Roddy McDowall (1928 - 1998)

Roddy McDowall Roderick McDowall was born in London, the son of a Merchant Mariner father and a mother who had always wanted to be in movies. He was enrolled in elocution courses at age five and by ten had appeared in his first film, Murder in the Family (1938), playing Peter Osborne, the younger brother […]

Sonny Bono (1935 - 1998)

Sonny Bono Entertainer, US Congressman. Until the early 1960s, he had a job delivering meat along the Sunset Strip in California. He became an A&R Man for Phil Spector. Working with people such as Sam Cooke, and Chubby Checker, and writing songs such as ‘Baby Don’t Go’, and ‘Don’t Laugh At Me’ Bono achieved his […]

Alan Shepard (1923 - 1998)

Alan Shepard American Astronaut. The first American into space, he is currently the oldest man to have walked on the moon. Born in Derry, New Hampshire, the son of Army Lieutenant Colonel Alan B. Shepard and Renza Emerson Shepard, Alan Jr graduated from the Admiral Farragut Academy (military high school) in 1941, and received a […]

Dale Evans (1912 - 2001)

Dale Evans The world knew her as “the Queen of the West.” High Desert neighbors knew her as a neighbor, a friend and a matriarch. Friends and fans everywhere are mourning the death of Dale Evans, who died Wednesday of congestive heart failure at her home in Apple Valley with her children by her side. […]

Roy Rogers (1911 - 1998)

Roy Rogers In 1944, Rogers appeared in his first film with actress Dale Evans. The Cowboy and the Señorita sparked an irresistible on-screen chemistry between the two, and Evans quickly gained the nickname “Queen of the Cowgirls,” to match the moniker of her on-and-off-screen sweetheart. Between the years of 1944 and 1951, they appeared in nearly 30 […]

Fess Parker (1924 - 2010)

Fess Parker was born in Fort Worth, Texas, and raised on a farm in Tom Green County near San Angelo. He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in the latter part of World War II, hoping to become a pilot. He was turned down because he was too tall at 6 feet 6 inches (1.98 m). […]

Peter Graves (1926 - 2010)

Peter Graves was born Peter Duesler Aurness on March 18, 1926, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of parents Rolf Cirkler Aurness (1894–1982), a businessman, and his wife Ruth (née Duesler, died 1986), a journalist. Graves’ ancestry was Norwegian, German, and English. The family name originally was “Aursnes,” but when Rolf’s Norwegian father, Peter Aursnes, immigrated […]

J. D. Salinger (1919 - 2010)

Jerome David “J. D.” Salinger was an American writer who won acclaim early in life. He led a very private life for more than a half-century. He published his final original work in 1965 and gave his last interview in 1980.  Salinger was raised in Manhattan and began writing short stories while in secondary school. […]

Pernell Roberts (1928 - 2010)

Roberts was born in 1928 in North Carolina and moved to Waycross, Georgia as an infant, the only child of Pernell Elven Roberts, Sr. (1907–1980), a Dr Pepper salesman, and Minnie (Betty) Myrtle Morgan Roberts (1910–1988). During his high school years, Pernell played the horn, acted in school and church plays and sang in local […]

Jean Simmons (1929 - 2010)

Simmons was born in Lower Holloway, London, to Charles Simmons, a gymnast, and his wife, Winifred (née Loveland) Simmons. Jean was the youngest of four children with siblings Edna, Harold and Lorna. She began acting at the age of 14. During the Second World War, the Simmons family was evacuated to Winscombe, Somerset. Her father, […]

Robert B. Parker (1932 - 2010)

Parker was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1956 Parker married Joan H. Parker, whom he claimed to have met as a toddler at a birthday party. They spent their childhoods in the same neighborhood.  After earning a BA degree from Colby College in Waterville, Maine, Parker served as a soldier in the US Army Infantry […]

Maureen O’Sullivan (1911 - 1998)

Maureen O’Sullivan She is best remembered for her role of Jane in the Tarzan movies of the 1930s and 1940s. Considered Ireland’s first film star, she is also remembered as the mother of actress Mia Farrow. Born Maureen Paula O’Sullivan in County Roscommon, Ireland, she was the daughter of Mary Fraser Lovatt and Charles Joseph […]

Jeanette Nolan (1911 - 1998)

Jeanette Nolan Was an American radio, film, and television actress who was nominated for four Emmy Awards. Nolan graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in her native Los Angeles, California. In 1935, Nolan married actor John McIntire; the couple remained together until his death in 1991. The couple had two children, one of whom was […]

Dorothy Stickney (1896 - 1998)

Dorothy Stickney Born in Dickinson, North Dakota, Stickney attended the North Western Dramatic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She sang and danced as one of the four Southern Belles in vaudeville and began acting in summer stock companies including Atlanta‘s Forsyth Players in the early 1920s before she married Howard Lindsay, to whom she would stay […]

John Derek (1926 - 1998)

John Derek Born Derek Harris in Hollywood in 1926, he had a film-oriented background, his father being the silent film-maker Lawrence Harris and his mother a minor film actress, Dolores Johnson. The producer David Selznick put him under contract as a teenager, and gave him small roles (billed as Derek Harris) in the Selznick productions […]

Frank Sinatra (1915 - 1998)

Frank Sinatra Baritone Frank Sinatra was indisputably the 20th century’s greatest singer of popular song. Though influenced by Bing Crosby’s crooning, and by learning from trombonist Tommy Dorsey’s breath control and blues singer Billie Holiday’s rhythmic swing, Frank Sinatra mainstreamed the concept of singing colloquially, treating lyrics as personal statements and handling melodies with the […]

Alice Faye (1915 - 1998)

Alice Faye Ms. Faye’s warm, husky contralto and demure sexuality in ”Tin Pan Alley,” ”Hello, Frisco, Hello” and ”Alexander’s Ragtime Band” made her one of Hollywood’s top 10 moneymaking stars in 1938 and 1939. Under contract to 20th Century Fox for a little over a decade, during which she made 32 movies, Ms. Faye walked […]

Gene Raymond (1908 - 1998)

Gene Raymond Raymond, romantic leading man in several films of the 1930s and 1940s, died Sunday night at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of pneumonia, his publicist said. Among the actor’s more memorable films were “Flying Down to Rio” opposite Dolores Del Rio in 1933, which first paired Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers; “Red […]

Peter Lind Hayes (1915 - 1998)

Peter Lind Hayes He was only two when his father, Joseph Conrad Lind Snr, a railroad man and amateur singer, died. Peter attended parochial school in Cairo, Illinois, but, from the age of nine, performed every summer with his mother, Grace Hayes, a vaudeville star. At 16, he wrote a new act for his mother […]

Gene Evans (1922 - 1998)

Gene Evans He was born in Holbrook, Arizona, but reared in Colton, California. His acting career began while he was serving in World War II. He performed with a theatrical troupe of GIs in Europe. Evans made his film debut in 1947 and appeared in dozens of films and television programs. He specialized in playing […]

J T Walsh (1943 - 1998)

J T Walsh He is best remembered for his role of Sergeant Major Dickerson in “Good Morning, Vietnam” (1987) and for his role of Big Bob in “Pleasantville” (1998). Born John Patrick Walsh in San Francisco, California, he attended a Jesuit boarding school in Ireland. After returning from studying at Clongowes Wood College in Ireland, […]

Carl Wilson (1946 - 1998)

Carl Wilson Rock Musician, Vocalist, and Producer. He is best remembered as a founding member, lead guitarist, and occasional lead vocalist of classic California-based rock group The Beach Boys. He was the youngest brother of fellow Beach Boys Dennis and Brian Wilson and cousin of Beach Boy’s Mike Love. Born Carl Dean Wilson, as a […]

Evelyn Lauder (1936 - 2011)

She was born Evelyn Hausner in Vienna, Austria in 1936 to a Jewish family. Lauder’s family fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, using their household silver to get visas to Belgium. They then moved on to England where her mother was sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man and Evelyn was placed in […]

Ruth Stone (1915 - 2011)

She was born in Roanoke, Virginia. She raised three daughters alone after her husband, professor Walter Stone, committed suicide in 1959. She wrote that her poems are “love poems, all written to a dead man” whose death caused her to “reside in limbo” with her daughters. For twenty years she traveled the US, teaching creative […]

Tom Wicker (1927 - 2011)

Wicker was born in Hamlet, North Carolina. He was a graduate of the University of North Carolina. He won a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1957. In 1993, he returned to Harvard, where he was a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government. He died from an apparent heart attack, on November 25, 2011. […]

Patrice O’Neal (1969 - 2011)

Patrice Malcolm O’Neal was born in New York City, on December 7, 1969, and grew up in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts. His mother, Georgia, named him after Patrice Lumumba, the leader of the Congolese independence movement, and Malcolm X. He was raised by his mother and never knew his father.  He was a […]

Lloyd Bridges (1913 - 1998)

Lloyd Bridges He is remembered for his role as ‘Mike Nelson’ on the television adventure series “Sea Hunt” that ran from 1958 to 1961 and was popular in syndication for many years afterwards. Born Lloyd Vernet Bridges, Jr, his father was involved in the California hotel business and had once owned a movie theater. After […]

William J Bell (1927 - 2005)

William J Bell American screenwriter and television producer, best known as the creator of the soap operas Another World, The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful. In 1972, CBS executives wanted a new daytime serial that was youth oriented. William along with his wife Lee Phillip Bell created The Young and […]

Chris Candido (1972 - 2005)

Chris Candido American professional wrestler. Candito was best known for his appearances with professional wrestling promotions such as World Championship Wrestling, Extreme Championship Wrestling, New Japan Pro Wrestling, Total Nonstop Action Wrestling and Smoky Mountain Wrestling under the ring name Chris Candido, as well as his appearances in the World Wrestling Federation as Skip, one-half […]

John Fred (1941 - 2005)

John Fred During the psychedelic era, John Fred and the Playboy Band climbed to No 3 on the UK charts with “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)” but no one was sure whether this oddball record was an example of psychedelia or a satiric comment. In truth, the lead singer and songwriter, John Fred Gourrier, loved […]