The Grammy-award winning singer recently announced that ("Coal Miner's Daughter") will become a Broadway musical starring actress and singer Zooey Deschanel.Lynn's spokesperson told The AP the singer said it's "none of their business" how old she is. By most accounts, she's 77. The new documents show she's 80.
"Liam Neeson, his sons, and the entire family are shocked and devastated by the tragic death of their beloved Natasha. They are profoundly grateful for the support, love and prayers of everyone, and ask for privacy during this very difficult time."
"Oh, they're plunging to the earth right in front of our eyes! One just went through the windshield of a parked car! Oh, the humanity! The turkeys are hitting the ground like sacks of wet cement!
A spokeswoman says Diddley died of heart failure. He had suffered a heart attack in August 2007, three months after suffering a stroke while touring in Iowa.
Mr. Pollack’s career defined an era in which big stars (Robert Redford, Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty) and the filmmakers who knew how to wrangle them (Barry Levinson, Mike Nichols) retooled the Hollywood system. Savvy operators, they played studio against studio, staking their fortunes on pictures that served commerce without wholly abandoning art.
Hollywood honored Mr. Pollack in return. His movies received multiple Academy Award nominations, and as a director he won an Oscar for his work on the 1985 film “Out of Africa” as well as nominations for directing “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” (1969) and “Tootsie” (1982).
“Michael Clayton,” of which Mr. Pollack was a producer and a member of the cast, was nominated for a best picture Oscar earlier this year. He delivered a trademark performance as an old-bull lawyer who demands dark deeds from a subordinate, played by George Clooney. (“This is news? This case has reeked from Day 1!” snaps Mr. Pollack’s Marty Bach.) Most recently, Mr. Pollack portrayed the father of Patrick Dempsey’s character in “Made of Honor.”
Martin, who went on to become one of television's busiest directors after splitting with Dan Rowan in the late 1970s, died Saturday night of respiratory complications at a hospital in Santa Monica, family spokesman Barry Greenberg said. ...
"Laugh-in," which debuted in January 1968, was unlike any comedy-variety show before it. Rather than relying on a series of tightly scripted song-and-dance segments, it offered up a steady, almost stream-of-consciousness run of non-sequitur jokes, political satire and madhouse antics from a cast of talented young actors and comedians that also included Ruth Buzzi, Arte Johnson, Henry Gibson, Jo Anne Worley and announcer Gary Owens.
Presiding over it all were Rowan and Martin, the veteran nightclub comics whose standup banter put their own distinct spin on the show.
Like all straight men, Rowan provided the voice of reason, striving to correct his partner's absurdities. Martin, meanwhile, was full of bogus, often risque theories about life, which he appeared to hold with unwavering certainty.
Rambo, of Nashville, Tenn., was on her way to a Mother's Day performance in Texas, according to her Web site.
"She was a giant in the gospel music industry," said Beckie Simmons, Rambo's agent. "Dolly Parton recorded some of her songs."
Parton sent condolences to "everyone involved in this terrible tragedy."
"I know Dottie is in heaven in the arms of God right now, but our earth angel will surely be missed," Parton said in a statement. "Dottie was a dear friend, a fellow singer, songwriter and entertainer, and as of late my duet singing partner."
Rambo was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame last year and the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame in 2006.
Toshiba is widely expected to pull the plug on its HD DVD format sometime in the coming weeks, reliable industry sources say, after a rash of retail defections that followed Warner Home Video's announcement in early January that it would support only the rival Blu-ray Disc format after May. ...
Immediately after the Warner announcement, the HD DVD North American Promotional Group canceled its Consumer Electronics Show presentation. The following week, data collected by the NPD Group revealed Blu-ray took in 93% of all hardware sales for that week.
Toshiba subsequently fired back, drastically cutting its HD DVD player prices by as much as half, effective Jan. 15. But a hoped-for consumer sales surge never materialized; retail point-of-sale data collected by the NPD Group for the week ending Jan. 26 still showed Blu-ray Disc players ahead by a wide margin, 65% to 28%.
Mr. Scheider’s rangy figure, gaunt face and emotional openness made him particularly appealing in everyman roles, most famously as the agonized police chief of “Jaws,” Steven Spielberg’s 1975 breakthrough hit, about a New England resort town haunted by the knowledge that a killer shark is preying on the local beaches.
Mr. Scheider conveyed an accelerated metabolism in movies like “Klute” (1971), his first major film role, in which he played a threatening pimp to Jane Fonda’s New York call girl; and in William Friedkin’s “French Connection” (also 1971), as Buddy Russo, the slightly more restrained partner to Gene Hackman’s marauding police detective, Popeye Doyle. That role earned Mr. Scheider the first of two Oscar nominations.
The co-founder of CleanFlicks, a video editing service once used by many Christians, has been arrested in Utah for allegedly paying a 14-year-old girl for sex.
Daniel Thompson, who ran CleanFlicks till the courts shut it down in 2006, had more recently operated Flix Club, a family-friendly edited-movie video business in Orem, Utah. He was arrested last Thursday on two charges of forcible sexual abuse and two charges of forcible sexual activity with a 14-year-old. Thompson is out on bail.
Thompson’s business partner at Flix Club, Isaac Lifferth, was also arrested on similar charges.
Thompson reportedly told police that Flix Club, which carried videos in which objectionable content had been edited out, was only a front, and that he and Lifferth were also involved in making and distributing porn movies.
Flix Club was forced to close last year after a federal court ruled that movie-editing businesses violated U.S. copyright law when they "sanitized" films by removing nudity, sex, profanity, and other objectionable content.
According to police reports, Thompson and Lifferth allegedly paid two 14-year-old girls $20 each to perform oral sex, and Lifferth allegedly had intercourse with a 16-year-old girl multiple times, including in the offices at Flix Club.
A New York Police Department spokesman says the actor Heath Ledger has been found dead at a downtown Manhattan residence.
There was no immediate word on the cause of death, which was first reported by celebrity Web site TMZ.com.
Turner managed to rehabilitate his image somewhat in his later years, touring around the globe with his band the Kings of Rhythm and drawing critical acclaim for his work. He won a Grammy in 2007 in the traditional blues album category for "Risin' With the Blues."
Mr. Thompson died at his home in Keller, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. "He was battling aggressive lung cancer," said his spokesman, Tracy Pitcox.
His career stretched more than 60 years, and he charted 79 hits in five decades, from his first, "Humpty Dumpty Heart" in 1948 through "Once in a Blue Moon" in 1983. But even after the hits stopped, Mr. Thompson maintained an intensive tour schedule, playing upward of 250 shows a year for most of his career. He performed as recently as Oct. 8 in his native Waco, a day that was declared "Hank Thompson Day" by Texas Governor Rick Perry and Waco Mayor Virginia DuPuy.
"He was a stalwart of the honky-tonk and Western swing traditions," John Rumble , senior historian for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, said yesterday. "He stayed right with that through all of country's various experimentations with pop sounds and rock sounds and folk or what have you."
Mr. Thompson, however, moved beyond traditional venues by embracing new performance opportunities, being among the first country stars to host a TV show, to perform in Las Vegas, and to record a live album. He also recognized and nurtured young talent, mentoring the careers of Merle Travis and Wanda Jackson among others.
"The Wild Side of Life," written by Arlie Carter and William Warren and one of the few hits Mr. Thompson had with a song he didn't write, held the No. 1 spot in 1952 for 15 weeks. It shocked listeners for its unvarnished portrayal of a woman who leaves her husband for a life of good times in the honky-tonks: "I didn't know God made honky-tonk angels/I might have known you'd never make a wife/You gave up the only one who ever loved you/And went back to the wild side of life."
