Just returned from the shops to learn that actress CARRIE FISHER has died. Saw her on a couple of chat shows not that long ago, and it's hard to believe that she's now gone. To paraphrase a well-known saying: "May she be with the Source."
******
Sadly, only a day or two after Carrie passed away, her mother, actress DEBBIE REYNOLDS, has also died. Let's hope we can get into 2017 without losing any other celebrities, eh? Such a shame.
12 comments:
I'm ready to see 2016 fading in my rear view mirror.
Alas, G, for poor Carrie, it has already faded. I wish it was 1977 again.
This was a shock. I knew she had a substance abuse problem in the past, but I didn't suspect that she had any serious health problems in recent years. Until the news of her heart attack last week. And, even after that, the reports kept saying that she was in "stable" condition.
With John Glenn, Nancy Reagan, and Florence Henderson, at least they were very old, and the news was not unexpected.
Somehow, I always sort of halfway expect rock stars to die young, or relatively young, so Prince, David Bowie, and George Michael did not come as a big surprise.
But now, I want to put Chrissie Hynde, Stevie Nicks, Patty Smyth, Terri Nunn, and Susanna Hoffs in a safe house until next week.
I had to cut & paste your comment, TC, because there was about a mile of blank space underneath your last sentence, which gave the impression that yours was the final comment. It's getting scary now, given the amount of celebrities who have died in the last couple or so years. At least their 'celluloid' performances ensure that they'll still be around to some degree long after we've both fallen off the twig. I don't want to even think about which star might be next.
OTOH, and with all due respect to celebrities and their fans, how many ordinary people died in the past year? People you never heard about if you did not know them personally.
In the US, 87 firefighters and 138 police officers were killed this year so far. And none of them made the cover of Rolling Stone or People magazine.
And fatal traffic accidents are so common that they don't even get a lot of publicity locally.
Very true, TC, but so-called 'ordinary' people don't have the advantage of that curious illusion that certain celebrities have of seeming known to all of us, so the deaths of strangers (which, of course celebrities are also 'though we don't think of them in that way) don't affect us in the same manner. I suppose it's because we associate many celebrities with periods of our lives as we're growing up, which is not something we do with people we've never heard of before.
Yes, I agree with your comment, Kid - George Michael's death was rather poignant for me because my sister, who died in 1988 aged 19, was a fan of his. I remember that she had a George Michael calendar and she thought he was gorgeous (of course, this was the mid '80s before anybody knew he was gay lol). I recall my father saying that the stars he'd grown up with were mostly gone and now it's happening to our generation. I suppose each death is a reminder of our own mortality and the transitory nature of existence. On a lighter note - Stan Lee is 94 today !!
I remember Jasper Carrot saying he was as surprised to learn that George Michael was gay as he was to learn that Terry Wogan was Irish. (Or maybe it was someone else that he said it about, but I thought it was funny.) Yeah, I knew about Stan's birthday - thought about doing a post about it, but it's pretty well covered elsewhere. To think that he was only 69 when I met him 25 years ago. Only seems like yesterday as well.
I heard she had had a heart attack on Christmas Eve. A lot of people on Facebook ( myself included ) were keeping our fingers tightly crossed that she pulled through, but alas, yet another one claimed by the Grim Reaper.
What an absolute SHIT of a year!
:-(
It's sad, JP, but I think we need to keep a sense of perspective and remember that we don't even know these people. I sometimes wonder if it's presumptuous, if not intrusive, for strangers to feel serious grief over a celebrity's death. I can understand feeling a sense of loss because it's usually the demise of part of our own past that we're mourning, but the outpourings of public grief seen when Princess Diana's died were disproportionate I felt. My own philosophy is that, as long as I'm alive, the year isn't as bad as it might've been.
Yeah, I think you've nailed it with the loss being more a link to something from our own past rather than it being the loss of someone that we actually knew. While not a massive Star Wars fan myself (my tastes in SF run more to Alien, Blade Runner & Robocop)
it was a major cultural icon from my favorite decade, the 1970s. It did hit me personally on another level in as much as Carrie Fisher is only one year older than I am! So make the most of every day (easier to say than do) 'cause you don't know how many you'll have left!
She was only two years older than me, PC, so it was a shock to hear she'd died as you never think of yourself - or people in the same age group - as being old. However, because of her past lifestyle, she looked older than she was, and, sadly, it seems to have been that previous lifestyle that contributed to her death. I imagine those of us of a certain age will prefer to remember her as she was in Star Wars and The Blues Brothers.
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