicide.
Ruslana Korshunova, barely shy of her 21st birthday, apparently jumped from the balcony of her residential building in Manhattan’s Financial District, police tell the New York Post.
Authorities said there appeared to be no signs of a struggle having taken place inside the 9th-floor apartment, which the green-eyed, 5′8″ beauty had occupied for only two months.
The Kazakhstan-born “Russian Rapunzel,” as she was known, had appeared as cover girl on editions of French Elle and Russian Vogue, as well as in ads for Marc Jacobs, DKNY, Vera Wang and Christian Dior.
“Our hearts are with her family,” a spokesman for her agency, IMG (which also represents Heidi Klum and Kate Moss) told the Post.
A former boyfriend, Artem Perchenok, 24, told the paper that the two had watched the movie Ghost and that he dropped her off at home at 5 a.m. Saturday. “She was a good person,” he said.
The Daily News suggests that Korshunova had become despondent over a lost love. She poured her heart out on the Web in the months leading to her apparent suicide.
“Life is short, Break the rules, Forgive quickly, Kiss slowly, Love truly, Laugh uncontrollably,” the sandy-haired knockout wrote in a poem that concluded: “And never regret anything that made you smile.”
The Kazakh beauty wrote that love “blinds,” “sets souls afire,” and “is always the answer” in emotion-soaked passages posted on a social networking site.
Korshunova volleyed between Russian and English in her heartfelt prose, but love was a central theme no matter the language. “Do not confuse love and desire,” she wrote in Russian in her most recent posting May 30. “Love is the sun, desire - only flash. Desire dazzles, and the sun gives life.”
The soulful note warns of the perils of sacrifice.
“Love does not take away from one in order to give to another,” wrote Korshunova, a 20-year-old thousands of miles from her native Kazakhstan. “Love - this is the essence of life. But you will not give your life to another.”
Korshunova’s most telling message came three months ago: “I’m so lost. Will I ever find myself?”
She appeared angry in some postings, brokenhearted in others.
“I’m a bitch. I’m a witch. I don’t care what you say!!!” she wrote March 11. “I know what it is. I know why my other relationships didn’t work out, ’cause I’m unpredictable. Why are you afraid of it?”
In January, she wrote, “It hurts, as if someone took a part of me, tore it out, mercilessly stomped all over and threw it out.
“My dream is to fly. Oh, my rainbow it is too high,” she wrote in a March note.
This is very, very sad.
UPDATE (James): Fox News has shown video of Korshunova’s body . I think the family could have done without that. Sad, indeed.
Comedian George Carlin has died from heart failure.
The man who made famous the “seven words you can never say on television” passed away at 5:55 p.m. Sunday at Saint John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, his longtime publicist said. He was 71.
Carlin, who has had several heart attacks and a history of cardiac issues, went into the hospital this afternoon after complaining of heart problems.
[Video Contains Foul Language and is NSFW]
Carlin has more than 20 comedy albums, 14 HBO specials, numerous TV and movie roles, and three best-selling books to his credit.
Last year, he celebrated his 50th year in show business, and he had just finished his last HBO special in March, “It’s Bad for Ya.”
As mourners left the Tim Russert memorial, moments after hearing someone perform Somewhere Over The Rainbow at the service, a rainbow was seen over Washington, D.C.
Yves Saint Laurent died today in Paris at the age of 71.
His close friend, Pierre Berge, confirmed his passing and would only say he died this evening after a long illness. He did not give any other details.
The reclusive French maestro, who had retired from haute couture in 2002 after four decades at the top of his trade, had been ill for some time.
During his farewell appearance seven years ago, Saint Laurent had told reporters he had “always given the highest importance of all to respect for this craft, which is not exactly an art, but which needs an artist to exist.”
Yves Henri Donat Mathieu Saint Laurent was born in the coastal town of Oran, Algeria, on August 1, 1936, at a time when the North African country was still considered part of France.
A shy, lonely, child, he became fascinated by clothes, and already had a solid portfolio of sketches when he first arrived in Paris in 1953, aged 17.
Vogue editor Michel de Brunoff, who was to become a key supporter, was quickly won over, and published them.
The following year Saint Laurent won three of the four categories in a design competition in Paris — the fourth went to his contemporary Karl Lagerfeld, now at Chanel.
Discerning the young man’s potential, de Brunoff advised Christian Dior to hire him and he rapidly emerged as heir apparent to the great couturier, taking over the house when Dior died suddenly three years later.
Saint Laurent would say of his mentor: “Dior fascinated me. I couldn’t speak in front of him. He taught me the basis of my art. Whatever was to happen next, I never forgot the years spent at his side.”
However in 1960, like many Frenchmen of his age, Saint Laurent was called up to fight in his native Algeria, where an independence war was under way.
Less than three weeks later he won an exemption on health grounds, but when he returned to Paris it was to learn that Dior had already found a replacement for him, in the person of Marc Bohan.
With his close associate and lover Pierre Berge, Saint Laurent resolved to strike out on his own, with Berge, who survives the couturier, taking care of the business side.
Saint Laurent’s success lay in the harmony he achieved between body and garment — what he called “the total silence of clothing.”
He was also in the right place at the right time. Having learned his trade at the house of Dior, he founded his own couture house at the start of the 1960s, at a time when the world was changing and there was a new appetite for originality.
Saint Laurent rode his luck through the rise of the youth market and pop culture fuelled by the economic boom of the 1960s, when women suddenly had more economic freedom.
His name and the familiar YSL logo became synonymous with all the latest trends, highlighted by the creation of the Rive Gauche ready-to-wear label and perfume, as well as astute licensing deals for accessories and perfumes.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he set the pace for fashion around the world, opening up the Japanese market and subsequently expanding to South Korea and Taiwan.
Among his many fans in his native France was the actress Catherine Deneuve, who was always to be seen at his shows.
Saint Laurent’s career was not without controversy. In 1971 a collection modelled on the styles of World War II Paris was slammed by some American critics, and his launch in the mid 1970s of a perfume called “Opium” brought accusations that he was condoning drug use.
For fellow-designer Christian Lacroix, the reason for Saint Laurent’s success was his astonishing versatility. There had, Lacroix said, been other great designers but none with the same range.
“Chanel, Schiaparelli, Balenciaga and Dior all did extraordinary things. But they worked within a particular style,” he explained. “Yves Saint Laurent is much more versatile, like a combination of all of them. I sometimes think he’s got the form of Chanel with the opulence of Dior and the wit of Schiaparelli.”
In his later years the depression that had haunted him all his life became more oppressive, and at his farewell bash in 2002 Saint Laurent admitted to having recourse to “those false friends which are tranquillisers and narcotics.”
source: Yves Saint Laurent: a giant of French fashion [afp]
Getty, who suffered from advanced dementia, died at about 5:30 a.m. Tuesday at her Hollywood Boulevard home, said her son, Carl Gettleman of Santa Monica.
Authorities said there appeared to be no signs of a struggle having taken place inside the 9th-floor apartment, which the green-eyed, 5′8″ beauty had occupied for only two months.
The reclusive French maestro, who had retired from haute couture in 2002 after four decades at the top of his trade, had been ill for some time.
