Cloris Leachman was born April 30, 1926 and died January 27, 2021. She was an American actress and comedian with a career spannin’ nearly eight decades. She got 22 Primetime Emmy nominations and won eight, tyin’ Julia Louis-Dreyfus for the most actin’ Emmys ever. She also won an Oscar, a BAFTA, and a Golden Globe. She was known for her range and usin’ props to bring her characters to life.
Lorissa McComas, whose full name was Lorissa Deanna McComas, came into the world on November 26, 1970 in Columbus, Ohio. She was an American actress, producer, and glamour model who got her start in the mid-1990s. She studied ballet as a kid and graduated from Princeton High School in Sharonville, Ohio in 1988. She majored in education at Miami University before diving into modeling.
Stella Stevens, born Estelle Caro Eggleston on October 1, 1938, and passed away February 17, 2023, was an American actress. She was the mother of actor Andrew Stevens.
Constanze Engelbrecht, born January 6, 1955, and died July 21, 2000, was a German actress. She was one of the most popular in the country from 1980 to 1990. She appeared in over seventy films from 1960 to 1998. Her daughter Julie Engelbrecht is also an actress, and so was her husband.
Joan Crawford, born Lucille Fay LeSueur around March 23, 1904, and died May 10, 1977, was an American actress who started out as a dancer in traveling shows and Broadway chorus lines. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her tenth among the greatest female stars of classic Hollywood.
Hendrikje Fitz, born September 15, 1961, and passed away April 7, 2016, was a German actress best known for her role as Pia Heilmann on the ARD soap opera In aller Freundschaft. She brought depth to the character over many episodes, makin’ her a fan favorite on the long-runnin’ medical drama.
LaDonna Adrian Gaines (December 31, 1948 – May 17, 2012), known by her stage name Donna Summer, was an American singer, songwriter, and painter. She gained prominence during the disco era of the late-1970s. A five-time Grammy Award winner, she was the first artist to have three consecutive double albums reach No. 1 on the United States Billboard 200 and charted four number-one singles in the U.S. within a 12-month period. Summer has reportedly sold over 140 million records, making her one of the world’s best-selling artists of all time. She also charted two number-one singles on the R&B charts in the U.S. and one number-one in the U.K.
Summer earned a total of 32 hit singles on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart in her lifetime, with 14 of those reaching the top ten. She claimed a top 40 hit every year between 1975 and 1984, and from her first top ten hit in 1976, to the end of 1982, she had 12 top ten hits;(10 were top five hits) more than any other act. She returned to the Hot 100’s top five in 1983, and claimed her final top ten hit in 1989 with “This Time I Know It’s for Real”. Her most recent Hot 100 hit came in 1999 with “I Will Go With You (Con Te Partiro)”. While her fortunes on the Hot 100 waned through those decades, Summer remained a force on the U.S. Dance/Club Play Songs chart over her entire career.
While influenced by the counterculture of the 1960s, she became the front singer of a psychedelic rock band named Crow and moved to New York City. Joining a touring version of the musical Hair, she left New York and spent several years living, acting, and singing in Europe, where she met music producers Giorgio Moroder and Pete Bellotte.
Summer returned to the U.S., in 1975 after the commercial success of the song “Love to Love You Baby”, which was followed by a string of other hits, such as “I Feel Love”, “Last Dance”, “MacArthur Park”, “Heaven Knows”, “Hot Stuff”, “Bad Girls”, “Dim All the Lights”, “No More Tears (Enough Is Enough)” (duet with Barbra Streisand), and “On the Radio”. She became known as the “Queen of Disco”, while her music gained a global following.
Summer died on May 17, 2012, at her home in Naples, Florida. In her obituary in The Times, she was described as the “undisputed queen of the Seventies disco boom” who reached the status of “one of the world’s leading female singers.” Moroder described Summer’s work with him on the song “I Feel Love” as “really the start of electronic dance” music. In 2013, Summer was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Diane “DeDe” Gayle Lind, born in ’47 and passed in 2020, was a glamour model and Playmate who lit up the 1960s with her nude spreads in Playboy. At just 14, she got spotted by photographer Leon Beauchemin at a Burbank, California pool, landin’ her two Teen magazine covers. She snagged small parts on The Donna Reed Show and Leave It to Beaver, plus a few TV commercials.
Patricia Kara Cameron, sometimes rollin’ as JoAnna Cameron, was born September 20, 1948, and passed October 15, 2021. She was an American actress and model who made waves playin’ the lead in the 1970s TV series Isis, later aired as The Secrets of Isis. That role put her on the map big time.
Sarah Jean Burke (September 3, 1982 – January 19, 2012) was a Canadian freestyle skier who was a pioneer of the superpipe event. She was a four-time Winter X Games gold medallist, and won the world championship in the halfpipe in 2005. She successfully lobbied the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to have the event added to the Olympic program for the 2014 Winter Olympics. She was considered a medal favourite in the event. Burke died following a training accident in Utah.
Meet Nikki Fritz, born Nikki Goldstein on April 7, 1964, an American actress and model from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Los Angeles, California, who passed away on February 25, 2020, after a long fight with leukemia.
She crushed it with 30 covers, 5 photosets, and 25 vids before hangin’ it up in 2004. Known as a porn star and actress, she popped up in Cinemax TV shows and movies, plus Femme Fatales mag and Danni’s Hard Drive website.
Meet June Cochran, born February 20, 1942, in Indianapolis, Indiana, and passed May 21, 2004, in Wisconsin. She was an American model and beauty queen who snagged the Miss Indiana USA crown in 1960, though she didn’t place at nationals.
June crushed it as Playboy’s Playmate of the Month for December 1962, shot by Don Bronstein, and was named Playmate of the Year in 1963. She also worked as a Playboy Bunny at the Chicago club. Her second husband and two of her sons were racin’ drivers, and June made history as the first woman in the pits at the Indianapolis 500.
