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Carmel Valley, Calif., May 13, 2019 -- Doris Day passed away early this morning at her Carmel Valley home, having celebrated her 97th birthday on April 3 of this year. Nearly 300 fans gathered in Carmel last month to celebrate Day’s birthday. Day had been in excellent physical health for her age, until recently contracting a serious case of pneumonia , resulting in her death. She was surrounded by a few close friends as she passed.
Tim Conway, the cherub-faced comedian who became a TV star for playing the bumbling Ensign Parker on McHale's Navy and for cracking up his helpless colleagues on camera on The Carol Burnett Show, has died. He was 85. A five-time Emmy Award winner, Conway died Tuesday at 8:45 a.m. at a health care facility in Los Angeles, his rep told The Hollywood Reporter. According to recent reports, he was suffering from dementia and unable to speak after undergoing brain surgery in September.
Rutger Hauer, the versatile Dutch leading man of the ’70s who went on star in the 1982 “Blade Runner” as Roy Batty, died July 19 at his home in the Netherlands after a short illness. He was 75.
One of the joys of getting to know Rutger Hauer over the decades was my increasing awareness of shared similar interests.One was out abiding affection/respect for the sea; both of us knew from first-hand experience that the ocean is always ready to kill you. Rutger would regale me with tales of his experiences in the dutch merchant marine - I would swap my own yarns of being a commercial hookah diver in the early 1970’s, in addition to the 7000 plus nautical mile ocean voyages I seemed to take every two years between San Francisco and the Philippines, back in the 1950s and 1960s m, when I was a Navy brat roaming Southeast Asia with my military family.Perhaps that affinity for salt water was partly why Rutger usually invited me to formally interview, or sometimes just hang out with, him on his boat. Visits that always felt like I’d partially returned, somehow, to the seas that I still yearn for today.We also shared a deep compassion for and understanding of the realities of Third World poverty. In that regard, Rutger quietly but consistently always put his money where his mouth was. His Rutger Hauer Starfish Foundation, a non-profit whose monies went towards education about and medical treatment for AIDS sufferers (primarily women and children), did much good. It will continue to do so.In any event, earlier this evening, still stung by his passing and wondering how to privately honor Rutger’s memory, I remembered his love for sailing and the sea-“My escape from insanity,” he once told me.Thus my recently-completed hour long walk. Through drizzling rain and overcast skies, alongside the beautiful St. John’s River. By myself, on a solitary trail, accompanied only by my thoughts, the soft sussuration of the river’s flow, the occasional cries of Blue Herons, Ospreys and Ibises, and the melancholy memories of a unique, iconoclastic individual I wish could have walked beside me.Sail on, sailor. Sail on.
RIP Russi Taylor.You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login