It appears that Clarke was gay, according to a letter in our local gay weekly. I didn't know that!

Sydney Pollack, a Hollywood mainstay as director, producer and sometime actor whose star-laden movies like "The Way We Were," "Tootsie" and "Out of Africa" were among the most successful of the 1970s and ’80s, died on Monday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 73.

I'm a huge Saint Laurent fan and was actually thinking about him yesterday,

The Nobel Prize winner died yesterday after a battling cancer, his agent confirmed. He was 78.

Pinter, who also enjoyed success as a screenwriter for film and television, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, being hailed by the awarding committee as "the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century".
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Pinter's classics, including The Caretaker, The Homecoming, The Servant and Betrayal, have influenced a generation of British dramatists and introduced a new word to the English language – Pinteresque – to convey an atmospheric silence.

Eartha Kitt died today at the age of 81. That's very sad. She was still living life fully and performing regularly (she performed twice in Minneapolis less than 2 weeks ago), and had a slate of new things scheduled for '09.

How sad! She was so much fun and her rendition of "Santa Baby" was way better than Madonna's!

She rose to celebrity from the direst of circumstances. Born in South Carolina, in 1927, the spawn of an African-American and Cherokee woman who had been raped by the white owner of a plantation, Eartha Mae was jettisoned by her mother at eight. Sent to an aunt in Harlem, she quit school at 15 and lived for a time in subways -- an all-too-familiar blueprint for emotional disintegration.
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She broke onto the pop charts with the flirtatiously francophonic "C'est si bon," and capped that with the Top 10 "Santa Baby, in which a gold-digger lays down the law to her sugar daddy. Through these songs, Kitt constructed her persona of the irresistible siren -- both young and ageless -- who is so sure of her control over men that it's often a chore just to rouse herself for another conquest. As she fairly said, "I am the original Material Girl." That this smooth dominatrix was an African-American, at a time when U.S. blacks were still denied basic civil rights, made her woman-on-top status all the more notable, not to say delicious.

In 1968 she was invited to a White House luncheon and was asked by Lady Bird Johnson about the Vietnam War. She replied: "You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed. No wonder the kids rebel and take pot." The remark reportedly caused Mrs. Johnson to burst into tears and led to a derailment in Ms. Kitt's career.

As bookings dried up, she was exiled in Europe for almost a decade. But President Jimmy Carter invited her back to the White House in 1978, and that year she earned her first Tony nomination for her work in "Timbuktu!," an all-black remake of "Kismet."

By now a diva and legend, Ms. Kitt did what many other divas and legends -- Shirley Bassey and Ethel Merman among them -- did: she dabbled in dance music, scoring her biggest hit in 30 years with "Where Is My Man" in 1984, the same year she was roundly criticized for touring South Africa. Ms. Kitt was typically unapologetic; the tour, she said, played to integrated audiences and helped build schools for black children.

"Fantasy Island" Star Ricardo Montalban Dies at 88

Fantasy Island wasn't a show I watched, but I will most remember him as Sable's lover from The Colbys. Thank god for SoapNet

Montalban was already a star of Mexican movies in the 1940s when MGM cast him as a bullfighter opposite Esther Williams in "Fiesta" and put him under contract. He would go on to appear alongside such movie greats as Clark Gable and Lana Turner.
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When major film roles dried up for him in the 1970s, he turned to stage and eventually TV, where he was familiar to millions as the mysterious host whose signature line, “Welcome to Fantasy Island,” opened the hit ABC show that aired from 1978 to 1984.
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In the 1970s and '80s, Montalban was also familiar to TV viewers as a commercial spokesman for Chrysler. He was later widely spoofed for his silky allusion to the “soft Corinthian leather” of the Chrysler Cordoba, although no such leather existed.
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After MGM dropped him in 1953, Montalban went on the road with Agnes Moorehead and others in George Bernard Shaw's "Don Juan in Hell," which was revived 20 years later on Broadway with him in the lead. In 1955, he appeared on Broadway in the short-lived "Seventh Heaven" and in the late 1950s starred with Lena Horne in "Jamaica" and earned a Tony nomination.

He played a Kabuki theater actor in the 1957 movie "Sayonara" and co-starred with Debbie Reynolds in the 1966 film "The Singing Nun." Decades later, he played the evil tycoon in the 1988 comedy hit "Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!" and had a prominent role as the grandfather in "Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over" (2003).

People my age (those who never watched "Fantasy Island," at least) will always think of Montalban as Khan in the Star Trek episode "Space Seed" and even moreso in its film sequel, the best of the Trek movies. Also for his role as the beneficent circus owner in the Planet of the Apes films.

Patrick McGoohan also died yesterday, creator and star of the brilliant British TV series "The Prisoner":

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7829267.stm

Montalban always brings back memories of "Fantasy Island" ("Places everyone! Smiles, smiles!"), Khan in Trek, and the infamous "luxurious Corinthian leather" car commercials. But for me, I think I always remember him most for his role in "Escape from the Planet of the Apes." But that could be because I was a "Planet of the Apes" freak as a kid.

I remember him (McGoohan) for having the lead role in the Disney movie "Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow." A classic from my childhood (always watched "The Wonderful World of Disney") that stuck with me. Which oddly enough I just watched about a week or so ago. First time I had seen it since I was a kid. And while it was good, the scarecrow didn't frighten me like it did when I was young!

Montalban always brings back memories of "Fantasy Island" ("Places everyone! Smiles, smiles!"), Khan in Trek, and the infamous "luxurious Corinthian leather" car commercials. But for me, I think I always remember him most for his role in "Escape from the Planet of the Apes." But that could be because I was a "Planet of the Apes" freak as a kid.

David Carradine, star of the hit TV show Kung Fu, apparently commited suicide. I was never a fan of the show but loved him in Kill Bill and Bound for Glory.

http://movies.yahoo.com/news/movies.ap.org...dead-bangkok-ap

Oh my....so David died gettin his freak on? Mmm Mmm Mmm...thats ashame.

He hung himself. Or, as the NY Post put it: "Hung Fu."

I think it sounds like autoerotic asphixiation rather than suicide.

And in her divorce papers, posted on TheSmokingGun.com last week, Anderson alleged that Carradine had conducted dangerous sex acts during their marriage.

“It was the continuation of abhorrent and deviant sexual behavior which was potentially deadly,” the papers, filed in 2003, alleged. “His deviate behavior includes an incestuous relationship with a very close family member, which permeated our marriage. This is to his admission and the admission of the person involved.”

To feed the truism that celebrity deaths come in threes, we've had David Carradine, now Ed McMahon, and there was a blurb last week about Walter Cronkite not doing very well these days.