Rodney Dangerfield (1921–2004)
Rodney Dangerfield, the goggle-eyed comic famed for his self-deprecating one-liners and signature phrase "I can't get no respect," died on Oct. 5 at age 82, his publicist said.
Dangerfield became a pop culture sensation with a string of broad film comedies starting with Caddyshack in 1980. That same year, he came out with a popular comedy album, Rappin Rodney, earning him a Grammy. His 1986 film Back to School, in which he starred, was also popular.
Dangerfield was born in Babylon, New York in 1921. His birth name was Jacob Cohen. According to a biography published on the Web site IMDb, Dangerfield began writing jokes at age 15 and started performing before he was 20. He spent 10 years doing stand up on the road, during which time he went by the stage name Jack Roy. In the 1950s, he changed his stage name to Rodney Dangerfield. In 1961, he made a notable appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, during which he made his host laugh—a rarity for Sullivan.
In addition to becoming a hit at nightclubs across the county, Dangerfield made many appearances on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, The Dean Martin Show, and, later, on Saturday Night Live. Additional film credits include Easy Money, Natural Born Killers, Meet Wally Sparks, and Little Nicky. Earlier this year, Dangerfield released his autobiography, It's Not Easy Bein' Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs.
He died at 1:20 p.m. PDT at the UCLA Medical Center, where he had undergone heart valve replacement surgery in August, spokesman Kevin Sasaki said in a statement.
—Duane Byrge, The Hollywood Reporter
—Additional reporting by Jamie Painter Young
Janet Leigh (1927–2004)
Janet Leigh, whose notorious shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho shocked moviegoers in the 1960s and earned her an Oscar nomination, died Sunday at her home in Beverly Hills. She was 77.
The actress—who had battled vasculitis, an inflammation of the blood vessels, for the past year—was surrounded by her husband, Robert Brandt, and her daughters Kelly Curtis and Jamie Lee Curtis, according to Heidi Schaeffer, a representative for Jamie Lee Curtis.
Although Leigh established herself in the 1950s with a steady string of costume dramas and romantic comedies, her appearance in Psycho left moviegoers with an iconographic screen moment, which eclipsed her surrounding career. As the scheming secretary Marion Crane, she met her death just 45 minutes into the film at the hands of the knife-wielding Anthony Perkins. That Hitchcock would kill off his star in the first half of the movie was considered a daring gambit, and the brutally edited sequence earned Psycho a reputation as the granddaddy of slasher movies.
In the 1995 book Psycho: Behind the Scenes in the Classic Thriller, which Leigh co-authored, she recalled that filming the sequence was easy until the last 20 seconds, when she had to express total horror as her character was slashed to death. She often said she hadn't been able to take a shower since the movie. "It's not a hype, not something I thought would be good for publicity," she insisted. "Honest to gosh, it's true."
Jamie Lee Curtis continued what became a family tradition when she made her film debut as another slasher-pursued heroine in 1978's Halloween. And mother and daughter then teamed for the 1980 thriller The Fog and 1998's Halloween H20: 20 Years Later.
Leigh was born Jeanette Helen Morrison on July 6, 1927, in Merced, Calif. She attended high school in Stockton and later enrolled at the College of the Pacific. A music major, she performed for the patients of the state mental hospital, which inspired her to a lifetime of charitable activities in social projects. She was discovered by actress Norma Shearer, who was vacationing at a Northern California ski resort where Leigh's parents worked. Shearer saw a picture of Leigh on the lodge wall and passed on the photo to Lew Wasserman, then head of the MCA talent agency, who arranged for a screen test at MGM, where Leigh was put under contract for $50 a week. She soon made her motion picture debut, starring opposite Van Johnson in the love story The Romance of Rosy Ridge, set in the post-Civil War era.
She acknowledged that nearly all of the subsequent roles offered her were variations on the Rosy Ridge character of a vulnerable and innocent beauty. Leigh's second movie, If Winter Comes, starred Walter Pidgeon and Deborah Kerr. She followed with such high-profile fare as Words and Music, with Mickey Rooney and July Garland; Act of Violence, with Robert Ryan; Little Women, with Elizabeth Taylor; and That Forsyte Woman, with Greer Garson.
Her beauty also attracted more than mainstream attention. Howard Hughes pursued her relentlessly, but she turned him down, agreeing to a date only if she brought her mother and father along. Hughes agreed, and the foursome dined quietly in a San Fernando Valley restaurant.
Although she had two brief marriages in the '40s, her marriage to fellow star Tony Curtis in 1951 launched the couple into a whirlwind of attention, celebrated as they were as Hollywood's Perfect Couple. They appeared in four films together, including Houdini and The Vikings, and established a family together before divorcing in 1962. "Tony and I had a wonderful time together; it was an exciting, glamorous period in Hollywood," Leigh said in an interview. "A lot of great things happened, most of all two beautiful children." But it was Leigh's 1964 marriage to businessman Brandt that would prove the more long-lasting.
Psycho, for which she also won a Golden Globe, was bracketed by two other classic movies: In 1958, she appeared as Charlton Heston's wife in the moody Touch of Evil, and in 1962 she played a woman who encounters Frank Sinatra in the original version of The Manchurian Candidate.
As the '60s drew to a close, Leigh cut back on her performances in film, though she continued to take an occasional television role, such as the memorable 1975 Columbo episode in which she played an actress who kills for a comeback.
Throughout her adult life, Leigh was very active in a number of charitable causes, many involving mental health. Her volunteer civic efforts won widespread admiration, including the respect of President Johnson, who at one time offered her the ambassadorship to Finland, a post she turned down to be with her family. For her charitable activities, she received the Special Achievement Award from the Exceptional Children's Foundation in 1976 for her work with SHARE on behalf of the mentally handicapped.
In addition to her husband and two daughters, she is survived by two grandchildren. Plans for a celebration of her life, which will be private, are pending.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations be made to Motion Picture and Television Fund.
—Duane Byrge and Gregg Kilday, The Hollywood Reporter
—The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Ignatius "Iggie" Wolfington (1920–2004)
Ignatius "Iggie" Wolfington, a stage and screen actor who was nominated for a Tony Award for the original Broadway production of The Music Man, died Sept. 30 of natural causes, said his friend, actor Henry Gibson. He was 84.
As the longtime West Coast representative of the New York-based Actors' Fund of America, Wolfington helped thousands of actors in need of financial, medical, and other assistance. It was his proposal that the Actors' Fund establish a West Coast office to better serve Hollywood-area actors. He served 15 years in the office, retiring in 1984. He served in the Army in World War II and received a Purple Heart and Silver Star.
He first won acclaim in the 1952 Broadway production of Mrs. McThing, starring Helen Hayes. He received the Actors' Equity Association award for most promising performance in a supporting role. His Tony nomination came in 1958 for his role as Robert Preston's sidekick in The Music Man. In 1976, Wolfington played Mayor Shinn in the Broadway revival of the musical starring Dick Van Dyke. He also appeared in film, including Steven Spielberg's 1941, and on television. Wolfington received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award and the Actors' Equity Philip Loeb Humanitarian Award.