Former National Football League commissioner Pete Rozelle, 70, who helped make pro football the immensely popular—and profitable—sport it has become, died of brain cancer on Dec. 6 at his home in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. Elected commissioner in 1960, Rozelle ruled for 29 years, overseeing the league's merger with the rival American Football League, plus the creation of the Super Bowl (1967) and ABC's Monday Night Football (1970)....
Veteran country singer Faron Young, 64, who topped the charts in the '60s and '70s with "Hello Walls" and "It's Four in the Morning," died on Dec. 10 in a Nashville-area hospital after apparently shooting himself in the head the previous day. According to Nashville police, Young, who suffered from emphysema and recently underwent prostate surgery, left a suicide note at his Old Hickory, Tenn., home, where he was found unconscious by a friend. Young was also a successful businessman and sometime actor....
Joseph Quinlan, 71, father of Karen Ann Quinlan, the comatose woman whose removal from a respirator was authorized in a landmark court decision in 1976, died of bone cancer on Dec. 7 at his home in Wantage, N.J. Quinlan and his wife, Julia, had fought for the right to allow their daughter to die "with dignity and grace" after doctors pronounced her coma, the result of a 1975 overdose of alcohol and tranquilizers, irreversible. Taken off her respirator, Karen Ann survived until 1985.
Jean-Claude Van Damme, 35, checked himself into a California hospital on Dec. 11 for a 30-day substance abuse program.
Wheel of Fortune's, Vanna White, 39, and her husband, restaurateur George Santopietro, 50, expect their second child next July. Their son Nicholas is 2....
Married this fall, country hit-makers Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, both 29, expect their first child in June....
Baywatch costar Gena Lee Nolin, 25, and her husband, video producer Greg Fahlman, 36, are expecting their first child next June.
George Stephanopoulos, 35, has announced that in January he will leave the White House to become a visiting professor of political science at Columbia University. Stephanopoulos graduated summa cum laude from Columbia in 1982.
Queen Elizabeth II has bestowed one of her highest honors on actor Sir John Gielgud, 92, the Order of Merit. Gielgud follows the late Sir Laurence Olivier, the only other actor to join the 24-member order. Gielgud, who appears in the current Australian film Shine, fills the vacancy left by the death of Sir Frank Whittle, who developed the turbojet engine.
All My Children co-stars Eva La Rue, 29, and John Callahan, 41, who play the married couple Dr. Maria Santos Grey and journalist Edmund Grey on the ABC daytime soap, were married Nov. 30 on the island of Lanai, Hawaii. This is the second marriage for both.
What's love got to do with it? Everything, it seems, for actress Angela Bassett, 38, who is engaged to marry The Preacher's Wife star Courtney B. Vance, 36, next year. It will be the first marriage for both.
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