Arg

[nycwriters]

Robert Pastorelli, the dude from Murphy Brown died. Apparently from a drug overdose in the same house where his live-in girlfriend shot herself in 1999.

They seem to die in threes, I wonder who the third will be.

*sigh*




'Murphy Brown' Co-Star Pastorelli Dies Aged 49

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Actor Robert Pastorelli, who gained TV fame as Eldin Bernecky, the house painter with artistic vision on the CBS comedy series "Murphy Brown," was found dead in his house with drug paraphernalia nearby, the Los Angeles County Coroner's Office said on Tuesday.

Pastorelli, 49, was found dead in the bathroom of his Hollywood Hills home on Monday afternoon, a coroner's spokesman said. Drug equipment was found at the scene, he added, and an autopsy was being conducted to determine the cause of death.

The New Jersey-born Pastorelli got into stage acting in the 1970s in productions like "Rebel Without A Cause" but found his greatest fame on "Murphy Brown," painting the house of the title character played by Candice Bergen (news) but never quite finishing his ambitious artistic projects on her walls.

Nominated for an Emmy for best guest actor in a comedy in 1995 for an episode of that show, he later briefly had his own CBS series, "Double Rush," about the manager of a bicycle messenger service. Pastorelli also starred in "Cracker," a remake of a British TV series about a psychologist dealing with criminals who has his own vices. That show is sometimes cited as an example of a successful British show that did not make the transition to American TV well.

Most recently, he was cast in the film "Be Cool," a sequel to "Get Shorty."

Syndicated TV entertainment show Access Hollywood, which first reported the actor's death, said his girlfriend died in the same home in early 1999. The two had a daughter.

[SpecialK]

Awww. . . I loved him.

[priceyfatprude]

*like Brando in Streetcar*




ELLLLLLLLLDOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNN



This makes me very sad.

[Aphrodite]

I thought he played great characters.

I liked how he played them.

What a shame.

[Audreyvgs]

I thought he was wonderful. sad.

The other two are Paul Winfield and Spalding Gray:

Wednesday, March 10, 2004
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Sounder's Winfield Dead
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Oscar-nominated actor suffered a heart attack on Sunday at the age of 62.
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By_Mark Umbach
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LOS ANGELES

Paul Winfield, the Oscar-nominated star of 1972's Sounder, died of a heart attack on Sunday, March 7th, in Los Angeles. The Emmy-winning thesp was 62-years-old.

Born in Los Angeles, Winfield began his acting career by becoming the first African-American to win the best actor prize in a regional high school competition. From there, he went on to attend the University of Portland, Stanford and UCLA. After leaving school, just six credits short of a bachelor's degree, he landed his first big legit roles when cast by Burgess Meredith in the controversial plays The Dutchman and The Toilet.

In 1969, Winfield was hired by Sidney Poitier for his first film, The Lost Man. For a few years he was a contract player at Columbia Pictures, but he soon made his return to the stage by joining the Stanford Repertory Theater and Los Angeles' Inner City Cultural Center Theater.

His role in Sounder, which scored him a Best Actor Oscar nomination, led to a busy career in both film and television. One of his most famous television roles was on the sitcom Julia. His role as Diahann Carroll's boyfriend opened the door for many black actors on TV. In 1978 and 1979, he earned Emmy nominations for his work in the specials King and Roots: The Next Generation, respectively. Then, in 1995, Winfield won an Emmy for guest starring on the show Picket Fences.

Some of his more notable feature work includes Damnation Alley, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, The Terminator and Cliffhanger. More recently, Winfield has been providing narration for the A&E crime series City Confidential. His last on-screen television role was in the 2003 television remake of Sounder.

_______________________________________________


Spalding Gray
(Filed: 10/03/2004)

Spalding Gray, who has died aged 62, was best known as a writer and performer of autobiographical monologues chronicling his quest for wisdom, experience and the elusive "perfect moment".



His distinctive achievement, observed Simon Prosser in The Sunday Telegraph in 1993, was "the reworking of his own life as a tragi-comic road movie in which he stars as a perpetual innocent abroad, revealing elemental truths in spite of himself and evoking situations in which almost anyone can imagine finding themselves". He was, Prosser added, too funny for the avant-garde, too quirky for the mainstream.

Gray's most famous monologue was Swimming to Cambodia, loosely based on his experiences while acting in The Killing Fields, filmed on location in Thailand in 1983.

He had told the director, Roland Joffe, that he knew nothing about politics. "Perfect," replied Joffe, "we're looking for the American Ambassador's aide." Three years later, Swimming to Cambodia was itself turned into a film, directed by Jonathan Demme.

Demme's film opens with the hunched figure of Gray walking across lower Manhattan to the stagedoor of the Performing Garage, where his audience waits. He comes on stage, sits at a wooden table, draws a long breath, then talks for 87 minutes - in the live show it was for two hours.

Aside from a few clips from The Killing Fields, the film of Swimming to Cambodia relies for its action on Gray's gesticulations, a few dramatically-timed sips of water, and the unfurling of two maps of the Far East. With Laurie Anderson's hypnotic soundtrack, the effect is strangely mesmerising.

In coming to grips with the events depicted in The Killing Fields, Gray reached the conclusion that for the first time he was dealing with "a larger psychosis than my own neurosis".

The success of Swimming to Cambodia, which had been evolving as a one-man show over two and a half years, paved the way for Gray's move "uptown" for the premiere later in 1986 of his next monologue, Terrors of Pleasure.

This was the parabolic story of his purchase of a collapsing cabin in the Catskills, and his attempt to capitalise on his new-found fame by getting television and film work to pay for the necessary repairs.

The attempt was not successful, partly because Gray had never been happy with the pretence of emotion demanded by fictional roles. In the end he returned to the Catskills to be confronted by the question of whether he had bought the cabin merely so that he could make a monologue out of it.

Spalding Gray was born at Barrington, Rhode Island, on June 5 1941. His mother became a Christian Scientist after she suffered the first of two nervous breakdowns; after the second, in 1967, she committed suicide.

Spalding and his two brothers were brought up as Christian Scientists and, by his account, "had to work very hard in order to keep a hot line to God". Restless at school, Spalding was "into petty demolition", setting off cherry bombs in the school lavatory and throwing rotten eggs in the halls.

Concerned at his low grades - he was dyslexic - his parents transferred him to Fryeburg Academy, Maine, where his academic performance improved.

He later went to Emerson College, Boston, where he began to act. While working nights as a dish washer, he developed the habit of relating the events of his day to whoever was around to listen.

After graduating in 1965, he began his acting career in summer stock on Cape Cod, and landed his first role as a psychotic in The Curious Savage. He later worked at a small theatre in Saratoga, New York, before moving to New York City in 1967 to live with his girlfriend, Elizabeth LeCompte.

His mother's suicide later that year plunged him into a depression that lasted for nine years and culminated in his own nervous breakdown. During this period he began to participate in underground experimental theatre groups, and he and Elizabeth LeCompte joined Richard Schechner's Performance Group at the Performing Garage.

Gray later recalled how Schechner was the first director to tell him "to be myself first, before . . acting a role or taking on a character". Under Schechner's direction, he played the leading role of Hoss in Sam Shephard's Tooth of Crime for two years, but became increasingly dissatisfied with having to "mimic make-believe emotions", wanting instead to re-enact feelings he had experienced himself.

In 1979 Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte formed the Wooster Group and put on the autobiographical Sakonnet Point, named after the resort in Rhode Island where Gray had spent summers as a child; it developed into the trilogy Three Places in Rhode Island, with Gray as the main character and Elizabeth LeCompte as director and designer.

Wanting a simpler format and more direct contact with the audience, Gray next wrote his first monologue, Sex and Death to the Age 14, setting his childhood experiences against the big events of the time, including the polio epidemic, which Gray survived by "washing my hands with rubbing alcohol and staying out of crowded movie theatres".

This was followed by Booze, Cars and College Girls, and then India [And After], an account of a Wooster Group's tour of India and his subsequent nervous breakdown.

Gray's monologues, always delivered at a bare desk with a glass of water, were soon hailed as a new form of performance art and began to fill theatres not just in Manhattan but all over the world.

But his growing celebrity, especially after Swimming to Cambodia, did not allay his neuroses. In 1992, aged 51, he took up downhill skiing in the midst of a midlife crisis as he approached the age at which his mother took her own life; this gave rise to another monologue.

Gray's one novel, Impossible Vacation (1994), followed the progress of Brewster North, a character immediately recognisable as a version of the author, in his quest for a perfect holiday.

It is only when, on his way home, he lands up in a jail in Las Vegas that North experiences the epiphany he has hoped for: "I was beginning to be aware of how my imagination was often more vivid and exciting than the actual experiences I had in the outside world, that the essence of my life was imagining the places that I was not in . . . For the first time in years I felt a strange freedom."

His other works included Gray's Anatomy (1994), a memoir of his neurotic attempts to get a "pucker" ironed out of his left eye.

In 2001 Gray suffered a broken hip, fractured skull and sciatic nerve damage in his foot after a van crashed into his hire car in Ireland. Unimpressed by Irish hospitals, he wrote and performed a monologue about his experiences, then began a book, Black Spot.

He became more bitter and gloomy about his injuries as time went on. "I can't take long walks," he complained. "I don't feel whole any more. I've been maimed and there's been no acknowledgment of it."

In October 2002 he sought to jump from a bridge near his home on Long Island, but was talked down by a passer-by. On January 10 this year he went missing and was later seen on the Staten Island ferry. His body was recovered from the East River on Sunday.

He is survived by his wife, Kathleen Russo, two sons and a stepdaughter.


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