53-year-old American actress and photographer Berry Berenson, the widow of actor Anthony Perkins and younger sister of actress Marisa Berenson, was one of the ninety-two passengers and crew on American Airlines Flight 11, en route from Boston to Los Angeles, that terrorists crashed into the North Tower of New York’s World Trade Center on September 11th. She appeared in such movies as Cat People (1982) andWinter Kills.
Former TV reporter, Beat poet, Second City founding member and belated character actor, Victor [Keung] Wong died in his sleep on September 12th, aged 74. His nearly thirty films include Big Trouble in Little China, The Golden Child, Prince of Darkness andTremors. He retired in 1998 after suffering two strokes.
46-year-old Lani O’Grady (Lanita Rose Agrati), best known for playing the eldest daughter in the TV series Eight is Enough (1977–81), was found dead at her California home on September 25th. The actress, whose other credits include Massacre at Central High (aka Blackboard Massacre), The Curious Case of the Campus Corpse and the TV movie The Kid With the Broken Halo, had suffered from panic attacks, agoraphobia and alcohol and drug abuse.
Actress Gloria Foster, who appeared as The Oracle in The Matrix, died of complications from diabetes in New York on September 29th, aged 64.
Early American TV sex symbol Dagmar (Virginia Ruth Egnor, aka Jennie Lewis) died on October 9th, aged 79. The buxom blonde appeared on Broadway with comedy duo Olsen and Johnson in the mid-1940s, and guested on TV alongside Jerry Lester, Morey Amsterdam and Milton Berle during the following decade. She retired in the 1970s.
American actor Otis Young died of a stroke on October 12th, aged 69. His films include The Clones, The Capture of Bigfoot and Blood Beach.
British actress Linden Travers (Florence Lindon-Travers), best remembered for her role as Mrs Todhunter in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes, died on October 23rd, aged 88. Her other films include The Terror (1939), The Ghost Train (1940), The Bad Lord Byron and No Orchids For Miss Blandish, which was banned in Britain for several years. Her younger brother was actor Bill Travers.
British character actress Jenny Laird, who appeared in Village of the Damned (1960) and the TV movies A Place to Die and The Masks of Death (as Mrs Hudson, opposite Peter Cushing’s Sherlock Holmes), died on Halloween, aged 84. She also appeared in episodes of TV’s Doctor Who and Hammer House of Horror.
Actor and Tony award-winning composer Albert Hague, who played the cantankerous Mr Shorofsky in Fame and the spin-off TV series, died of lung cancer on November 12th, aged 81. In 1966 he scored the animated short Dr Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (narrated by Boris Karloff), and also appeared in Nightmares, Space Jam and TV’s Tales from the Darkside.
American actor Byron Sanders, who appeared in The Flesh Eaters and also modelled for Salvador Dali’s ‘Crucifixion’, died the same day, aged 76.
Veteran British comedienne and character actress Peggy Mount died on November 13th, aged 86.
33-year-old British actress Charlotte Coleman, best remembered as Hugh Grant’s room-mate in Four Weddings and a Funeral, died of a severe asthma attack in London on November 14th. She also appeared in The Young Poisoner’s Handbook, Bearskin: An Urban Fairytale and TV’s Worzel Gummidge, as well as providing voices for the feature cartoon Faeries.
79-year-old Australian actor and screenwriter Michael St. Clair died of a brain aneurysm while driving to an audition on November 22nd. He appeared in Skullduggery and the TV movie The Hound of the Baskervilles (1972), and scripted Mission Mars and co-wrote The Body Stealers (aka Thin Air).
Actor and opera singer Norman Lumsden, best known as author J. R. Hartley looking for a copy of his own book on flyfishing in the British Yellow Pages TV commercial, died on November 28th, aged 95. His first job was as a commercial artist for publisher Hodder & Stoughton, where he designed book covers for Leslie Charteris’s The Saint series and other titles. Benjamin Britten wrote the part of Peter Quince in his 1960 opera of A Midsummer Night’s Dream with Lumsden in mind.
John Mitchum, the actor brother of Robert, died of a stroke on November 29th, aged 82. He appeared in Bigfoot, High Plains Drifter, Telefon and Escapes.
American character actress Pauline Moore, who played one of the bridesmaids in the 1931 Frankenstein, died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease on December 7th, aged 87. Her other credits include Charlie Chan at the Olympics, Charlie Chan on Treasure Island and Charlie Chan in Reno.
Veteran Indian actor Ashok Kumar [Ganguli], who appeared in more than 300 films during a career that spanned over sixty years, died of a heart attack on December 10th, aged 90.
Singer Rufus Thomas, best known for his novelty hit ‘Do the Funky Chicken’, died of apparent heart failure in Memphis, Tennessee, on December 15th, aged 84. The Rolling Stones covered his ‘Walking the Dog’ on their first album in 1964.
72-year-old British actor Sir Nigel Hawthorne died of a heart attack on December 19th after a two-year battle against pancreatic cancer. He won a Tony Award for his stage performance as C. S. Lewis in the 1991 Broadway production of Shadowlands and was forced to pull out of playing Jack the Ripper in From Hell (2001) when potentially lethal blood clots were discovered on his lungs prior to filming. He also appeared in DreamChild, Demolition Man, Richard III, Memoirs of a Survivor, Firefox and the 1981 TV movie of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and contributed voice characterizations to Water ship Down, The Plague Dogs and Disney’s The Black Cauldron and Tarzan.
American character actor Lance Fuller died in a Los Angeles nursing home after a long illness on December 22nd, aged 73. He portrayed the Metaluna Mutant in the classic This Island Earth, and also appeared in The She Creature (1956), Voodoo Woman, The Bride and the Beast, The Andromeda Strain and episodes of TV’s Thriller and The Twilight Zone.