Singer and musician Buck Page, who founded the original Western band Riders of the Purple Sage in 1936, died on August 21st, aged 84.
Bruce Gary, drummer for The Knack (“My Sharona”) died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma on August 22nd, aged 55.
British character actor Bill Stewart died of complications from motor neurone disease on August 29th, aged 63. He appeared in such films as Morons from Outer Space, 101 Dalmatians (1996) and Fairy Tale: A True Story.
Rockabilly singer and songwriter Jumpin’ Gene Simmons, who had a novelty hit in 1964 with “Haunted House”, died after a long illness the same day, aged 69.
90-year-old Canadian-born Hollywood star Glenn Ford (Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford) was found dead at his home on August 30th. He had suffered a series of strokes over the previous decade. Best known for his many Western roles, Ford also appeared in The Visitor (Stridulum), Virus (Fukkatsu no hi), Happy Birthday to Me, Raw Nerve, the TV movies The Brotherhood of the Bell and The Disappearance of Flight 412, and his final film appearance was as Jonathan Kent in Superman (1978). In 1958 Ford was voted the #1 male box-office attraction. Despite being romantically linked to Rita Hayworth for four decades, the first of his four wives was actress/dancer Eleanor Powell.
1948 and 1952 American Olympic decathlon champion Bob Mathias, who later became an actor and Republican Member of Congress, died of cancer on September 2nd, aged 75. He portrayed Prince Theseus in The Minotaur (1961).
Actor, radio singer/announcer and television station owner John Conte died on September 4th, aged 90. From 1955–58 he hosted more than 600 segments of the NBC-TV daytime anthology series Matinee Theater, which included adaptations of Dracula (with John Carradine), Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (with Robert Montgomery) and Frankenstein (with Primo Camera). Conte founded the NBC affiliate KMIR-TV in California’s Palm Springs-Rancho Mirage area in 1968 and ran the station until he sold it in 1999.
Crikey! Australian “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin was killed the same day by a freak stingray strike in the heart during underwater filming for a show called Ocean’s Deadliest at the Great Barrier Reef. He was only the third person in Australian history to die from a stingray attack. The 44-year-old TV personality and conservationist appeared in Dr Dolittle 2 and starred in the 2002 movie The Crocodile Hunter: Collision Course.
Welsh-born actor Bill Meilen, who played Dr Egas Gottreich in Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital, died of cancer in Canada on September 4th, aged 74. He also appeared in Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed and episodes of TV’s The Ray Bradbury Theater, The Outer Limits, Mysterious Ways, Dead Like Me and Battlestar Galactica.
British actress Hilary [Lavender] Mason, best known for her role as the blind psychic Heather in Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973), died on September 5th, the day after her 89th birthday. She also appeared in the films I Don’t Want to be Born (aka The Devil Within Her), Dolls, Robotjox, Meridian (aka Phantoms), Afraid of the Dark and Haunted. Her TV credits include The Secret Garden (1960), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1976), the 1977 Ripping Yarns episode “The Curse of the Claw”, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes: The Last Vampyre, and episodes of Out of the Unknown and Tales of the Unexpected.
Broadway actor Robert Earl Jones, the father of actor James, died of heart failure on September 7th, aged 95. Blacklisted for refusing to testify before the House of Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s, his relatively few film credits include Sleepaway Camp and Maniac Cop 2.
British character actor Frank Middlemass died on September 8th, aged 87. His credits include Hammer’s Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, Madame Sin, The Island, Dreamchild, Sherlock Holmes and the Leading Lady and episodes of The Avengers, Sherlock Holmes (1968), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Invisible Man (1984), Highlander and the mini-series The 10th Kingdom. In the mid-1960s, needing somewhere to stay in London, Middlemass asked actor Geoffrey Toone (who died in 2005) if he could borrow a spare room for a couple of weeks. Forty years later, he was still there.
American character actor S. John Launer died the same day, aged 86. He began his film career in Creature with the Atom Brain (1955) and went on to appear in The Werewolf, I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Jailhouse Rock (uncredited, as the judge who sends Elvis to prison), along with episodes of TV’s The Twilight Zone, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Wild Wild West and Batman. He retired in the late 1970s.
Herbert Rudley, who co-starred with Basil Rathbone, Lon Cha-ney, Jr, Bela Lugosi, John Carradine, Akim Tamiroff and Tor Johnson in The Black Sleep (1956), died of a heart attack on September 9th, aged 96. He also played Ira Gershwin in Rhapsody in Blue (1945), and his TV credits include episodes of Lights Out, Science Fiction Theater, Suspicion, Men Into Space, Thriller, My Favorite Martian, My Living Doll, The Munsters, I Dream ofjeannie and Project UFO.
20-year-old Daniel Smith, the son of former Playboy model Anna Nicole Smith, died in Nassau, Bahamas, on September 10th. He had been visiting his mother in hospital after she had given birth to a daughter three days earlier. A pathologist later attributed his death to a heart attack caused by drugs.
American-born singer Peter Tevis died of Parkinson’s disease on September 13th, aged 69. Tevis spent most of his early career in Italy, where he was instrumental in creating the distinctive themes for Spaghetti Westerns. After returning to America in the late 1960s, he was credited as music producer on Flesh Gordon (1974).
Hungarian-born champion bodybuilder turned actor Mickey Hargitay (Miklós Hargitay), the father of Emmy Award-winning actress Mariska, died after a long illness on September 14th, aged 80. Inspired by a magazine cover of muscleman Steve Reeves, Hargitay won the “Mr. Universe”, “Mr America” and “Mr Olympia” contests in 1955 and went on to become an ensemble cast member of Mae West’s night-club stage show. He was married to actress Jayne Mansfield from 1958 until three years before her untimely death in a car crash in 1967. The couple appeared together in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, Promises! Promises! and the Italian films The Loves of Hercules and Primitive Love. Hargitay’s other European movies include Revenge of the Gladiators, Lady Frankenstein, Delirium, The Reincarnation of Isabel and, most famously, as the “Crimson Executioner” in Bloody Pit of Horror. On TV he appeared in an episode of The Wild Wild West, and Arnold Schwarzenegger played Hargitay in the 1982 TV movie The Jayne Mansfield Story.