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Patrick Kiger

As a writer of steamy, salacious fiction about the rich and famous, Jackie Collins might have been a bigger star than her big sister Joan, the scheming Alex Carrington in the 1980s prime-time soap opera Dynasty. Jackie, who passed away Sept. 19 at age 77 in Los Angeles, churned out more than three…
Judy Carne sticks in our memories as the “Sock it to me!” character on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (1968-73). When she uttered the magic words, she’d abruptly be doused with water, fall through a trap door or suffer some other inglorious fate.
Wes Craven was the Steven Spielberg of slasher movies, that grisly sub-genre of horror movies peopled by mask-wearing madmen and serial killers with razor-blade gloves.
Oliver Sacks was perhaps the only neurologist to inspire a hit Hollywood film, 1990's Awakenings starring Robin Williams. The movie was based on Sacks' 1973 memoir about his work with encephalitis patients, one of 14 books by the physician and professor turned author, who passed away Aug. 30 at age…
In the 1960s, student civil rights activist-turned-Georgia legislator Julian Bond, who passed away Aug. 15 at age 75 in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., cut such a charismatic figure with his slim, handsome looks and dazzling gift for oratory that some envisioned him becoming the first African-American…
As the low-key buffer between folksy “Dandy Don” Meredith and pontificating Howard Cosell on ABC’s Monday Night Football , Frank Gifford became such a sportscasting institution that some younger viewers might not have realized that he was once one of the game’s top players.
In the late 1950s, a young surgical resident at Johns Hopkins Hospital named James Jude learned that his friend Guy Knickerbocker had noticed something strange during an experiment. Knickerbocker, a graduate student, had pressed electrical defibrillator paddles against a dog’s chest, and amazingly,…
E.L. Doctorow took the art of historical novels a step beyond by reimagining historical figures as fictional characters. In his most famous work, the 1975 best-seller Ragtime, Doctorow, who passed away on July 21 in New York at age 84, set a cast that includes Harry Houdini, Sigmund Freud, Henry…
With his dark, dashing looks and commanding presence, Egyptian-born Omar Sharif dominated the big screen in such epics as Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965).
If you're a fan of the Burt's Bees line of natural, environmentally friendly personal care products, you might have assumed that the Walt-Whitman lookalike on the label was a generic hippie dreamed up by marketing experts.
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