Jimmy Lee Smith, the lifelong criminal whose role in the 1963 kidnapping and killing of a police officer inspired Joseph Wambaugh's crime book "The Onion Field," has died behind bars at age 76, a state prisons official said ( Read more... )

Cartoonist Johnny Hart, whose award-winning "B.C." comic strip appeared in more than 1,300 newspapers worldwide, died Saturday while working at his home in Endicott, New York. He was 76 ( Read more... )

LOS ANGELES, California -- Film director Bob Clark, best known for the holiday classic "A Christmas Story," was killed with his son Wednesday in a head-on crash with a vehicle that a drunken driver steered into the wrong lane, police and the filmmaker's assistant said ( Read more... )

The balding, bespectacled nebbish who gained cult status as the oddball Larry "Bud" Melman on David Letterman's late-night television shows has died after a long illness ( Read more... )

Actor Woody Harrelson's father, Charles Harrelson, died of a heart attack in the Supermax federal prison where he was serving two life sentences for the murder of a federal judge, officials said Wednesday ( Read more... )

Luther Ingram, the R&B singer and songwriter best known for the hit "If Loving You Is Wrong (I Don't Want to Be Right)," has died. He was 69 ( Read more... )

John Backus, whose development of the Fortran programming language in the 1950s changed how people interacted with computers and paved the way for modern software, has died. He was 82 ( Read more... )

Stuart Rosenberg, a prolific director of series television and theatrical films who partnered with Paul Newman on the widely popular prison drama "Cool Hand Luke" and several other movies, has died at 79 ( Read more... )

F. Clark Howell, an anthropologist who unearthed important fossil evidence of human evolution and was seen as a peacemaker in an often contentious field, has died of cancer at his home, according to University of California, Berkeley spokeswoman Shirley Wong. Howell was 81 ( Read more... )

LOS ANGELES - Betty Hutton, the actress and singer who brought a brassy vitality to Hollywood musicals such as "Annie Get Your Gun," has died in Palm Springs, California, at age 86 ( Read more... )