The RIP Thread

[Frothy Afterbirth]

Popular 1980s actor Loni Anderson of the hit TV series ‘WKRP in Cincinnati’ has died
By CHRISTOPHER WEBER
Updated 6:54 PM PDT, August 3, 2025


AP Photo/Chris Carlson, File

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Loni Anderson, who played a struggling radio station’s empowered receptionist on the hit TV comedy “WKRP in Cincinnati,” died Sunday, just days before her 80th birthday.

Anderson died at a Los Angeles hospital following a prolonged illness, said her longtime publicist, Cheryl J. Kagan.

“We are heartbroken to announce the passing of our dear wife, mother and grandmother,” Anderson’s family said in a statement.

“WKRP in Cincinnati” aired from 1978 to 1982 and was set in a flagging Ohio radio station trying to reinvent itself with rock music. The cast included Gary Sandy, Tim Reid, Howard Hesseman, Frank Bonner and Jan Smithers, alongside Anderson as Jennifer Marlowe, whose good looks were matched by her intelligence.

As the station’s receptionist, the blonde and high-heeled Jennifer routinely deflected unwanted business calls for her boss, Mr. Carlson. Her efficiency often kept the station running in the face of others’ incompetence.

The role earned Anderson two Emmy Award nominations and three Golden Globe nominations.

Anderson starred on the big screen alongside Burt Reynolds in the 1983 comedy “Stroker Ace,” and the two later married and became tabloid fixtures before their messy breakup in 1994.



AP Photo/Bob Galbraith

Their son, Quinton Reynolds, was “the best decision that we ever made in our entire relationship,” she said during the unveiling of a bronze bust at Reynolds’ Hollywood grave site in 2021.

“I think back to the beginning of our relationship, it was so, oh, gosh, tabloidy. We were just a spectacle all the time. And it was hard to have a relationship in that atmosphere. And somehow, we did it through many ups and downs,” Anderson told The Associated Press.

Anderson detailed their tumultuous marriage in the 1995 autobiography, “My Life in High Heels,” which she said was about “the growth of a woman, a woman who survives.”

“I think if you’re going to write about yourself, you have to do it warts and all,” Anderson told the AP while promoting the book. “You may not even tell the nicest things about yourself, because you’re telling the truth.”

She married four times, most recently to Bob Flick in 2008.

Anderson was born Aug. 5, 1945, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her father was an environmental chemist, and her mother was a model.

Her first role as an actress was a small part in the 1966 film “Nevada Smith,” starring Steve McQueen. Most of her career was spent on the small screen with early guest parts in the 1970s on “S.W.A.T.” and “Police Woman.” After “WKRP,” Anderson starred in the short-lived comedy series “Easy Street” and appeared in made-for-TV movies including “A Letter to Three Wives” and “White Hot: The Mysterious Murder of Thelma Todd.”

In 2023 she co-starred in Lifetime’s “Ladies Of The 80s: A Divas Christmas” with Linda Gray, Donna Mills, Morgan Fairchild and Nicollette Sheridan.

“I am heartbroken to hear of the passing of the wonderful Loni Anderson!” Fairchild wrote on X. “The sweetest, most gracious lady! I’m just devastated to hear this.”

Anderson is survived by Flick, her daughter Deidra and son-in law Charlie Hoffman, son Quinton Anderson Reynolds, grandchildren McKenzie and Megan Hoffman, stepson Adam Flick and wife Helene, and step-grandchildren Felix and Maximilian.

A private family service is planned at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Kagan said.

Associated Press journalist Itzel Luna in Los Angeles contributed.

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[Frothy Afterbirth]

Graham Greene, ‘Dances With Wolves’ Actor, Dies at 73

His role as Kicking Bird in the 1990 Kevin Costner film earned him a best supporting actor Oscar nomination.
Lexy Perez September 1, 2025 4:14pm


Gerry Jordan

Graham Greene, the Oscar-nominated actor from Dances With Wolves, died Monday in Stratford, Ontario, after a lengthy illness, his rep told The Hollywood Reporter. He was 73.

“He was a great man of morals, ethics and character and will be eternally missed,” Greene’s agent Michael Greene said in a statement to THR. “You are finally free. Susan Smith is meeting you at the gates of heaven,” referring to the actor’s longtime agent, who died in 2013.

Born on June 22, 1952, in Ohsweken on the Six Nations Reserve and a graduate of the Centre for Indigenous Theatre Program in 1974, the Canadian actor made his small-screen debut on the 1979 Canadian drama series The Great Detective and film debut in Running Brave (1983).

However it was his role as Kicking Bird in the 1990 film Dances With Wolves that earned him a best supporting actor Oscar nomination. Out of its 12 nominations, Dances with Wolves won seven, including one for best picture.

The film launched Graham’s career to new heights; he had performances in more than 200 film and television productions and starring roles at the Stratford Festival.

His other best-known films included Maverick (1994), Die Hard With a Vengeance (1995), The Green Mile (1999), The Twilight Saga: New Moon (2009) and Aaron Sorkin’s Molly’s Game (2017).

He also starred in Thunderheart (1992) opposite Val Kilmer, Transamerica (2005), Wind River (2017) and on the FX series Reservation Dogs.

Most recently, Greene starred in the Tyler Sheridan series 1883 and Tulsa King.

Throughout his career, Greene received numerous accolades including several Gemini’s, a Grammy and was the recipient of the Earle Grey Lifetime Achievement Award. He was bestowed an honorary doctor of law degree in June 2008 from Sir Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario which was near the Oneida Reserve where he is from.

Greene was also the recipient of the Order of Canada and the Governor General’s Award.

He is survived by his wife Hilary Blackmore; daughter Lilly Lazare-Greene; and grandson Tarlo. Details regarding a remembrance celebration are expected to be shared in the coming days.

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[Frothy Afterbirth]

Robert Redford, movie star and Sundance founder, dies at 89
Adam Bernstein
Tue, September 16, 2025 at 10:21 AM PDT


Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

Robert Redford, an actor whose beach-god looks and subtle magnetism in films such as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” and “All the President’s Men” made him one of the biggest movie stars of all time, but who forged an even more profound legacy in cinema as a patron saint of American independent film, died Sept. 16 at his home in the mountains outside Provo, Utah. He was 89.

His death was announced in a statement by publicist Cindi Berger, who did not cite a cause.

Since 1981, Mr. Redford had been president and founder of the Sundance Institute in nearby Park City, Utah. He said his arts colony was not about “insurgents coming down from the mountain to attack the mainstream” but about broadening the very concept of mainstream. Sundance provided a vital platform for two generations of outside-the-system filmmakers — from Quentin Tarantino to Ava DuVernay — who were embraced by ticketbuyers and studios and helped enlarge the definition of commercial fare in a risk-averse industry.

This might have seemed an unlikely quest for Mr. Redford, whose square jaw, blue eyes and sun-dappled hair projected an almost blinding beauty that made him a Hollywood sex symbol for five decades. He became one of the most popular and highly paid actors in the world, his audiences reveling in his romantic chemistry with Meryl Streep and Barbra Streisand, and his bromantic banter with Paul Newman and Dustin Hoffman.

From an inauspicious upbringing — he ran with suburban gangs and drank his way out of college before finding focus in the adrenaline rush of acting — Mr. Redford also achieved success as a producer, Oscar-winning director, environmental activist and entrepreneur. Privately, he nursed a temperament that could be mercurial, aloof and in harmony with what Alan J. Pakula, director of “All the President’s Men,” once called a “rebel heart” beating under his glossy surface.

Mr. Redford remained essentially a loner who craved the solitude of his wilderness home in Utah and pushed 120 mph on the open highway in his Porsche. He described his acting and other endeavors as a search for himself and for meaningful connection with others.

“Part of the reason that he was such an enduring star … is that people never felt like they got to know him completely,” Sydney Pollack, who directed Mr. Redford in seven movies, once told The Washington Post. There was a “tension,” he said, “between the stereotype of a pretty, handsome, blond Golden Boy and the interior, which is much more complicated and even darker.”

Mr. Redford amassed dozens of film credits and a shelf full of generational milestones. With Newman as his fast-talking partner, he was the sardonic outlaw Sundance in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) — a western buddy comedy that branded him into the national consciousness and featured a memorable cliff-dive sequence as they evade the law.

In what film critic Pauline Kael dubbed “the golden yes-yes” of two of the world’s sexiest male stars, Mr. Redford and Newman reteamed as Depression-era con men who pull an audacious scheme against a gangster in “The Sting” (1973); it earned Mr. Redford his only Oscar nomination as an actor.

He had another touchstone role as Post reporter Bob Woodward in “All the President’s Men” (1976), a political and journalistic thriller about the investigation of the Watergate scandal that drove President Richard M. Nixon to resign. Mr. Redford was credited with being among the first to see the cinematic potential in The Post’s Watergate coverage and securing the rights to the story.

Mr. Redford said he identified most closely with individualists and idealists — and few roles resonated more than the 19th-century trapper looking to escape White civilization in “Jeremiah Johnson” (1972). “I have very strong views about the injustice of our society, the injustices of our governmental systems, the preservation of values I think should be kept,” he told the Boston Globe. “So I find a character that can inhabit the point, and I’m able to put my truth in a character who delivers it for the audience.”

He also traded liberally on his glamour — as a conformist writer to Streisand’s liberal activist in “The Way We Were” (1973), as the enigmatic, snappily dressed protagonist of “The Great Gatsby” (1974), as a dashing CIA researcher hunted by corrupt forces in his own agency in “Three Days of the Condor” (1975) and as Streep’s dreamy but elusive English lover in “Out of Africa” (1985), winner of a best picture Oscar.

Mr. Redford turned to directing at the peak of his fame and won an Academy Award for his debut feature, the family drama “Ordinary People” (1980). He later made such films as the lyrical “A River Runs Through It” (1992) and the Oscar-nominated “Quiz Show” (1994), about the TV game-show scandals of the 1950s and the national obsession with winning at any cost.

He ran the commercial and critical gamut with his other directing efforts, including “The Horse Whisperer” in 1998 (in which he played a mystical equestrian healer) and the golf fantasy “The Legend of Bagger Vance” (2000). He helped produce films as varied as “The Motorcycle Diaries” (2004), a hit drama about the prerevolutionary life of Che Guevara, and the Oscar-nominated short “The Solar Film” (1980), about the benefits of solar energy.

Mr. Redford had long used his celebrity to lobby for renewable energy sources and to forewarn about the dangers of global warming. His activism grew from his decades living in central Utah on a property that would house the Sundance Institute.

He created the arts organization in 1981 to insulate fledgling artists from commercial compromise, functioning as an incubator for variety and experimentation in an era being defined by blockbusters such as “Jaws.” One of its first successes was Gregory Nava’s Oscar-nominated “El Norte” (1983), about Mayan peasants who flee the Guatemalan civil war.

In 1985, the Sundance Institute absorbed the little-known U.S. Film and Video Festival in the sleepy ski town of Park City. In the Sundance Film Festival’s first year, Mr. Redford stood outside the Egyptian Theatre on Park City’s main street — “handing out brochures like a street hawker, trying to talk people into coming inside,” he once told Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert.

The turning point was Steven Soderbergh’s “Sex, Lies and Videotape” (1989), a modestly funded but innovative drama that snared a major distribution deal and turned a massive profit, turning its director into “the poster boy of the Sundance generation,” as Ebert put it. Tarantino, a former video-store clerk who received funding and training from the Sundance Institute, found similar success with “Reservoir Dogs” (1992).

In time, Sundance began to challenge festivals such as Cannes as a powerhouse. David O. Russell, Kevin Smith and Paul Thomas Anderson were among the filmmakers boosted by Sundance applause over the decades.

“Redford did not live inside his celebrity as a star,” film scholar Jeanine Basinger said in a 2018 interview for this obituary. “The Sundance Institute had an enormous effect on filmmaking and film distribution through the development of new talent, shepherding the independent film scene and making it a legitimate rival to the Hollywood studio system.”

Charles Robert Redford Jr. was born in Santa Monica, California, on Aug. 18, 1936; his parents married a few months later. His father, who had a severe stutter, was a milkman and spent years on the edge of poverty before joining Standard Oil as an accountant. Mr. Redford remembered him mostly for his angry disposition and penny-pinching.

He was close to his mother, the former Martha Hart, who spent much of her life in ill health and died of complications from a blood infection when Mr. Redford was 17. “I’d had religion pushed on me since I was a kid,” he later told his biographer Michael Feeney Callan, “but after Mom died, I felt betrayed by God.”

He grew up in Van Nuys, a Los Angeles bedroom community he likened to a “‘Twilight Zone’ version of suburbia.” He channeled his restless energy into athletics, proving fiercely competitive on the baseball diamond. He also was lured into street gangs, with their all-night beer-drinking parties and hot-rod racing.

The University of Colorado at Boulder recruited him as a baseball prospect, but he was kicked out in 1956 for rowdy behavior. “I was in a pretty bad way as a young guy,” he later told public-television interviewer Charlie Rose. “Quite lost, quite edgy, pretty much always seeking the edge of everything, which wasn’t healthy.”

A prizewinning illustrator in high school, he spent a year struggling through art schools in Paris and Florence before settling in New York to study set design. On a whim, he picked up a prospectus from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and impressed talent scouts with the tightly coiled anger he brought to his stage auditions. His extraordinary looks fetched immediate demand for his services on TV.

He became a stalwart of TV dramas, usually playing ultra-handsome psychopaths and neurotics. As his stature increased, so did his earnings. But he boggled his agents by refusing $10,000 a week to star in another TV drama, calling it a “honey trap.” Instead he accepted $110 a week to appear in a Broadway-bound Neil Simon comedy, “Barefoot in the Park” (1963), as an uptight young lawyer adjusting to life with his free-spirited new wife (Elizabeth Ashley).

After a series of wan movie parts, the 1967 film version of “Barefoot in the Park” co-starring Jane Fonda brought Mr. Redford a boost of attention for his light comic touch. He was soon approached to play Butch Cassidy, the glib second lead in a film about two inept bank robbers and their picaresque adventures, then titled “The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy.”

Studio executives at Twentieth Century Fox were unenthusiastic about Mr. Redford, viewing him as the good-looking lightweight from “Barefoot.” Newman — who was initially cast as the Sundance Kid, a gambler and gunslinger — rose to Mr. Redford’s defense.

Mr. Redford saw William Goldman’s Oscar-winning script as a virtuoso takedown of the heroic mythology surrounding the American West. But, wanting to avoid another comic part as the loquacious Butch, he suggested switching roles with Newman, who readily agreed. In deference to Newman, an established star, the title of the film also was flipped.

Critics were slow to embrace the film, but audiences responded to its comically absurdist, antiestablishment tone. The film cost $6.5 million to make and generated more than $40 million. Mr. Redford was a breakout sensation.

He used his power to star in and help produce the low-budget “Downhill Racer” (1969), which featured one of Mr. Redford’s least-seen but most daring performances — as a world-class skier and abrasive cad.

Mr. Redford modeled his character on the brash Olympic swimmer Mark Spitz. “It was cool to be a jerk,” Mr. Redford told Callan of the ethos of the time. “Winning was everything, bad behavior now excused. … He isn’t nice to the coach because he doesn’t have to be. This is not a good role model marker for the way we, as a society, are going.”

The film marked what Mr. Redford hoped would be several films about “the Pyrrhic victory of winning” — a theme that he felt resonated with the era and what he said were the hypocrisies and misplaced values at the center of much of American life. His next venture as a producer was “The Candidate” (1972), in which he played a California civil rights lawyer who loses his soul while running for the U.S. Senate.

“I’ve tried to be independent within Hollywood, tried to be my own person,” Mr. Redford later told the U.K.’s Daily Telegraph. “Once my career got going and I was able to act, I tried to take parts that were offbeat. At the same time I got frustrated: There were stories I wanted to tell. I wanted to start producing my own films that I could act in. So I’d say to Warner’s or Columbia or Fox, ‘Okay, I’d be happy to do “The Way We Were.” But if I do, would you let me make “The Candidate” or “Downhill Racer”?’ Finally they’d say, ‘Yes, if it’s under $2 million.’”

A devoted follower of The Post’s investigation of the Watergate crime and cover-up, he paid Woodward and his reporting partner Carl Bernstein $450,000 for the film rights to what became their book “All the President’s Men.” “This story was allegory, about a certain innocence that was corrupted by Watergate,” Mr. Redford told Callan. “Woodward and Bernstein personified the innocence.”

After Goldman wrote an initial draft of the screenplay, Mr. Redford reportedly objected to the jokey tone reminiscent of “Butch Cassidy.” He and Pakula, who immersed themselves in Washington journalism circles, took uncredited hands in reworking parts of the script. Goldman alone received the Academy Award for the screenplay.

Mr. Redford rounded out the decade as an arrogant barnstorming stunt pilot in “The Great Waldo Pepper” (1975) and an ex-rodeo champion who steals a horse to save it from commercial exploitation in “The Electric Horseman” (1979). For minimal screen time and maximum payout, he played an American war hero in the all-star World War II epic “A Bridge Too Far” (1977).

For his directing debut, Mr. Redford chose the Judith Guest novel “Ordinary People,” about a family struggling to cope with the death of a beloved son in a boating accident. Mr. Redford cast sitcom star Mary Tyler Moore against type as the bottled-up mother, a performance that brought her an Oscar nod.

The film, made for $6 million, took in $115 million and was lavished with acclaim — including a best picture award — for its tasteful restraint. Mr. Redford told Callan he was unnerved by the success. “There are only so many times you want to be told, ‘This is the best thing since ‘Gone With the Wind’ or ‘You are the best leading man since Moses,’ ” he said. “I thought, Screw this! and disappeared.”

He dived into a depression, injured himself on a skiing trip and saw his long first marriage, to Lola Van Wagenen, dissolve. He sought escape, as he often did over the years, in a Hopi Indian chanting festival, which he called “a transcendental state of release that brought me away from the pain and anxieties of the world.”

Eight years passed before he returned to directing, with “The Milagro Beanfield War” (1988). He took acting jobs, but only a few. In “The Natural” (1984), he played a baseball player bedeviled by his past. His performances in “Havana” (1990), as a gambler in prerevolutionary Cuba, and in “Indecent Proposal” (1993), as a billionaire who offers $1 million for a night with a financially desperate Demi Moore, marked by most accounts a creative nadir as he focused on Sundance and his activism.

Mr. Redford had been an outdoorsman since his youth, when he hiked in the Sierra Nevada and worked summers at Yosemite National Park. Driving home to California from college, he was smitten with the Utah canyonlands.

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[Frothy Afterbirth]

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He built an A-frame home there in 1961 on a small parcel of land he bought for $500, and over the next decade bought up 7,000 acres around it. By the early 1970s, his holdings included a small ski resort that, along with a Western-oriented apparel catalogue, helped subsidize the Sundance Institute.

Perhaps his greatest environmental success, in 1976, was the scuttling of a proposed Kaiparowits coal-fired power plant touted by business interests as a much-needed jobs generator in southern Utah. Mr. Redford mounted a publicity blitz — including a 36-page photo spread in National Geographic featuring the actor traversing the landscape on horseback — that ignited fierce community backlash to his efforts. Derided as liberal carpetbagger, he was hanged in effigy.

“I had to hear over and over again all through the ’70s, ‘Oh, what does he know, he’s an actor,’” he said decades later while being honored by the League of Conservation Voters. “Until Reagan got elected, and that took that argument off the table.”

Forging ties to lawmakers and allies in the media, Mr. Redford worked to promote renewable energy sources. In the early 1980s, he inaugurated the Sundance-based Institute for Resource Management, an environmental mediation group for environmentalists and industrialists.

It was not until the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro that the environmental cost of greenhouse-gas emissions became more visible as a global agenda item. Mr. Redford, a trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, remained outspoken on green issues and political leaders who fell short in his estimation of their stewardship of public lands.

Behind his sheen of good fortune, Mr. Redford endured crushing sorrows. His infant son Scott died of sudden infant death syndrome in 1959, just as Mr. Redford embarked on his Broadway debut. “The gothic part of my nature came down on me,” he told Callan. “I know it sounds self-absorbed, and in hindsight it was, but it felt like retribution.” His son James had a lifetime of health setbacks stemming from an autoimmune disease and died in 2020.

Mr. Redford married German-born artist Sibylle Szaggars in 2009. In addition to his wife, survivors include two daughters from his first marriage, Shauna Redford Schlosser and Amy Redford; and seven grandchildren.

Mr. Redford received the National Medal of Arts in 1996, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2005 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2016. An honorary Oscar in 2002 called him an “inspiration to independent and innovative filmmakers everywhere.”

As Sundance grew, it found detractors who deplored the hive of agents, publicists, marketers and celebutantes clogging the streets and threatening to co-opt attention from the art. The Slamdance Film Festival opened in 1995 in Park City to puncture the commercialization of Sundance. Mr. Redford bemoaned but did little to mitigate the slide into glitz.

In his later years, as his features became appealingly weather-beaten, Mr. Redford seemed intent on returning to the stripped-down basics of his craft and grew refreshingly devoid of the vanity, artifice and bland self-seriousness that critics felt marred some of his work.

As a solitude-seeking adventurer who faces distress at sea in “All Is Lost” (2013), he gave a desperate performance made all the more compelling by its near-total absence of dialogue. In the New York Times, A.O. Scott called him “a magnificent underplayer, a master of small, clear gestures and soft-spoken intensity.” He later starred as a bank robber and prison escape artist in “The Old Man & the Gun” (2018).

Mr. Redford said that even as his activism became a defining part of his spirit, a vast majority of people would never take him seriously as anything other than the Sundance Kid.

“I remember a moment in 1969, when I was asked to speak to a group of 300 bankers in Utah just after I’d purchased the Sundance property,” he told the Harvard Business Review in 2002. “I was nervous and gave a blistering, preaching speech to these bankers about corporate greed and whatnot.

“At the end, I was greeted with dead silence,” he continued. “As they filed out, the head of the group said, ‘I appreciate your comments. I just have one question.’ I was expecting him to say something like, ‘What the hell do you know about banking?’ But all he asked was, ‘Did you really jump off that cliff in “Butch Cassidy”?’”

Harrison Smith contributed to this report.

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[Frothy Afterbirth]

Jane Goodall, legendary primatologist, has died at age 91
October 1, 20252:28 PM ET
Nell Greenfieldboyce


Bertrand Guay/AFP/Getty

Jane Goodall, a scientist whose studies of wild chimpanzees made her a household name, has died at the age of 91, according to an announcement posted by the Jane Goodall Institute.

Chimpanzees seemed to accept Goodall as one of their own, and the public was fascinated by both her easy familiarity with the creatures as well as her groundbreaking discoveries that showed just how much chimps are like humans.

"They kiss, embrace, hold hands, pat one another on the back. They show love and compassion, and they also show violence and have a kind of primitive warfare," Goodall said. "It's because the chimpanzees are so like us that we can then say, 'What makes us different? What makes us unique?' "

As a child, Goodall dreamed of living with animals and writing about them.

"That was because I fell in love with Tarzan," she told WHYY's Fresh Air host Terry Gross in 1990. "I was terribly jealous of Tarzan's Jane. I thought she was a wimp and I'd have been much better as a mate for Tarzan myself — which is true. I would have been."

Goodall was born on April 3, 1934 in London. Her father was a race car driver who left for the army at the start of World War II, and her parents later divorced. She grew up in a rambling Victorian house in an English seaside town with her mother, sister, aunts, and grandmother. There was no money for college.

"My mother said, 'Well, if you are set on going to Africa or some other foreign place, if you learn secretarial work, then you can get a job anywhere in the world,' " Goodall explained. She went to secretarial school and in 1956, when a friend invited her to visit a family farm in Kenya, she worked as a waitress and saved up for a one-way ticket to get there.

Once in Africa, she quickly arranged to meet the paleontologist Louis Leakey.

"He discovered immediately a very beautiful, a very vibrant, a very passionate young woman who was utterly focused on animals and who knew a surprising amount," says Dale Peterson, who wrote a biography of Goodall. Leakey hired her as his secretary on the spot.

Leakey was busy digging up the fossilized bones of ancient relatives to humans, but he thought someone should really study humanity's closest living relative: the chimpanzee. To him, Goodall seemed perfect.

It didn't matter to Leakey that Goodall had no college degree, was just 26 years old, and was female — not exactly the typical scientist back then. In 1960, he proposed sending her to what is now the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania.

"The officials there said, 'Well, it's fine, but we can't let a woman live in the forest alone, that would be unseemly,'" says Peterson.

She had to have a chaperone, so she brought along her mom. They both got malaria, and the chimps kept running away, but Goodall did not give up. She offered them bananas, and approached them quietly and respectfully.

"Jane was the first who actually went out and stayed with the chimpanzees and tamed them, and got them used to her," says Peterson.

In just a few months, Goodall a made a major discovery. Chimps could make and use tools — as she learned by watching a chimp she'd named David Greybeard. (Goodall has called him "my favorite chimpanzee of all time.") He stripped leaves off a twig, then used it to fish termites out of a mound. Goodall later told NPR that her mentor, Louis Leakey, was impressed.

"He said, 'Well, it's always been considered that man is the only toolmaking animal. So we now have to redefine tool, redefine man, or include chimpanzees with humans,' " she recalled.

The discovery astonished scientists, but so did the person who made it. Who was this untrained woman, who named her research animals things like David Greybeard, Fifi, Merlin, and Flo? She talked about the chimps like they had emotions and personalities.

"In the 1960s, when she started, there was still a very mechanical approach to thinking about animals," says Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard University, who did his Ph.D. with Goodall. "They were regarded as unthinking machines," he says.

Wrangham says when he thinks of Goodall, he remembers her tremendous empathy for animals and one other thing: "Her rock-solid honesty in describing what she saw."

She wasn't afraid to say the chimps had minds. And she didn't hide their dark side, either. She witnessed brutal assaults, killings, even cannibalism.

As she explained on WHYY's Fresh Air, it sure looked like warfare. "I was shocked. I was saddened," Goodall said. "But I realized that, very sadly, this makes them even more like us than I thought before."

In 1965, she was on the cover of National Geographic, and she and the chimps were featured in numerous popular books and documentaries. To the public, she really had become like Tarzan's Jane.

But as the years passed, she spent less time in the field, instead relying on students and colleagues. She had a son with her first husband, a photographer, then later married a politician. In 1977, she founded The Jane Goodall Institute, to promote the protection of chimpanzees and the environment.

Goodall's life changed dramatically in 1986, when she attended a conference of chimp researchers in Chicago and learned how wild chimps were threatened by poaching and habitat destruction, and how chimps were being used in medical experiments.

"I realized I had to stop living selfishly in my own little paradise and use the knowledge I'd gained to do what I could to help," she later recalled.

Goodall became an activist, traveling almost nonstop to give talks, and returning to her childhood home between trips. It could have been a lonely life, except that she had so many friends around the world.

Sometimes people would ask her, which do you like better, chimps or people? She'd say well, it depends.

"Chimps are so like us," Goodall said, "that I like some people much more than some chimps and some chimps much more than some people."


Jean-Marc Bouju/AP

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[Frothy Afterbirth]

Diane Keaton, Famed for Roles in Father of the Bride, First Wives Club and More, Dies at 79
The actress' legendary career also included other films like 'Annie Hall,' 'Something's Gotta Give' and 'The Godfather'
By Victoria Edel, Nicholas Rice, and Julie Jordan
Updated on October 11, 2025 06:42PM EDT


Rodin Eckenroth/WireImage

Diane Keaton has died. She was 79.

PEOPLE can confirm the legendary actress died in California on Saturday, Oct. 11. "There are no further details available at this time, and her family has asked for privacy in this moment of great sadness," a spokesperson tells PEOPLE.

The Los Angeles Fire Department (LAFD) confirms to PEOPLE that they responded to Keaton's home at 8:08 a.m. local time and transported a 79-year-old woman to a local hospital.

Keaton rose to fame in the 1970s thanks to her role in The Godfather films and her collaborations with director Woody Allen. She won an Oscar for Best Actress for 1977’s Annie Hall. Her long career included movies like The First Wives Club, multiple collaborations with director Nancy Meyers and the Book Club franchise.

The actress was born in Los Angeles in 1946 as Diane Hall, and was the oldest of four children. Her father was a civil engineer, while her mom stayed at home.

Still, Keaton thought her mother dreamed of something bigger. "Secretly in her heart of hearts she probably wanted to be an entertainer of some kind," the actress told PEOPLE in 2004. "She sang. She played the piano. She was beautiful. She was my advocate.”


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Keaton performed in plays in high school, and after graduating in 1964, she pursued drama in college. But she soon dropped out and moved to New York to try to make her way in theater. She took her mother’s maiden name, Keaton, for her professional name, because there was already a Diane Hall registered with Actors' Equity.

In 1968, Keaton was cast in Broadway’s Hair as the understudy for Sheila. In 2017, Keaton told PEOPLE that she struggled with bulimia during this time after the director of the show told her she needed to lose weight, though she didn’t blame him for her illness. “Believe me, it had to do with an overabundant need for more. Too much. It was a mental illness,” she said.

“I became a master at hiding. Hiding any evidence — how do you make sure no one knows? You live a lifestyle that is very strange. You’re living a lie,” she explained about her illness. She eventually recovered thanks to therapy, but said bulimia also robbed her of the ability to enjoy her time on Broadway.

Next, Keaton starred in Allen’s Broadway show Play It Again, Sam, which premiered in 1969. She received a Tony nomination for the role.


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Her film debut was in 1970’s Lovers and Other Strangers, but her big break came when Francis Ford Coppola cast her as Kay Adams, the girlfriend of Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone, in The Godfather, released in 1972. The movie was based on the novel by Mario Puzo but Keaton didn’t read the bestseller before her audition and didn’t really know what the film was about.

"I think the kindest thing that someone's ever done for me ... is that I got cast to be in The Godfather and I didn't even read it. I didn't know a single thing," she told PEOPLE in 2022. "I just was going around auditioning. I think that was amazing for me. And then I had to kind of read the book."

The film was a massive success and won Best Picture at the Oscars. Keaton reprised her role in 1974’s The Godfather Part II, which was also a triumph and won Best Picture. She returned for 1990’s The Godfather Part III, the last film.


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Keaton also continued to collaborate with Allen, appearing in the film version of Play It Again, Sam, released in 1972, 1973’s Sleeper and 1975’s Love and Death. Despite her early success, Keaton’s insecurities still plagued her, and she would never watch her own films. "I just don't like the way I look and sound," she told PEOPLE in 1975.

In 1977, Keaton starred in Allen’s Annie Hall as the title character. She won the Oscar for Best Actress for the role. Annie’s wardrobe mimicked Keaton’s own, full of menswear, vests, and structured trousers, and the film cemented the actress’s place as a style icon.

Many speculated that the movie was based on Keaton and Allen’s relationship. She told The New York Times in 1977, “It's not true, but there are elements of truth in it.”

Keaton would collaborate with Allen again in 1978’s Interiors, 1979’s Manhattan and 1993’s Manhattan Murder Mystery. She also defended Allen in the wake of sexual abuse allegations from his stepdaughter Dylan Farrow. “I love him,” she told The Guardian in 2014.
Diane Keaton and Woody Allen in the film "Annie Hall."


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Keaton’s other film roles included 1977’s Looking for Mr. Goodbar, 1981’s Reds, 1982’s Shoot the Moon and 1984’s The Little Drummer Girl. She worked with Meyers for the first time on 1987’s Baby Boom. They would reunite three more times: in 1991’s Father of the Bride, 1995’s Father of the Bride Part II and 2003’s Something’s Gotta Give, which garnered another Oscar nom for Keaton. Asked which of these projects she loved the most, Keaton told Vulture in 2020, “Honestly, you can think it’s sappy, but I love the Father of the Bride movies. They were so touching."

Keaton starred with Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler in 1996’s The First Wives Club, about three women whose husbands had left them for younger women. The comedy famously ended with all three singing Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me.” Keaton told The Hollywood Reporter in 2023 that she was “always kind of anxious and a little worried” while filming it because Hawn and Midler were “really amazing actresses.”


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Later roles for Keaton included The Family Stone, Because I Said So, Finding Dory, Book Club (and its sequel) and Poms. She made a rare TV appearance with a starring role in HBO’s 2016 miniseries The Young Pope. Keaton also worked as a director, helming the 1987 documentary Heaven, 2000’s Hanging Up and an episode of Twin Peaks.

In 2021 Keaton starred in Justin Bieber’s music video “Ghost.” She also was a prolific Instagram user, posting updates on her life, reflections on her career and friendships and praising those she loved.


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Looking back on her career, Keaton told PEOPLE in 2019, "I don't know anything, and I haven't learned. Getting older hasn't made me wiser. Without acting I would have been a misfit."

Keaton never married. “Today I was thinking, I'm the only one in my generation of actresses who has been a single woman all her life,” she explained to PEOPLE in 2019. “I'm really glad I didn't get married. I'm an oddball. I remember in high school, this guy came up to me and said, ‘One day you're going to make a good wife.’ And I thought, ‘I don't want to be a wife. No.’”



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She was romantically linked to Allen, Pacino and Warren Beatty over the years. "Talent is so damn attractive," she noted to PEOPLE.

Keaton had two children, daughter Dexter and son Duke, whom she adopted in 1996 and 2001, respectively. "Motherhood was not an urge I couldn't resist, it was more like a thought I'd been thinking for a very long time. So I plunged in,” she told Ladies' Home Journal in 2008.

Keaton is survived by her children.

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[Frothy Afterbirth]

Grammy-winning R&B singer D’Angelo dies at 51
Oct 14, 2025 1:34 PM EDT
Jonathan Landrum Jr., Associated Press



D’Angelo, the Grammy-winning R&B singer recognized by his raspy yet smooth voice and for garnering mainstream attention with the shirtless “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” music video, has died. He was 51.

The singer, whose real name was Michael Eugene Archer, died Tuesday, according to a statement from the family.

The singer’s family confirmed in a statement Tuesday that he died after a prolonged battle with cancer. They called him “a shining star of our family and has dimmed his light for us in this life,” adding that they are “eternally grateful for the legacy of extraordinarily moving music he leaves behind.”

In his music, D’Angelo blended hip-hop grit, emphatic soul and gospel-rooted emotion into a sound that helped spearhead the neo-soul movement of the 1990s. Earlier this year, the Virginia native celebrated the 30th anniversary of his debut studio album “Brown Sugar,” a platinum-selling offering that produced signature hits like “Lady” and the title track. The 1995 album earned him multiple Grammy nominations and cemented him as one of R&B’s most original new voices.

D’Angelo’s sultry vocal style — a mix of raspy texture and church-bred fluidity — set him apart from his peers. That voice became inseparable from the striking visuals of his 2000 single “Untitled (How Does It Feel).” The minimalist, shirtless music video became a cultural touchstone, igniting conversations around artistry, sexuality and vulnerability in Black male representation. The song earned him a Grammy for best male R&B vocal performance and propelled his sophomore album “Voodoo.” topping the Billboard 200 chart and winning the Grammy for best R&B album.

Beyond his own catalog, D’Angelo’s artistry shined in collaborations. He memorably duetted with Lauryn Hill on the soulful ballad “Nothing Even Matters,” a highlight of her landmark 1998 album “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill.” He also contributed to The Roots’ 1996 album “Illadelph Halflife” and was part of the supergroup Black Men United, which yielded one song: “U Will Know,” which D’Angelo wrote and co-produced, for the film “Jason’s Lyric” in 1994.

D’Angelo was partnered to Grammy-nominated R&B singer Angie Stone in the ’90s. The pair met while he was finishing “Brown Sugar” and bonded over their similar backgrounds: Both are from the South and both grew up in the church. Stone worked on the album with D’Angelo and the pair co-wrote the song “Everyday” for her 1999 debut album, “Black Diamond.”

Stone described D’Angelo as her “musical soul mate,” to The Associated Press in 1999, adding that their working relationship was “’like milk and cereal …. Musically, it was magic. It’s something that I have not been able to do with any other producer or musician.”

They had a son together, the artist Swayvo Twain, born Michael Archer Jr.

Stone died earlier this year in a car crash. She was 63.

D’Angelo also has a daughter, Imani Archer.

AP Music Writer Maria Sherman contributed to this story.

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