Peter White, actor. Other credits include “Crazy Like a Fox”, “Hardcastle and McCormick”, “I Want to Live” (the TV movie), and “The Bold Ones: The Senator”.
Evan Ellingson, actor. IMDB.
Robbin Bain (also Robbin Mele Gaudieri), former “Today Girl” and Miss Rheingold 1959.
Judy Nugent, actress.
Other credits include “The Greatest Show on Earth”, “77 Sunset Strip”, and the “The Thin Man” TV series.
It turned into a busier weekend than I thought it was going to be, and it also turned out that there was more going on this weekend than I expected. I wanted to get these up today, as I have an eye doctor’s appointment tomorrow and am not sure how things are going to go afterwards.
Richard Moll. THR. I’ve mentioned before how much I liked the original “Night Court” and what a great ensemble those folks were.
Moll had a shaved head — he did that to play the warrior Hurok in the sci-fi film Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn (1983) — when he auditioned for the role of Shannon on Night Court, created by Reinhold Weege.
“They said ‘Richard, the shaved head looks good. Will you shave your head for the part?” he recalled in a 2010 interview. “I said, ‘Are you kidding? I’ll shave my legs for the part. I’ll shave my armpits, I don’t care.’”
IMDB.
Joan Evans, actress who was shot by Farley Granger.
This is in the obit, but I did want to note that she was the love interest for Charles Drake’s character in “No Name On the Bullet“, about which I have written before and probably will again.
IMDB.
Matthew Perry. THR. IMDB. Everyone is on this like flies on a severed cow’s head at a Damien Hirst installation, and I don’t have anything to add.
Other credits include “The Rockford Files”, “Once Upon a Time in America”, “Miami Vice”, and “Pig Pen” in “Convoy”.
Lara Parker, actress.
Other credits include the good “Hawaii Five-O”, “Sword of Justice”, “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”, and “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”.
Joanna Merlin, actress. Other credits include “All That Jazz”, “The Killing Fields”, and “City of Angels”.
I’m aware of Suzanne Somers, but all the obits I’ve seen so far have been preliminary. I think I’ll wait until tomorrow on this one.
Other credits include two episodes of the 1985-1986 “Twilight Zone” revival, “The Bunker”, “The Eleventh Hour” and “Breaking Point” (both of which I was just recently reading about, and which I would love to see on home video), and three episodes of “St. Elsewhere”.
Colette Rossant, cookbook author and popularizer of French food. She may have been a bit obscure for most of you: I know of her because she was a great friend of Calvin Trillin, and he wrote about her multiple times in “The Tummy Trilogy”.
In a 1981 article in The Times with the headline “The Inspirations of a Global Cook,” Craig Claiborne, the newspaper’s august food critic, wrote that he “found it impossible to refuse an invitation to a Rossant meal, which turned out to be a feast,” including a blend of fresh and smoked salmon christened with rillettes of fish as an appetizer, a roast of veal “cooked to a savory state in milk” and other delicacies.
Mr. Claiborne noted that Mr. Trillin, the celebrated author, humorist and food writer, had once written that whenever he was invited to dine at Ms. Rossant’s, his wife, Alice, was “forced to grab me by the jacket two or three times to keep me from breaking into a steady, uncharacteristic trot.”
Tommy Gambino, of Gambino family fame.
He was the nephew of “Big Paul” Castellano, who succeeded Carlo as the head of the family but was rubbed out in 1985 on the orders of eventual Gambino godfather John Gotti.
Tommy Gambino arrived at Sparks Steakhouse on East 46th Street just moments after Castellano and his driver, Tommy Bilotti, were gunned down outside the eatery.
Tommy Gambino, once described as the a “quintessential Mafia prince of New York City,” was convicted in 1993 of two counts of racketeering and racketeering conspiracy for controlling gambling and loan sharking operations in Connecticut.
He served in federal prison from 1996 to 2000.
The prosecution’s evidence in his trial included secretly recorded conversations with Mafia turncoat Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano.
Walt Garrison, legendary Dallas Cowboy, rodeo competetor, and Skoal endorser.
His best season was 1971, where he scored 10 touchdowns and had 1,174 total yards, and it was capped off by a 24-3 Super Bowl victory over Miami. He was named to the Pro Bowl that season.
A knee injury Garrison suffered while steer wrestling in 1975 ultimately ended his NFL career. He retired from Dallas as the third-leading rusher and fourth-leading receiver in team history.
Phyllis Coates, actress. Other credits include three appearances on “Perry Mason”, “Midnight Caller”, “The Untouchables”, and “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman”.
Jeff Burr, director. IMDB. (Hattip: Lawrence.)
Michael Chiarello, celebrity chef.
Rudolph Isley, of the Isley Brothers.
Dick Butkus, one of the greats. ESPN.
At 6 feet 3 inches and 245 pounds, good size for his era, Butkus stuffed running plays up the middle. He was also speedy and mobile enough to drop back and foil opponents’ pass plays. He was cited as a first-team All-Pro five times and was chosen for the Pro Bowl game eight times. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1979, his first year of eligibility.
Sacks did not become an official statistic until 1982, so the number of times Butkus smothered opposing quarterbacks remains unrecorded. But he was considered to have intercepted 22 passes and recovered 27 fumbles while playing for the Bears from 1965 to 1973.
…
Butkus was chosen by the Bears in the first round, third overall, in the 1965 N.F.L. draft and by the Denver Broncos of the American Football League in its second round. He went with his hometown team, a storied N.F.L. franchise owned and coached by the future Hall of Famer George Halas. In his rookie season, he intercepted five passes and recovered seven fumbles.
But the Bears fell on hard times during Butkus’s years. They won 49 games, lost 74, tied four and never reached the playoffs. In his last few seasons, Butkus played on with a badly injured right knee despite having undergone surgery. In May 1974, having retired, he sued the Bears for $1.6 million, contending that the team had not provided him with the medical and hospital care it had promised in a five-year contract he signed in July 1973. The case was settled out of court.
He also did some acting.
Joe Christopher, one of the original 1962 Mets.
He was a part-time player in 1962 — the perfectly awful “Amazin’ Mets,” as their manager, Casey Stengel, called them, had a 40-120-1 record that season — when he got batting tips from a Mets coach, the renowned Rogers Hornsby, who hit over .400 three times in the 1920s.
“He was sitting in hotel lobbies,” Christopher recalled in an unpublished interview in 2010 with George Vecsey, a sports columnist for The New York Times. Christopher recalled Hornsby telling him that the secret of hitting was “don’t let the pitcher jam home plate” and “it’s not about contact, it’s impact.”
…
In June, when he was hitting .307, he talked about getting a chance to play full time.
“I always knew I could hit, but nobody up here believed me,” he said in an interview with The Associated Press. “I always hit well in the minors, but when I got to the majors nobody had any confidence in me.” He added, “They just wouldn’t give me a chance to play regularly. There was always that worry that if I went 0 for 4 I’d be on the bench the next day.”
He finished the season at .300, 16th best in the National League and only the third time a Met had reached that level. (The Mets’ Ron Hunt hit .303 that season.) He also led the Mets with 76 runs batted in and was second in home runs with 16.
…
He had a career batting average of .260, with 29 home runs and 173 R.B.I.
Keith Jefferson, actor. IMDB.
Russell Sherman, pianist.
…
Mr. Sherman was in many ways an anti-virtuoso; he devoted much of his time to other interests, like poetry, philosophy and photography. In the late 1950s, instead of becoming a touring concert pianist, he left New York to teach piano at Pomona College in California and the University of Arizona in Tucson.
In 1967, he began a long tenure at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, hired by its president at the time, the composer Gunther Schuller. Mr. Schuller, who founded GM Recordings in 1981, produced a Beethoven album by Mr. Sherman, who became the first American pianist to record the complete Beethoven sonatas and piano concertos.
On a GM Recording album, “Russell Sherman: Premieres and Commissions,” Mr. Sherman performed works composed for him in the 1990s by Mr. Schuller, Robert Helps, George Perle and Ralph Shapey. His recordings also include works by Claude Debussy and Arnold Schoenberg, as well as Chopin Mazurkas, the complete Mozart Piano Sonatas and Bach’s English Suites.
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Some two decades later, Allan Kozinn wrote in The Times that Mr. Sherman’s “interpretive style, it should be said, is an acquired taste,” but that his “performances are usually illuminating alternatives to the standard view.”
Mr. Sherman resented these accusations of eccentricity. “I think of myself as a compassionate conservative” who responded “radically to the score and nothing but the score,” he told The Times in 2000. He suggested that listeners who disliked his interpretations lacked imagination.
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Dianne Feinstein. NYT. LAT. WP.
This doesn’t quite qualify as an obit, but I don’t have any place else to put it (other than a separate entry, which I’d rather not do) and I feel like it is close enough for government work. The Las Vegas Police department has made an arrest in a 27-year old cold case.
But:
The other point that I think should be made: an arrest is one thing. A conviction is another. More from the tabloid of record.
Edited to add: A two-pack (see what I did there?) of additional coverage from the NYT and the LAT.
“Dwight, shouldn’t you be linking to the actual Las Vegas newspapers?” Well, yes, except: the Las Vegas newspapers are generally not great. Though they have had some good columnists working for them in the past…but for the record, here’s the Review-Journal coverage.
Also not quite an obit, but within this blog’s area of coverage:
This is just a very preliminary report from the NTSB: we probably won’t get the full report for two years or more. And no, I’m not noting it because moose. RoadRich can argue with me in the comments if he knows more, but I believe this is one of the biggest killers of pilots out there, especially pilots of small aircraft: trying to take off with an overloaded aircraft, or an aircraft out of balance.
Sir Michael Gambon, British actor. The NYT is still in “A complete obituary will appear shortly.” mode.
David McCallum. THR. Tributes from Deadline.
David McCallum made every moment count, in life and on set. Let’s raise a jug and celebrate a funny fantastic authentic man. I’ve only got 3 autographs. Connery, Tony Bennett and McCallum. I felt the same way as Steve McQueen in this picture from The Great Escape: Wow! It’s David… pic.twitter.com/ve6hFvFkQD
— Michael Weatherly (@M_Weatherly) September 25, 2023
I was a little young for “UNCLE” first-run (and I don’t recall it being in re-runs on any of the Houston stations) and I’ve never been a big fan of “NCIS”. But I did kind of like Mr. McCallum. I have no idea what his politics were, which I think is worthy of praise in the current era.
And this kind of made me choke up a bit:
So did this:
Donations can be made to the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation.
Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation.
(Mr. McCallum served in the British military. But his second wife’s father was a Marine who fought at Iwo Jima.)
Other credits include “The Master”, “Babylon 5”, “Hell Drivers” (which I have to admit sounds interesting: check out that cast), “A Night to Remember”, and “The Six Million Dollar Man: Wine, Women and War”.
Dick Clark, one-term Democratic Senator from Iowa. He was famous for walking 1300 miles during his 1972 campaign.
Matteo Messina Denaro, Italian Mafia boss.
In 2020, Mr. Messina Denaro was convicted in absentia for his role in the high-profile murders of two of Italy’s top anti-Mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, in 1992, and for deadly bombings the next year in Milan, Rome and Florence that prosecutors believe were part of a Cosa Nostra strategy against the state.
He also received a life sentence for his involvement in the kidnapping and death of the 12-year-old son of a Mafia turncoat after the boy was strangled and his body was dissolved in acid, and in the death of a police officer.
He’d been “underground” since 1993, but was still running the “family business”. The authorities tracked him down because he was being treated for cancer: