Celebrities You Didn't Know Had Died

[The Mighty Ducks]

FRED THOMPSON

HOW - Lymphoma



Casting agents everywhere probably had Fred Thompson on speed dial any time they needed a distinguished government official. In his long Hollywood career, he played the president of the U.S. at least three times, an admiral, a general, a prosecutor (in multiple series), a sheriff, the FBI director ... he was pretty much always choosing between a suit or a military officer's uniform.

A former attorney, he was so convincing as a stately leader type that he ran for the real U.S. Senate and won, serving nine years before running for president in 2008. When he failed to get the Republican nomination, he went right back to acting, immediately playing a police chief and a governor.

[The Mighty Ducks]

MELISSA MATHISON

HOW - Neoroendocrine Tumor



Most famously known as the screenwriter who gave us E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Melissa Mathison at once had the power to make us love and then to give up on life completely. Seriously, when E.T. is all gray in that ditch? Come on ...



Mathison got her foot in Hollywood's usually men-only door by working as an assistant on The Godfather Part II and Apocalypse Now. You may have noticed that those are both Francis Ford Coppola films. She actually worked for him as a babysitter for his family when she was 12.

She later worked on the little-known Scorsese film Kundun and The Indian In The Cupboard, showing that she possessed a remarkable understanding of children and how they really can grasp some advanced morals and ideals. Her final work will prove to be her swan song when it arrives in 2016. She finished the script before she passed. It's an adaptation of the beloved Roald Dahl book The BFG, and it's another collaboration with Steven Spielberg. And no, Doom fans, that doesn't stand for "Big Fucking Gun."

[The Mighty Ducks]

GUNNAR HANSEN

HOW - Pancreatic Cancer



When you think of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre series, you usually only have one character who comes to mind.

That would be Leatherface. And the man who filled that butcher apron and mask made of human skin was none other than Gunnar Hansen. He was later told that he was hired for the low-budget 1974 horror film almost instantly, because of his sheer size and ability to fill a room.



Acting was not his first love, however. He really wanted to write screenplays. Hansen actually turned down many offers after Chainsaw came out, for fear of being typecast as some chainsaw-wielding monster. So, he tried his hand at some screenplays and nonfiction works, but, still, the fervent horror industry kept calling, and he put his quibbles aside.



It's admirable to shy away from being pigeonholed into one type of role, but, sometimes, it's just as good to lean into something you kick ass at. Gunnar Hansen eventually starred in movies such as Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, Chainsaw Sally, and, possibly the greatest and most mystifying movie title of all time, Reykjavik Whale Watching Massacre.

[The Mighty Ducks]

ANDY WHITE

HOW - Stroke



Quick. Name the Beatles drummer who missed out on their enormous success, just before they came to America. If you said Pete Best, you're kind of right. But, there was a drummer before Ringo who actually was on an honest-to-goodness Beatles hit.

Meet Andy White, a Scottish drummer who performed on "Love Me Do" and "Please Please Me" after Best was canned. The Fab Four had actually already hired Ringo to take over in the band, but he did such a piss-poor job re-recording the songs that producer George Martin called in White to take care of business. Ringo did get a bone thrown his way, as he got to play a little tambourine and maracas on top of the tracks.

Andy White was compensated 5 pounds for the three hours' worth of work. He never received any royalties whatsoever for the lads' breakthrough single that quickly reached #17 on the charts. He could have been bitter, but, instead, continued a drumming career that crossed paths with Tom Jones, Rod Stewart, and Burt Bacharach. And he always knows who's on the skins when he hears an early Beatles hit.

[The Mighty Ducks]

JACK YUFE

HOW - Stomach Cancer

Two male twins were born on the small island of Trinidad in 1933. They ended up separated at birth, and the paths these two took in their lives couldn't have been more different.

One twin, Oskar, went to live in the mostly-German inhabited part of the Sudetenland. He grew up very German, in line with that dark era of history and geography. He was raised as a straight-up Nazi, even taking part in the Hitler Youth movement as a child. After the war, presumably he chilled out with the Fuhrer shit and settled down and married, earning a living as a welder.

His identical twin was named Jack Yufe, and he stayed in Trinidad for some time before moving to Venezuela, where he lived with an aunt who had survived the concentration camps. He then joined the Israeli navy, spending some time in a kibbutz, a kind of rural community settlement. After that, he followed his father to San Diego, living the rest of his life in the area. He also was Jewish, was raised Jewish, and lived his entire life, you betcha, Jewish. Which, astute observers will notice, is in stark contrast to his brother being one exact Nazi, who historically have had issues with Jews. Not very twinny, eh?



Their first encounter was cold and awkward. The only real brotherly thing that occurred was Oskar advising Jack to maybe not advertise his Jewishness very openly, as they were in Germany, and things were still a little iffy around there.

It would be another 25 years before they would reconnect, this time for a research study. The insanity of this not already being a movie is baffling, as we already know who could play the estranged brothers:

[The Mighty Ducks]

PHIL TAYLOR

HOW - Liver Failure



Affectionately known as "Philthy Animal," the second and longest-tenured drummer for Motorhead, Phil Taylor, had the good fortune to land in the role because he gave the band's leader, Lemmy, a ride somewhere.



Taylor's hard-partying ways led to scores of shenanigans, one of which had him dropped on his head by his friends. He didn't miss a beat, going on tour with a brace on his neck and playing through the pain. Another time, his hand was shattered in a fistfight just before Motorhead was to embark on a tour. Phil's solution? Tape his drum stick to his broken hand.

Not surprisingly, Taylor spent most of his later years in declining health, but his legacy lives on in the booze-soaked metal legacy that inspired Metallica and Guns N' Roses.

[The Mighty Ducks]

MICHAEL C. GROSS

HOW - Cancer



It's possibly the single coolest logo in movie history. Just the sight of it conjures images of Ray summoning a marshmallow or Venkman being smarmy about something, anything. It doesn't matter. And the man behind that emblem was Michael C. Gross.



Gross first started making his mark in 1973 when he worked for National Lampoon magazine. He designed the famous "if you don't buy this magazine, we'll kill this dog" cover:



Gross made quick friends working in New York, among them John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. They helped convince him to move to the West Coast, where he began producing movies, among them Kindergarten Cop, Twins, and the film that he put his own literal stamp upon, Ghostbusters.

He was also a hell of a survival story, having been diagnosed with cancer the first time back in 1984. He was inspired by that ordeal to create and commission a series called Flip Cancer, which all featured a giant middle finger aimed at the shitty disease that has taken most of the folks on this list.

[The Mighty Ducks]

SHELDON MOLDOFF

HOW - Natural Causes (dude was 91)



Sheldon Moldoff, comic book artist, co-creator of Poison Ivy, Mr. Freeze, Clayface, and Bat-Mite.



You know the old story: A talent scout spots a young girl in a mall, and suddenly she's America's favorite covergirl supermodel. Moldoff's the comic book artist equivalent of that. We don't mean that his cold, dead eyes stare at you from a billboard selling face cream to spotty teenage girls. We mean that he was discovered as a teenager, while doodling with chalk on the sidewalk outside his apartment.

From there, he went on to become one of the most prolific artists of the Golden Age. Yep, if we keep typing away at Starbucks, eventually a publisher will look over our shoulder and give us a job. It's happened before, damn it!

[The Mighty Ducks]

RALPH MCQUARRIE

HOW - Parkinson's Disease



There is a 99.9999 percent chance that Star Wars would not exist if it wasn't for Ralph McQuarrie, which puts him right up there with George Lucas, Frank Herbert, and Joseph Campbell in that respect. Here's why: Back in the 1970s, McQuarrie was just a guy doing some technical art for Boeing, and George Lucas was just a guy who couldn't get his space opera financed, no matter how hard he tried. That is, until he commissioned McQuarrie to sketch some of the concepts he was trying to get across. McQuarrie said "Sure!" and went to work inventing the look of:

Darth Vader's breathing apparatus, helmet, and cape
C-3PO
Light sabers
TIE Fighters
Just ... all of it



With McQuarrie's detailed, beautiful drawings in hand, Lucas had the big picture he needed to sell his story. And those designs became some of the most recognizable artistic creations in the history of human civilization.

[The Mighty Ducks]

TERRY TEENE

HOW - Car Accident



Teene led an unusual life. Things got off to a strange start even before he was born -- his father's name was Kermit. Teene soon became a rockabilly star, most famous for the vaguely terrifying songs "Curse of the Hearse" and "Just Wait Til I Get You Alone." So, what next for a strange young man so obviously obsessed with death and stalking? Why, he became a clown, of course, performing under the name "Clownzo." In the course of that gig, he may have created the second most recognizable character on planet earth behind Santa Claus. See, in the early days, Ronald McDonald looked like this:



GAH! But "Clownzo, son of Kermit" says he worked with another man named George Voorhees to create the world-famous Ronald McDonald character design as you and every other human knows it today, claiming that they threw it together for an appearance at an LA area McDonald's in 1963, presumably because they didn't want to traumatize children with the monstrosity above. McDonald's doesn't give them credit for the design, but we can say that A) Keene was working as a clown at the time and B) he did his makeup like this:



We'll let you be the judge.

[The Mighty Ducks]

JIM MARSHALL

HOW - Natural Causes



Jim Marshall, the inventor of Marshall amps, aka the things you see in the background of every concert and music video:



In his youth, Marshall was a drummer in the English music scene. He also owned a London drum store. Musicians would come in and urge Marshall to stock guitars and amps, including the Who's Pete Townshend, who was "demanding a more powerful machine gun ... [to] blow people away all around the world ... I wanted it to be as big as the atomic bomb had been." Marshall came up with an innocent-looking black box with a speaker inside and controls on the top -- this was the prototype for the "Marshall stacks" that would become a mainstay of rock stages around the world.

Although the more expensive Fender amps had a more precise sound, scores of musicians wanted something bigger and louder. Marshall stacks were used by Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, "and almost every other major rock guitarist in the '60s and '70s."

On Twitter, Motley Crue bass player Nikki Sixx claimed that Marshall was "responsible for some of the greatest audio moments in music's history -- and 50 percent responsible of all our hearing loss."

[The Mighty Ducks]

RICHARD DAWSON

HOW - Esophageal Cancer



While your grandparents might remember Dawson for his turn as Corporal Peter Newkirk on Hogan's Heroes, your parents (and you, if you're old enough) probably remember Dawson from Family Feud reruns -- he was the host who lip-assaulted all the lady contestants.



He also played the game show host in The Running Man, if that helps.

In a 2010 interview, Dawson said that the barely consensual kissathon started early on in his Feud career, when he saw a woman shaking as she tried to come up with the name of a green vegetable: "I said, 'I'm gonna do something that my mom would do to me whenever I had a problem of any kind ... And I kissed her on the cheek, and I said, 'That's for luck.' And she said, 'Asparagus.' ... They went on to win."

One of those smooches actually led to a marriage between Dawson and a contestant. Can you imagine delivering a kiss so memorable that Richard "The Man Whore" Dawson picked you for his wife? Can you imagine it without shuddering?

[The Mighty Ducks]

HENRY HILL

HOW - Heart Problems



The real-life Henry Hill, the New York City mobster who would later be played by Ray Liotta in Goodfellas.

Thanks to Henry Hill and the movie inspired by his biography, Goodfellas, we learned that you should never tell a short Italian man with a bad temper that he's funny, that "Layla" is by far the best Derek and the Dominos song to find a corpse to, and oh hey -- don't get involved in organized crime. It's just not worth it.

For those who never saw the movie, Hill was a mafioso who snitched to the government after his own drug bust in 1980. His testimony led to the convictions of 50 fellow wiseguys, all of whom would put Hill's head on a platter if they could.

So how did Henry Hill stay out of trouble for the next 32 years? He didn't. He was expelled from the witness protection program thanks to his continued drug use and behavior issues stemming from alcoholism. It probably didn't help that anonymity was like kryptonite to a guy like Henry Hill.

[The Mighty Ducks]

GAD BECK

HOW - Natural Causes



Gad Beck. Gay Holocaust survivor.

Imagine the worst possible scenario to be in in the history of bad scenarios. Did you pick being a gay Jewish man living in Nazi Germany? Because if not, we'd like to know what the hell it was.

Had Gad Beck been born about 20 years earlier, he would have enjoyed one of the most liberal, gay-friendly eras in Germany's history up to that point. Unfortunately, the Nazis started targeting homosexuals just about the time that Beck figured out that he liked men. Still, love prevailed and Beck found a boyfriend. Who was also Jewish. Who was, sure enough, snatched up by the Nazis.

Here's where things get amazing. Beck borrowed a Hitler Youth uniform from a neighbor, walked up to the temporary holding area where his boyfriend was held, and convinced the officer in charge that the young man was needed for a building project. And the guy believed him! Beck and his boyfriend walked right out the door, free as birds. Except Beck's boyfriend was just a teenager, like him, and leaving his family forever didn't sit well with him, so he went back. He and his family were later sent to Auschwitz.



That was the experience that shaped the rest of Beck's life -- one as the leader of a resistance movement that sheltered and transported Jews all over Europe, as a fighter in Israel's war for independence, and as the eventual director of Berlin's Center for Adult Education. Throughout it all, Beck kept his head in check. After getting invited to ride in New York's pride parade, he said, "Look, if I am a hero, I am a little one. Everyone has to fight sometime in their life."

[The Mighty Ducks]

LONESOME GEORGE

HOW - Heart Failure due to Old Age



At one point, there were so many gargantutortoises clogging up George's island home that it was actually nicknamed the Isles of the Tortoises. Since then, pirates slaughtered the animals for their meat and hunters decided that tortoise oil was good for lamps. Before you knew it, only George, the 200-pound, 100-year-old tortoise, was left. And it turns out that being the last of your kind is a huge negative in the sex department. George's minders were so desperate for baby Georges that they offered a $10,000 reward for a lady-George, matchmaking him with four similar breeds of tortoise. No dice.

Farewell to the world's most expensive tortoise whore. You'll be missed.