the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually still alive

Name Bosko Balaban
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Telma Hopkins!

but that was last week.

today it was ARNOLD STANG!!!!

don't know why i though telma hopkins died.

Zsa Zsa Gabor just turned 91 a few days ago.

abe vigoda

I think Ernest Borgnine is still at it too.

doris day

she's getting a grammy tomorrow

Shirley Temple

!!!

Leonard skinner, but he's now dead.

I was surprised that Bosko even lived.

― Ned Raggett (Ned), Tuesday, June 15, 2004 4:15 AM (6 years ago) Bookmark

dying here

had no idea Sam Beckett lived until 1989 until the other day

j.d. salinger, but then he died not long after i found out

Louie Anderson

He was on Tim & Eric a year or two ago.

Kenneth Mars, but once again after he was dead.

Jane Russell

Clive Dunn

speaking of: Rex Reed, 86

and, tangentially of course: Gene Shalit, 99

Btw Cindy Adams has two completely different birthdays attributed to her online. She may even be 95.

I was fairly confident that one of the Vera fashion designers (not sure which) had died tragically several years ago, but I wasn't sure about the other one. both "Veras" are still alive, though: Barbara Bradley Baekgaard (who named Vera Bradley after her mother) is 85 or 86, and Vera Wang is 75. I must have been thinking of Kate Spade, who killed herself in 2018 :(

tbf I live in a world where fashion designers are incorporeal entities whose names just happen to be attached to shit I'll never be able to afford. a few years ago I found myself wondering if Coco Chanel was still alive, only to learn that she was born in the same year as Mussolini. may they both RIP

Also, Roy Thinnes, who is 87, still looking for a shortcut that he never found. Coincidentally the same age as Loretta Swit, who... is not still alive.

I had completely forgotten, or perhaps blanked it from my memory, that Loretta Swit was in the film of Whoops Apocalypse. She played the president of the United States. What a curiously long-lived franchise that was. There was the UK TV show. The film. And Woops!, a US sitcom from 1991 which seemingly has no connection beyond the name, and yet it's an unusual coincidence.

Whoa i didnt realize she was that old and also dead

She just died yesterday.

Jimmy Boyle, 81 last week.

Dickie Bird, 92. Reminiscing about the 50th anniversary of this match https://www.thecricketer.com/topics/features/clive_lloyd_buxton_summer_1975_snow_stopped_play_june_lancashire_derbyshire.html

raúl castro turned 94 today

Claude Lelouch, 87. Honestly would have thought he'd be much older, Un Homme et une Femme was in 1966 and it was already his 7th film!

Peter Watkins (director of The War Game, Punishment Park etc), 89

xp didn't he do Rendezvous? That was a VHS classic

One of the Cinematheque Ontario staff mistook me for Watkins in 2004. I'm proud to say that at the age of 32, I evidently looked like a remarkably well-preserved 68 year-old.

Alan Dean Foster, who isn't even all that old. He's 78. Why was I thinking about Alan Dean Foster? There's an article in The Guardian today by the daughter of Erica Jong, who loves writing about herself despite not actually having done anything interesting. It prompted me to find out whether Alan Dean Foster's Alien novelisation was still in print, or not. It is!

It got me to thinking about books going out of print and also whether Alan Dean Foster was a better writer than Erica Jong. Peter Benchley's entire literary career with the exception of Jaws appears to have gone out of print. Peter Taylor's A Summons to Memphis and Penelope Fitzgerald's Offshore, which both won major literary prizes but no-one likes them, are still in print although it's unlikely they're ever going to have a third wind. Alien is still in print on account of the franchise connection.

I'm not sure what point I'm trying to make. Part of the problem is that I hate books. I started with Alan Dean Foster's novelisation of Alien as a kid, and what's the point of reading beyond that? It has all the stuff from the director's cut of that film, but from 1979! He wasn't allowed to see the alien, so his descriptions of it are incredibly vague, which works because we all know what the alien looks like.

No, tell a lie. I have read another book. Aliens, also by Alan Dean Foster. It has all the stuff from the director's cut of that film, but from 1987! He... presumably had seen the alien at that point. It has the sentry gun scene, which is why the film felt so strange when I finally got to see it. I have no idea if any of Erica Jong's novels have sentry guns. Probably not. I imagine they're full of rich people from New York going to parties but being unhappy, because they're cretinous morons.

Also James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late. I've read that. It doesn't have any aliens. But it was a far, far better novel than I expected.

Admittedly whenever I hear Alan Dean Foster's name now I think of this paragraph from Harlan Ellison's "Xenogenesis" essay where Ellison asked his author friends about all the insane horrible, deeply-sinister shit that science-fiiction fans do to the subjects of their fandom:

I’ve saved the best for last. Of all the things that have been done to me—and I have only scratched the surface here—and of all the things that have been done to other writers and artists, the prizewinning monstrousness, the anecdote that I think will put the last nail in the testament, comes from Alan Dean Foster.

I’ve saved it for last, because not even the most vicious detractor can find a bad word to say about Alan Dean Foster. He is as decent and courteous a man as one can hope to meet. “You ain’ t gonna believe this one:”

— —

Dear Harlan,
In re yours of the 5th. I have only one incident that might suit your purposes and I still haven’t quite figured it out. I was heading back to my hotel room in the company of one of the con staff, after delivering the guest of honor speech at the past Okon, when someone yelled, “Alan Foster?” and I turned around and they hit me in the face with a paper cup full of warm vomit.

To this day what puzzles me is not the attack itself, which one comes to expect after a while, but the type of mind that not only could conceive of such a thing but actually find amusement in the preservation of its own vomit for purposes of using it to assault another person. Someone had to throw up carefully into a cup and then carry it around with them while in the process of searching me out. To me, that’ s infinitely sicker than actually throwing the stuff.

Just watched an old Alfred Hitchcock Hour and was amazed to find that June Lockhart is still with us, and will turn 100 on June 25th.

Also, Wiki offered this tidbit: She is a noted David Bowie fan, and frequently kept a picture of him in her wallet.[15]

Yep, saw her with her parents (Gene and Kathleen) in 1938 A Christmas Carol, when TCM showed several versions back to back.
As a science fiction reader who started really early and has gone on for a long-ass time, I'm tempted to say that Alan Dean Foster should have been (and maybe was, judging by tone of above letter to Harlan) privately flattered that his (forgettable by me) writing could have inspired such a response---but as an Internet psychoanalyst of people I've never met, I figure that it's at least as likely that "Alan Dean Foster" is code or codes in the vomit cup tosser's own private universe(s?), that the writer as such may or may not figure significantly in such welter weather.

Dolores Huerta, 95

Gary Snyder is now 95.

Gilbert Comte, 92, a writer and journalist, is famous in Paris if nowhere else. A living connection to (and arrestee of) the de Gaulle era.

robert wagner, 95

richard wagner, 212

his worldview is alive and well, anyway

Cynthia Ozick, now 97.

an old Alfred Hitchcock Hour

I was just reminded that four of Hitchcock's famous blonde leads are still with us. Kim Novak (92), thread perennial Eva Marie Saint (100, bday is July 4th!), Tippi Hedren (95), and Vera Miles (95).

fauja singh

Edmund W. Gordon, social psychologist, 101.

― alimosina, Friday, 21 April 2023 17:23 (two years ago)

104 today.

Norman Podhoretz

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GtW_D_iXkAEK2cR?format=jpg&name=medium

Barbara Holdridge, 93 or 94, co-founder of Caedmon Records.

― alimosina, Tuesday, 28 November 2023 18:16 (one year ago)

She departed on the 9th. A link to a better world.

Christopher Lillicrap, 76

Raymond Mungo ("78 or 79," according to Wikipedia), who'd be a lot easier to search here if not for Mungo Jerry. Does have the distinction of a one-post ILX thread:

Raymond Mungo - C or D?

Just for fun

Tom Courtenay
Julie Christie
Eleanor Bron
Paul (McCartney)

Tom Courtenay
Julie Christie

Talking of "Billy Liar", Billy's girlfriend, Helen Fraser, is still with us. As is George Innes, who used to be in everything on British TV, he's 87.

The Hitchcock TV show turned up another one for me: Nancy Olson. She played Betty Schaefer in Sunset Boulevard. She’ll turn 97 in July.

the rumors are true

Not so much surprised he's alive, but Penny Rimbaud from Crass is 82.. (same age as Brian Wilson & Sly Stone)

Just weird to have first-wave punkers in their 80's, though I know he was a big older than most when that scene coalesced

A year older than spring chicken Charlie Harper of the UK Subs!

Naked gardening and flaxseed-only diet will extend your lifespan past all reckoning, unlike most from the crust-punk scene who'll be lucky if they make it to 70.

well I just watched that Soft Focus interview with Ian Svenonius on youtube and he smoked about 16 rollies in a half-hour

Bobby Bare, 90

Ray Mungo! Didn't follow his writing and life past the first books, but he was a counterculture worker for sure, when that counted, and prob later:
http://scua.library.umass.edu/mungo-raymond-1946/

One for Canadians: Robert Nixon, leader of the Ontario Liberal Party from '67 to '76. Ran unsuccessfully for Premier three times. Steve Pakin had clips from a recently recorded interview tonight--97 in July.

David Peterson's on the show too...Knowing full well that politics has never not been vicious, I do feel a twinge of something approaching nostalgia when I watch the politicians of my youth looking back on their careers today.

Seymour Hersh

This is the thread for Wendy Craig’s 91st birthday.

terry riley turned 90 today

From a similar milieu, Gordon Mumma is also still alive and is also 90.

Maybe needs a "the last famous person you were pleased to discover was actually still alive" thread.

La Monte Young will turn 90 in October, eternity willing.

This is the thread for Wendy Craig’s 91st birthday.

― Ward Fowler, Monday, June 23, 2025 5:23 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

initially thought this read Wendy Carlos. sure enough, still kicking at 85

So is Patrick Gleeson, 90. Was there something in the water in the mid 1930s?