Christopher Plummer, the talented stage and screen star best known for playing opposite Julie Andrews in “The Sound of Music,” died Friday at his home in Connecticut. The cause of death was a blow to the head as the result of a fall. He was 91. He’s the only Canadian so far to have won
You type a lot of obits these days when you work the TV beat. This one hits home harder than most — Jim Bawden. It was Bawden’s TV column I read in the Toronto Star back when I was in high school and college. He covered the medium in print for 40 years (including an
Larry King, who passed away Saturday morning at 87, was a late-blooming, hard-grinding TV icon when I interviewed him in the ’90s and early 2000’s. CNN’s biggest star, especially in the early days, started in radio, honing his craft doing thousands of interviews before moving to television. During a 25 year span on CNN, his
I really wish I had met Earl Pomerantz, especially after reading Ken Levine’s wonderful tribute to his friend and fellow television writer. Pomerantz, a Canadian whose writing credits read like a Paley Centre tribute to the Golden Age of American sitcoms, died Saturday at 75. The Emmy award winner got his first TV writing gig
I was there the day Robert Conrad ended his network television career. It was way back in my early days at TV Guide magazine, sometime in the late ’80s. Conrad, who died Saturday in Malibu at 84, was trying to make a TV comeback at the time. The macho TV star, who came to fame
It’s getting to the point now where I hate getting a call from a producer at the CTV News Channel. Almost invariably, it means that someone of note in television has passed away. Such was the case Wednesday when Murtz Jaffer called to say that Terry Jones had died. Jones, who suffered from a rare
We all knew Valerie Harper was dying. We knew it when she made her final Television Critics Association press tour appearance over five years ago on January 11, 2014. She was promoting a TV-movie she had shot in Langley, BC, called, “The Town That Came a Courtin’.” News that she was suffering from a form
Very saddened to learn of the death of former Amazing Race Canada competitor Kenneth McAlpine. The good natured adventurer died Tuesday while attempting to scale Mount Gimli in B.C.’s Kootenay region. McAlpine died on his 28th birthday. I had the great good fortune to meet him while embedded on two legs of The Amazing Race