In Memory Of ...

[Jason X]

Originally Posted by Lando Griffin

Beverly Hills 90210 actress Shannon Doherty dies at 53 after battle with cancer

http://usatoday.com/story/entertainment/tv/2024/07/14/shannen-doherty-dead/74399542007/

RIP - Shannen...

[Lando Griffin]

Originally Posted by Jason X

RIP - Shannen...

I always loved this scene from Mallrats.

You Tube

You Tube

[ghost2509]

James Sikking, star of 'Hill Street Blues' and 'Doogie Howser, MD,' dies at 90

Associated Press
msn.com
Story by MALLIKA SEN and LINDSEY BAHR
July 14, 2024

James Sikking, who starred as a hardened police lieutenant on “Hill Street Blues” and as the titular character's kindhearted dad on “Doogie Howser, M.D.,” has died at 90.

Sikking died of complications from dementia, his publicist Cynthia Snyder said in a statement Sunday evening.

Born the youngest of five children on March 5, 1934 in Los Angeles, his early acting ventures included an uncredited part in Roger Corman's “Five Guns West” and a bit role in an episode of “Perry Mason.” He also secured guest spots in a litany of popular 1970s television series, from the action-packed “Mission: Impossible,” “M.A.S.H.” “The F.B.I.,” “The Rockford Files,” “Hawaii Five-O” and “Charlie's Angels” to “Eight is Enough” and “Little House on the Prairie.”

“Hill Street Blues” would debut in 1981, a fresh take on the traditional police procedural. Sikking played Lt. Howard Hunter, a clean-cut Vietnam War veteran who headed the Emergency Action Team of the Metropolitan Police Department in a never-named city.

The acclaimed show was a drama, but Sikking's character's uptight nature and quirks were often used to comic effect. Sikking based his performance on a drill instructor he'd had at basic training when military service cut through his time at the University of California, Los Angeles, from which he graduated in 1959.

“The drill instructor looked like he had steel for hair and his uniform had so much starch in it, you knew it would sit in the corner when he took it off in the barracks,” he told The Fresno Bee in 2014, when he did a series of interviews with various publications marking the box set's release.

When it debuted on the heels of a Hollywood dual strike, the NBC show was met with low ratings and little fanfare. But the struggling network kept it on the air: “Up popped this word ‘demographic,’” Sikking told the Star Tribune in 2014. “We were reaching people with a certain education and (who) made a certain kind of money. They called it the ‘Esquire audience.’”

The show ultimately ran until 1987, although for a brief moment it wasn't clear Sikking would make it that far. A December 1983 episode ended with his character contemplating dying by suicide. The cliffhanger drew comparisons to the “Who shot J.R.?” mystery from “Dallas” not long before — although it was quickly resolved when TV supplements accidentally ran a teaser summary that made it clear Hunter had been saved.

“I remember when Howard tried to kill himself. My brother called and asked, ‘You still got a job?’ I said, ‘Yeah,’ and he said, ‘Oh good,’ and then hung up,” Sikking told The Fresno Bee.

Sikking would earn an Emmy nomination for outstanding supporting actor in a drama in 1984. The look and format of “Hill Street Blues” were something new to Sikking — and many in the audience, from the grimy look of the set to the multiple storylines that often kept actors working in the background, even when they didn't have lines in the scene.

“It was a lot of hard work, but everybody loved it and that shows. When you have the people who are involved in the creation, manufacture — whatever you want to call it — who are really into it and enjoy doing it, you’re going to get a good product,” he told Parade.com in 2014. “We always had three different stories running through (each episode), which means you had to listen and you had to pay attention because everything was important.”

Aside from “Hill Street Blues,” Sikking played Captain Styles in 1984's “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.” He wasn't enthusiastic about the role, but had been lured by the idea that it would take just a day on set.

“It was not my cup of tea. I was not into that kind of outer space business. I had an arrogant point of view in those days. I wanted to do real theater. I wanted to do serious shows, not something about somebody’s imagination of what outer space was going to be like,” Sikking explained to startrek.com in 2014. “So I had a silly prejudice against it, which is bizarre because I’ve probably and happily signed more this, that or the other thing of ‘Star Trek’ than I have anything of all the other work I’ve done.”

After the end of “Hill Street Blues,” he acted in nearly 100 episodes of “Dougie Howser, M.D.,” reuniting with Steven Bochco, who co-created both “Hill Street Blues” and the Neil Patrick Harris-starring sitcom.

He married Florine Caplan, with whom he had two children and four grandchildren.

Sikking had all but retired by the time the box set of “Hill Street Blues” came out. He had fewer but memorable roles after the turn of the millennium, guest-starring on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and acting in the rom-com films “Fever Pitch” and “Made of Honor.” His last roles were as a guest star on a 2012 episode of “The Closer” and in a movie that same year, “Just an American.”

Sikking continued to do charity events. He was a longtime participant in celebrity golf tournaments and even once made it to the ribbon-cutting for a health center in an Iowa town of just 7,200 people. “Actually, I came to get something from you — air I can’t see,” Sikking told the crowd of 100 people. “Where we’re from, if it isn’t brown, we don’t know how to breathe it, The Associated Press reported in 1982.

“I probably would do something if it got me going. Acting is a license to do self-investigation. It’s a great ego trip to be an actor,” he told startrek.com in 2014. “I must say that, in the past few years in which I haven’t worked, the obscurity has been quite attractive.”

“The condiment of my life is good fortune,” he finished.

[ghost2509]

Bob Newhart, Dean of the Deadpan Delivery, Dies at 94

TheHollywoodReporter
yahoo.com
Mike Barnes
July 18, 2024

Bob Newhart, the beloved stand-up performer whose droll, deadpan humor showcased on two critically acclaimed CBS sitcoms vaulted him into the ranks of history’s greatest comedians, died Thursday. He was 94.

The Chicago legend, who won Grammy Awards for album of the year and best new artist for his 1960 breakthrough record The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, died at his Los Angeles home after a series of short illnesses, publicist Jerry Digney announced.

The former accountant famously went without an Emmy Award until 2013, when he finally was given one for guest-starring as Arthur Jeffries (alias Professor Proton, former host of a children’s science show) on CBS’ The Big Bang Theory.

In 1972, MTM Enterprises cast the modest comic as clinical psychologist Bob Hartley, who practiced in the real-life Newhart’s favorite burg, Chicago. The Bob Newhart Show would become one of the most popular sitcoms of all time, featuring a wonderful cast of supporting players: Suzanne Pleshette, Peter Bonerz, Marcia Wallace, Bill Daily and Jack Riley among them.

Newhart ended the series in 1978 after 142 episodes — and, incredibly, no Emmy nominations for him and no wins for the show — feeling it had exhausted its bag of tricks. But he was back on CBS in 1982 to front another MTM comedy.

In Newhart, he portrayed Dick Loudon, a New York author turned proprietor of the Stratford Inn in Vermont. The show was a mainstay for eight seasons, and this one also featured a great cast (Mary Frann, Tom Poston — who later would marry Pleshette — Julia Duffy, Peter Scolari and, as handymen “Larry, Darryl and their other brother Darryl,” William Sanderson, Tony Papenfuss and John Voldstad).

In one of the most admired series endings in history, Newhart wrapped its eight-season run with a cheeky final scene in which Loudon wakes up in the middle of the night as Bob Hartley in bed with Pleshette in their Chicago apartment, suggesting that his whole second series had been a dream.

Newhart’s pauses and stammering were among his trademarks, and his wry observations were a result of his observant nature.

“I tend to find humor in the macabre. I would say 85 percent of me is what you see on the show. And the other 15 percent is a very sick man with a very deranged mind,” he said during a 1990 interview with Los Angeles magazine.

He was inducted into the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame in 1992.

George Robert Newhart was born on Sept. 5, 1929, in Oak Park, Illinois. He grew up a Cubs fan and participated in the team’s victory parade down La Salle Street after Chicago took the National League pennant in 1945. (He was, quite naturally, thrilled when the Cubs ended their 108-year World Series drought by winning in 2016.)

Newhart never dreamed of being in show business; in fact, such a gaudy profession ran against the Midwestern grain of his personality and perhaps was why he would connect with Middle America.

After attending St. Ignatius College Prep and then earning a degree in commerce from Loyola University, Newhart spent two years in the Army and then flunked out of law school. He then worked as an accountant with U.S. Gypsum and then the Glidden Co., which sold paint.

“Somehow there’s a connection between numbers and music and comedy. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s there,” he once said in an interview with a college business professor. “I know it’s a case of 2 and 2 equals 5 in terms of a comedian. You take this fact and you take that fact and then you come up with this ludicrous fact.”

To combat the tedium at work, Newhart and a friend would amuse themselves by making prank phone calls to each another. He refined those into what was then his signature comic bit: having a one-sided phone conversation (the audience got to imagine what the other side of the chat was like).

He and his pal also sold a syndicated radio show in which they did five-minute comedy routines five days a week for $7.50 a week.

In 1959, another friend who was a disc jockey in Chicago introduced Newhart to a Warner Bros. Records executive. The accountant, now a copywriter, had just three routines at the time but came up with more material and landed a contract with the recording company.

“Keep in mind, when I started in the late fifties, I didn’t say to myself, ‘Oh, here’s a great void to fill — I’ll be a balding ex-accountant who specializes in low-key humor,’ ” he said. “That’s simply what I was and that’s the direction my mind always went in, so it was natural for me to be that way.”

The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, recorded live at a nightclub in Houston, became the first comedy album to reach the top of the album charts, selling 1.5 million copies as one of the biggest-selling “talk” albums. The bits included such classics as “Abe Lincoln vs. Madison Avenue” and “Driving Instructor.”

Coming at a time when controversial, harder-edge comedians like Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl were taking hold, The Button-Down Mind also earned Newhart a third Grammy for best comedy performance. Suddenly, he was getting booked on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Following two more successful albums, Newhart was offered a weekly TV variety series for the 1961-62 season. The first The Bob Newhart Show won an Emmy for the year’s outstanding program achievement in the field of humor as well as a Peabody Award.

Newhart, however, soon found himself exhausted. “I took all the responsibility for the program seven days a week, 24 hours a day, despite a fine production team,” he once said.

He was offered a spate of sitcoms but turned them down, returning to nightclubs and sharpening his acting skills with TV guest spots and film work, beginning with Don Siegel’s Hell Is for Heroes (1962), starring Steve McQueen, and then in other movies like Hot Millions (1968), Mike Nichols’ Catch-22 (1970) and Norman Lear’s Cold Turkey (1971).

Newhart Show co-creators Dave Davis and Lorenzo Music had wanted to work with the comic for some time.

“Lorenzo and I wrote a segment for Bob on Love American Style. Bob wasn’t available. So, we got Sid Caesar. A few years later, we did a script for Bob for The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Again, Bob wasn’t available,” Davis told THR in an oral history of the sitcom. “After we became story editors on Mary’s show, MTM Enterprises decided to branch out and asked Lorenzo and me to do a pilot. We knew exactly what we wanted to do. We wanted a show with Bob.”

Said Newhart: “Arthur Price [co-founder of MTM] was my manager. He asked me if I was interested. For 12 years I’d been on the road doing stand-up, mostly one-night shows where the next day you’re off somewhere 5,300 miles away. I wanted a normal life where I could be home with my family.

“I didn’t have a lot of demands. I just didn’t want the show to be where dad’s a dolt that everyone loves, who gets himself into a pickle and then the wife and kids huddle together to get him out of it.”

In 1992, he embarked on another new series, Bob, playing a cult comic book artist, but it never found an audience. Neither did George & Leo, in which he played a bookstore owner opposite Judd Hirsch.

Newhart appeared on NBC’s ER for three episodes, playing a doctor who is developing macular degeneration (that earned him another Emmy nom), and played Morty Flickman, the husband of Lesley Ann Warren’s character, on ABC’s Desperate Housewives.

More recently, Newhart played Judson on a trio of The Librarians telefilms and then a series for TNT.

Newhart also co-starred in Little Miss Marker (1980); as the president in Buck Henry‘s First Family (1980), with Gilda Radner as his frisky daughter; as Papa Elf in Will Ferrell’s Elf (2003); and in Horrible Bosses (2011). He brought his flat Midwestern cadence to voice work on two Rescuers films.

Chicago honored Newhart with a statue on Michigan Avenue, near the office building seen in the opening credits of The Bob Newhart Show, with his likeness in a chair and an empty psychiatrist’s couch at his side. It was later moved to the Navy Pier.

In 2002, he became the fifth recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor and four years later published his memoirs, I Shouldn’t Even Be Doing This.

Newhart was married to Virginia “Ginny” Quinn (the daughter of character actor Bill Quinn) from January 1963 until her death in April 2023 at age 82. They were set up on a blind date by comedian Buddy Hackett (Ginnie was baby-sitting Hackett’s kids).

“Buddy came back one day and said in his own inimitable way, ‘I met this young guy and his name is Bobby Newhart, and he’s a comic and he’s Catholic and you’re Catholic and I think maybe you should marry each other,’ ” she recalled in a 2013 interview.

She was the one who came up the idea for the brilliant ending of the Newhart show during a Christmas party that Pleshette happened to also be attending.

The Newharts were great friends with Don Rickles and his wife, Barbara, and the couples often vacationed together.

Survivors include his children, Robert Jr., Timothy, Courtney and Jennifer, and 10 grandchildren.

[KDO]

John Mayall
November 29, 1933 - July 22, 2024

British Musician | Songwriter | Producer | Blues Musician

John Mayall, Pioneer of British Blues, is Dead at 90 - NYT

http://rollingstone.com/music/m...ry-1235066448/

British Blues Pioneer John Mayall Dies Aged 90 - BBC

John Mayall - Wikipedia[


*

[ghost2509]

Wally Amos, Famous Amos Cookies Creator, Dead at 88

Rolling Stone
yahoo.com
Tomás Mier
August 14, 2024

Wallace “Wally” Amos, the founder of Famous Amos cookies, has died at the age of 88. The company founder’s children Shawn and Sarah announced Tuesday that the cookie creator died at his Honolulu home on Aug. 13 due to complications with dementia, according to the New York Times.

Throughout his life, Amos had talked about how he promoted his cookie in a similar way that he’d promote artists when he was an agent at William Morris Agency, where he was the first Black talent agent in the industry, according to the History Channel. In his 2002 book, The Cookie Never Crumbles, Amos wrote that he would include a photo of the cookie and provide little plastic bags with the cookies stapled so you could “taste the cookies.”

Amos even got R&B legend Marin Gaye to invest in his sweets company early on.

“Marvin Gaye had returned my call and wanted me to get back to him,” Amos wrote in the book, per LAist. “I called him from that waiting room, got him on the line, and started right in describing what it was I was up to with The Cookie and Famous Amos, and my store and all. He stopped me in mid-pitch and said, ‘Wally, Wally…hey, wait a minute, man. If you’re doin’ it, that’s Ok, I’ll invest in it.'”Amos even got R&B legend Marin Gaye to invest in his sweets company early on.

“And just like that, he was in for the $10,000 I needed,” he added. “My shortfall set me back only a week, and thanks to Marvin, my plans were back on track.”

Born Wallace Amos Jr. in Tallahassee, Florida, on July 1, 1936, he lived his teen years in New York City’s Harlem borough. Amos got his G.E.D. while in the Air Force before he joined Willam Morris Agency. There, he signed talent such as Simon and Garfunkel, and worked with the Supremes, Diana Ross, Sam Cooke, and Dionne Warwick.

“I’d go to meetings with record company or movie people and bring along some cookies, and pretty soon everybody was asking for them,” Amos told The New York Times in 1975. That year, he launched his company and its first store on the east side of Sunset Boulevard in L.A.

According to History, the Famous Amos Cookie Company sold $300,000 worth of cookies during its first year and made $12 million in revenue by 1982. (That’s $42 million in today’s currency.) Four years later, President Ronald Reagan awarded Amos an Award of Entrepreneurial Excellence. In 1986, Amos sold his company to Ferrero Group for $4 million and the remainder of his stakes to the Shansby Group for $3 million.

Outside of cookie-baking, Amos appeared as a guest on The Jeffersons and Taxi, and also The Office.

[ghost2509]

Greg Kihn, Pop Star Who Had a Big Hit With “Jeopardy,” Dies at 75

TheHollywoodReporter
yahoo.com
Mike Barnes
August 15, 2024

Greg Kihn, the singer, songwriter, guitarist and West Coast pop star best known for his bouncy hit “Jeopardy,” which made it to No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 before being parodied by “Weird Al” Yankovic, has died. He was 75.

Kihn died Tuesday after a battle with Alzheimer’s, publicist Michael Brandvold announced. His family did not want to disclose the location of his death.

Kihn blended folk, classic rock, blues and melodic pop in a style that helped define the Bay Area music scene in the 1980s. His first hit was “The Breakup Song (They Don’t Write ‘Em),” which got to No. 15 on the Hot 100 in May 1981.

The Greg Kihn Band released the danceable “Jeopardy” in January 1983, and only Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” kept from nabbing the No. 1 spot. A huge MTV favorite, it was quickly spoofed by Yankovic as “I Lost on Jeopardy,” which even featured the host of the game show, Art Fleming, and its announcer, Don Pardo. (Kihn’s song was about a relationship going bad.)

Kihn gave Weird Al permission to make his song and was seen at the end of Yankovic’s music video as the driver of a convertible.

Gregory Stanley Kihn was born in Baltimore on July 10, 1949. His father, Stanley, was an inspector for the city health department. Watching The Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 for the first time was “a life-altering event,” he said.

When he was 17, his mother, Jane, submitted a tape of one of his songs to local radio station WCAO, and from that he won a Vox electric guitar. He moved in San Francisco in 1974, signed with Matthew Kaufman’s Beserkley Records and released his first album, fronting his own ensemble, in 1976.

His LPs also included 1981’s Rockihnroll, 1982’s Kihntinued, 1983’s Kihnspiracy, 1984’s Kihntageous, 1985’s Citizen Kihn, 1986’s Love & Rock & Roll, 1994’s Mutiny, 1996’s Horror Show and 2017’s Rekihndled.

Kihn was a popular morning host on the San Jose, California-based station KUFX-FM (known as KFOX) for 17 years through 2018. He also published several horror novels and edited a collection of short stories written by the likes of Ray Davies, Pete Townshend and Joan Jett.

He had an interesting hobby — breeding rare praying mantises — and donated time and money to Operation Care and Comfort.

Survivors include his wife, Jay; children Ryan and Alexis; son-in-law Samora; grandsons Nate and Zuri; sister Laura; brother-in-law Lou; and nephews Larry, Lou and Matthew.

A private memorial celebration is planned, as is a public celebration of life concert. Donations in his honor can be made to the Alzheimer’s Association.

[SynchroDub]

PARIS, Aug 18 (Reuters) - French actor Alain Delon, who melted the hearts of millions of film fans whether playing a murderer, hoodlum or hitman in his postwar heyday, has died, his three children said on Sunday. He was 88.



Delon had been in poor health since suffering a stroke in 2019, rarely leaving his estate in Douchy, in France's Val de Loire region.
President Emmanuel Macron hailed him as a giant of French culture.
"Alain Delon has played legendary roles and made the world dream. Lending his unforgettable face to shake up our lives. Melancholic, popular, secretive, he was more than a star: he was a French monument," he posted on X.
With striking blue eyes, Delon was sometimes referred to as the "French Frank Sinatra" for his handsome looks, a comparison Delon disliked. Unlike Sinatra, who always denied connections with the Mafia, Delon openly acknowledged his shady pals in the underworld.
In a 1970 interview with the New York Times, Delon was asked about such acquaintances, one of whom was among the last "Godfathers" of the underworld in the Mediterranean port of Marseille.
"Most of them the gangsters I know ... were my friends before I became an actor," he said. "I don't worry about what a friend does. Each is responsible for his own act. It doesn't matter what he does."

DELON STARRED IN VISCONTI, MELVILLE, LOSEY FILMS

Delon shot to fame in two films by Italian director Luchino Visconti, "Rocco and His Brothers" in 1960 and "The Leopard" in 1963.
He starred alongside Jean Gabin in Henri Verneuil's 1963 film "Melodie en Sous-Sol" ("Any Number Can Win") and was a major hit in Jean-Pierre Melville's 1967 "Le Samourai" ("The Godson"). The role of a philosophical contract killer involved minimal dialogue and frequent solo scenes, and Delon shone.
Delon became a star in France and was idolised by men and women in Japan, but never made it as big in Hollywood despite performing with American cinema giants, including Burt Lancaster when the Frenchman played apprentice-hitman Scorpio in the eponymous 1973 film.
In the 1970 film "Borsalino", he starred with fellow French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo, playing gangsters who come to blows in an unforgettable, stylised fight over a woman.
Crowning moments also included 1969 erotic thriller "La Piscine" ("The Swimming Pool"), where Delon paired up with real-life lover Romy Schneider, in a sultry French Riviera saga of jealously and seduction.
Delon's stand-out film in the 1970s - a decade during which he and Belmondo were staples of the French box office - was the 1976 Joseph Losey film "Monsieur Klein" in which he plays an art dealer in occupied Paris during World War Two who is taken for a Jewish fugitive of the same name.

TROUBLED MAN

Born just outside Paris on November 8, 1935, Delon was put in foster care aged four after his parents divorced.
He ran away from home at least once and was expelled several times from boarding schools before joining the Marines at 17 and serving in then French-ruled Indochina. There too he got into trouble over a stolen jeep.
Back in France in the mid-50s, he worked as a porter at Paris wholesale food market, Les Halles, and spent time in the red-light Pigalle district before migrating to the cafes of the bohemian St. Germain des Pres area.
There he met French actor Jean-Claude Brialy, who took him to the Cannes Film Festival, where he attracted the attention of an American talent scout who arranged a screen test.
He made his film debut in 1957 in "Quand la femme s'en mele" ("Send a Woman When the Devil Fails").
SULPHUROUS FRIENDS
Delon was a businessman as well as an actor, leveraging his looks to sell branded cosmetics and dabbling in race horses with old underworld friends. He invested in a racehorse stable with Jacky "Le Mat" Imbert, a notorious figure in a thriving Marseille crime scene.
Delon's more louche friendships exploded to the surface when a former bodyguard-cum-confidant, a young Yugoslav called Stefan Markovic, was found dead in a bag, with a bullet in his head, discarded in a rubbish dump near Paris.
The actor was interrogated and cleared by police but the "Markovic Affair" snowballed into a national scandal.
The man police charged with the Markovic murder - he was later acquitted - was Francois Marcantoni, a Corsican cafe owner and friend of Delon who thrived in the hustle and bustle of the Pigalle district in the aftermath of World War Two.

OUTSPOKEN

Delon was outspoken off-stage and courted controversy - notably when he said he regretted the abolition of the death penalty and spoke disparagingly of gay marriage, which was legalised in France in 2013.
He publicly defended the far-right National Front and telephoned its founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, an old friend, to congratulate him when the party did well in local elections in 2014.
Delon's lovers included Schneider and German model-turned-singer Nico, with whom he had a son. In 1964, he married Nathalie Barthelemy and fathered a second son before ending the marriage and embarking on a 15-year relationship with Mireille Darc. He had two more children with Dutch model Rosalie van Breemen.
Delon told Paris Match in an interview in 2018 he was fed up with modern life and had a chapel and tomb ready for him on the grounds of his home near Geneva, and for his Belgian shepherd dog, called Loubo.
Delon's last major public appearance was to receive an honorary Palme d'Or at the Cannes film festival in May 2019.
In recent years, Delon was the centre of a family feud over his care, which made headlines in French media.
In April 2024 a judge placed Delon under "reinforced curatorship", meaning he no longer had full freedom to manage his assets. He was already under legal protection over concerns over his health and well-being.

[ghost2509]

Leonard Hayflick, Who Discovered Why No One Lives Forever, Dies at 96

The New York Times
msn.com
by Clay Risen
Aug 19, 2024

Leonard Hayflick, a biomedical researcher who discovered that normal cells can divide only a certain number of times — setting a limit on the human life span and frustrating would-be-immortalists everywhere — died on Aug. 1 at his home in Sea Ranch, Calif. He was 96.

His son, Joel Hayflick, said the cause was pancreatic cancer.

Like many great scientific findings, Dr. Hayflick’s came somewhat by accident. As a young scientist in the early 1960s at the Wistar Institute, a research organization at the University of Pennsylvania, he was trying to develop healthy embryonic cell lines in order to study whether viruses can cause certain types of cancer.

He and a colleague, Paul Moorhead, soon noticed that somatic — that is, nonreproductive — cells went through a phase of division, splitting between 40 and 60 times, before lapsing into what he called senescence.

As senescent cells accumulate, he posited, the body itself begins to age and decline. The only cells that do not go into senescence, he added, are cancer cells.

As a result of this cellular clock, he said, no amount of diet or exercise or genetic tweaking will push the human species past a life span of about 125 years.

This finding, which the Nobel-winning virologist Macfarlane Burnet later called the Hayflick limit, ran counter to everything scientists believed about cells and aging — especially the thesis that cells themselves are immortal, and that aging is a result of external causes, like disease, diet and solar radiation.

Other researchers later discovered the mechanisms behind the Hayflick limit: As cells divide, they create copies of DNA strands, but the ends of each copy, called the telomeres, are a bit shorter than the last. Eventually the telomere runs out, and the cell stops dividing.

Dr. Hayflick made other important contributions to science. He developed a particularly vibrant cell line, WI-38, which has been used for decades to make vaccines. He also discovered that so-called walking pneumonia, unlike regular pneumonia, is caused not by a virus but by a type of mycoplasma, the smallest form of free-living organism.

But it was his work on aging that established his legacy. Dr. Hayflick was an outspoken critic of those who thought they could unlock the science of eternal life; he considered that idea an illusion and the pursuit of it a folly, if not outright fraud.

“The invention of ways to increase human longevity is the world’s second-oldest profession, or maybe even the first,” he told the medical journal The Lancet in 2011. “Individuals are going to the bank at this moment with enormous sums of money gained by persuading people that they’ve found either a way to extend your life or to make you immortal.”

Leonard Hayflick was born on May 20, 1928, in Philadelphia to Nathan Hayflick, who made dental prosthetics, and Edna (Silver) Hayflick, who worked in his father’s office.

He enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania but took three years off to serve in the Army. He graduated with a degree in microbiology in 1951, and five years later received a Ph.D. in chemistry and microbiology there.

After two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, he returned to Penn and the Wistar Institute, where he made many of his most important discoveries. He continued that work at Stanford University in 1968.

There was a wrinkle, though. The National Institutes of Health had funded the research on his WI-38 cell line but declined to fund its distribution, even as other researchers clamored for samples. Dr. Hayflick established a company to process orders, charged a minimal fee for shipping and set the proceeds aside until ownership was clarified.

But in a private report that was released to the news media, the N.I.H. accused Dr. Hayflick of theft. He sued the institute, charging invasion of privacy and reputational damage, including a forced resignation from his position at Stanford. The litigation took six years and ended in a settlement that allowed him to keep some of the money and cell samples.

During those six years, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which allows scientists to profit off government-funded research. The law, which would have made Dr. Hayflick’s earlier actions unquestionably legal, helped catalyze the biotech industry.

Dr. Hayflick married Ruth Heckler in 1955. She died in 2016. Along with his son, he is survived by four daughters, Deborah Curle, Susan Hayflick, Rachel Hastings and Annie Hayflick; eight grandchildren; and his sister, Elaine Rosamoff.

Dr. Hayflick later worked at the University of Florida and, since 1988, at the University of California, San Francisco, where he was an emeritus professor.

His criticism of those trying to find ways to extend the human life span was not just about practicality. On principle he thought it was a terrible idea.

“I’m an optimist,” he told The Guardian in 2001. “Anyone who believes in manipulating the human aging process is a terrible pessimist. I don’t want to be alive when that’s possible. I don’t want to give another Adolf Hitler, a Saddam Hussein, another 50 years of life.”

He continued, “Every time someone like that dies a natural death, people should thank their God, whoever that might be, for the phenomenon of aging.”

[Rick Sanchez]

Sid Eudy better known to professional wrestling fans as the legendary Sid Justice, Sid Vicious, and Sycho Sid died today at the age of 63 after battling cancer, his son confirmed on his social media accounts.