She began in the theater, starring in Broadway and Off-Broadway productions such as Chicago, Hair, and Eubie. After 12 years on Sesame Street, she joined the cast of 227, playing Rose (there's a snippet here, and a great clip here).

According to blogger Thembi Ford:

Kevin Peter Hall (the 7′2″ actor who portrayed Harry in Harry and The Hendersons and Predator in the movies of the same name) guest starred as Rose's love interest on 227 and in 1988 the two began a real-life relationship, marrying both on the show and in real life. Sadly, he passed away in 1991 from complications of AIDS contracted through a blood transfusion. 227 was canceled that same year…

Still, Alaina Reed Hall continued acting and singing, with guest spots on A Different World, Friends and Ally McBeal. She also had a one-woman theater show, "Alaina at the Bijou."

Alaina Reed Hall had been battling breast cancer and was 63 years old when she died.

Below, one of my favorite songs: "Sing."

Sesame Street Star Dies of Cancer [E!]
In Memoriam: Alaina Reed Hall [What Would Thembi Do?}
Alaina Reed Hall [Wikipedia]
Alaina Reed [Muppet Wiki]

Related: Breast Cancer: An African American Perspective [IMDb]

[Image via Muppet Wiki]

This combination of hard and soft — vulnerable and tough — seems to sum up Patrick Swayze as a person, and as an actor. His dad was a rodeo cowboy; his mom was a dance instructor, and his roles — from Roadhouse to The Outsiders to Dirty Dancing to Ghost and Point Break — always seemed to highlight the two sides of his spirit; the rough-around-the-edges dude with a heart of gold. (Jennifer Grey called him a "real cowboy with a tender heart.")

When it came to living with cancer, Swayze told Barbara Walters during a televised interview that he wasn't interested in pursuing experimental treatments. He thought if he were to "spend so much time chasing staying alive," he wouldn't be able to enjoy the time he had left. "I want to live," he said.

In 1985, Swayze starred in the TV miniseries North And South, playing a conflicted Southern soldier. According to the New York Times, he talked to the Associated Press about his character, saying: "People don't identify with victims. They identify with people who have the world come down on their heads and who fight to survive."

More memories of Patrick Swayze below.

Patrick Swayze, Star of ‘Dirty Dancing,' Dies at 57 [NY Times]
Jennifer Grey: I Remember Being in Patrick Swayze's Arms [People]

According to The New York Times, Sims was born in 1948 in Oxford, Mississippi. She was the third of three daughters, and her parents divorced shortly after she was born. All she knew of her father, she told Ladies' Home Journal, was "that my mother told me he was an absolute bum." Her family moved to Pittsburgh, but when her mother became sick, Sims was placed in foster care. In 1966, she came to New York with a scholarship to attend the Fashion Institute of Technology. Since she "towered" over her classmates, some encouraged her to try modeling — but, writes Eric Wilson, "every agency she approached turned her down, some telling her that her skin was too dark."

Sims decided to go directly to photographers instead, and landed the cover of the 1967 Fashions of The Times supplement. From there, her career took off, with the LHJ cover, the cover of a 1969 issue of Life and ad campaigns. The country was going through a "Black Is Beautiful" movement, and, according to former fashion model and model agency owner Bethann Hardison, who spoke with WWD: "She was that elegant, beautiful, classic, dark-skinned beauty that we really needed at that time. She came off of the civil rights movement and the theme of ‘Black is beautiful.' She really was the epitome of that and made it so true."

In the mid-1970s, Sims slowed down on modeling and started her own business. She developed wigs, fragrances and cosmetics targeted at African-American women. She wrote several books about modeling, health and beauty. But Naomi Sims will be remembered as a gorgeous and stylish woman who made a big difference in the world of modeling. As we search for diversity on today's magazine covers, we have to remember those who had the courage and persistence to be pioneers. As designer Halston told The New York Times in 1974:

"Naomi was the first… She was the great ambassador for all black people. She broke down all the social barriers."

Naomi Sims, 61, Pioneering Cover Girl, Is Dead [NY Times]
Naomi Sims, Model, Dies [WWD]

In addition to learning that Ledger was actually relieved he didn't win the Oscar for Brokeback Mountain (he thought being an "Oscar-winner" would put too much pressure on the types of films he wanted to do), Ledger hated doing interviews and publicity, "hustling" for a film or for awards season. But by all accounts, he loved acting, and inhabiting a role. His agent, Steve Alexander, says: "I cringe when I read that he was a tortured soul or a Method actor who couldn't get out of his own way because he'd played this dark character. It's just not true."

Ledger did, however, have dreams about getting out of Hollywood. Catherine Hardwicke, who directed Ledger in Lords Of Dogtown, explains: "During the awards and celebratory parties for Brokeback, he told me, 'I don't want to work. I want to take a year or two off where Michelle and I will move to Holland and ride bikes.'" While there are great stories about Ledger from early in his career — including from 10 Things I Hate About You costar Julia Stiles — you've got to love this anecdote from Donna Morong, the casting director of 10 Things:

Heath drove up in a convertible, top down, and jumped out of the car without even opening the door. He was adorable. Gorgeous. So full of life. He smoked cigarettes and was wearing tight, white jeans. He was impish, like he was in on a joke, like he had this secret that tickled him. He was living at a fast speed. It seemed like he was desperate to grow up.

And Gil Junger, the director of 10 Things, says that Ledger exuded sex appeal in his audition. ''I said, 'I have never wanted to sleep with a man, but if I had to, that would be the man. Please hire him immediately.''

In addition to praise from Mel Gibson, regarding his work on The Patriot and accolades for his role in Monster's Ball, Ledger is remembered by friend Wes Bentley, who was stunning as Ricky in American Beauty, and starred with Ledger in 2002's The Four Feathers. Bentley tells EW: ''I haven't talked about it until now. I'm really nervous.'' He continues:

"Heath didn't give himself enough credit for his talent as an actor. He didn't know what he had so he decided to enjoy what was being offered to him. I wanted to explain to him, 'Please wake up to how great you are.' He didn't have any classical training. He didn't have anyone making him feel like he had credibility. The only voice he listened to was his own self critic, because it was the loudest."

Ledger's agent, Alexander, seems to agree that Ledger often lived in his head and was cerebral about acting. Says Alexander: "Heath generally backed out of almost every movie that he did. He would say yes to something and then he really started thinking about it and it would spin him out. He'd go away and he'd tinker and play and then we'd have a conversation several weeks later and he'd say, 'I got it. I figured it out.'"

As for the drinking and the drugs, everyone EW spoke to agrees: Ledger was clean by the time he died; he'd stopped drinking and wasn't smoking pot and his biggest problem was insomnia. Not that he didn't have a "vibe" that often put people on edge: Hardwicke recounts:

"In most of Dogtown, Heath's character is drinking or high, so that's a state he had to get to every day. I did find out that most times when he was drinking a beer in a scene, he'd ask the prop people for a real beer, not a fake beer. So I'm thinking, Is this anything I should worry about? With other actors, it was a problem. They came on the set too fucked up and couldn't say their lines. For Heath, that was never an issue. But you just never know. There was one scene where his character is losing it at a party. He got up on the roof, and we didn't know if he was going to fall off and kill himself or throw his surfboard at somebody or what. Everybody was semi-terrified. You just didn't know where his chemistry was. I literally prayed. Heath's up there on the roof, hanging over the edge. I was like, 'I want somebody behind him to grab his leg if he needs it and somebody below him.' You feel that in the film. You don't know how far this guy is going to go. That's how we felt in some ways about Heath.

Despite that, Wes Bentley maintains that Ledger was not a downer:

"Heath's fun clouded its way through a room. It was infectious. If you were stuck in an elevator with him, you'd be entertained. He liked to go to Vegas dressed snazzy. He'd walk the streets of Vegas and never really have a plan, dressed up in a pink blazer and a tie. He liked to get a boat and travel to the Greek islands. Some people think he'd party too much and take drugs. That wasn't the case. It was young energy. He was high off life."

(Check out this picture of Ledger and Bentley in happier times.)


Whether Ledger gets nominated for The Dark Knight remains to be seen, but Ledger did love playing the Joker. Charles Roven, producer of The Dark Knight describes the moment he played the bank vault scene for Ledger, saying: '''You have to see this. You haven't seen yourself be the Joker!' He watched it, and it just blew his mind. He was so thrilled, he was just laughing. He said, 'I want to see it again!' It's not an easy thing to rethread an IMAX, so it took about 15 minutes but we showed it to him again. That was the last time I saw him." Says Ledger's agent Steve Alexander:

"Heath liked to torture me, in a playful way. He'd say, 'I'm going to disappear after The Dark Knight.'"

Heath Ledger: The Untold Story [EW]

He hosted his own show, Mr. Blackwell Presents, in 1968, and called himself "the worst bitch in the world." Reports the AP:

During his heyday the issuing of Blackwell's annual list was an eagerly anticipated media event. On the second Tuesday in January he would assemble reporters at his mansion for a lavish breakfast before making a dramatic entrance for the television cameras. By the turning of the millennium, however, the list had lost its juice and Blackwell took to issuing it by e-mail.

Mr. Blackwell ushered in an era for "Fashion Police" spreads in magazines and, later, blogs like Perez Hilton and Go Fug Yourself. His snippy take-downs and no-one-is-sacred attitude (he once had Diana, Princess of Wales on the list) would have been perfect for blogging. A few examples:

Ann Margret: "A Hells Angel escapee who invaded the Ziegfeld Follies on a rainy night."

Camilla Parker-Bowles: "The Duchess of Dowdy."

Bjork: "She dances in the dark — and dresses there, too."

Madonna: "The Bare-Bottomed Bore of Babylon."

Barbra Streisand: "She looks like a masculine Bride of Frankenstein."

Christina Aguilera: "A dazzling singer who puts good taste through the wardrobe wringer."

Meryl Streep: "She looks like a gypsy abandoned by a caravan."

Sharon Stone: "An over-the-hill Cruella DeVille."

Lindsay Lohan: "From adorable to deplorable."

Mr. Blackwell hinted that he had mixed feelings about being mean: "The list is and was a satirical look at the fashion flops of the year," he said in 1998. "I merely said out loud what others were whispering. It's not my intention to hurt the feelings of these people. It's to put down the clothing they're wearing."

Fashion Critic Mr. Blackwell Dies at 86 [NY Times]
'Worst dressed' critic Mr. Blackwell dies [CNN]

Celebrities, fashion, hair, makeup, college, finances, love advice, dealing with social pressure and, of course, boys. What made CosmoGirl! different from, say, Seventeen, was its "EyeCandy" feature: Fold-out, locker-sized poster pages of shirtless hunks, often on posing on a beach. (Sounds smutty, but the guys almost always listed their favorite book as "the Bible.") And even though CosmoGirl! reveled in photos of bronzed, broad-chested dudes and tips about eyeliner, the magazine also had something called Project 2024, an initiative to encourage readers to think about a female president (ostensibly a CosmoGirl!reader) by the year 2024. Project 2024 included interviews with with successful people like Richard Branson, Martha Stewart and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (the current issue features congresswoman Carolyn B. Maloney) as well as internship and career advice.

Though it entered the market at a time when the teen culture was booming, the newsstands were already crowded: J-14, Teen People, Seventeen and Teen were pulling readers, in addition to fanzines like Bop and Tiger Beat. (Later, CosmoGirl! would compete with ElleGirl and TeenVogue, launched in 2001 and 2003, respectively.)

But what CosmoGirl! always had going for it was its dead-on mix: The magazine was silly and serious, shallow and thoughtful, with eating disorder advice right next to guy quizzes, denim layouts and musings about religion. Because that's how teenage girls are: Seemingly at odds with themselves, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, unashamed to gawk at a barechested boy and dream about running the country.

CosmoGirl To Close [WWD]
Hearst Closes CosmoGirl [AdAge]
Hearst Closes CosmoGIRL! [Jossip]
Hearst Folds 'Cosmogirl' [Portƒolio]
‘CosmoGirl’ Folds [NY Mag]
Hearst closes CosmoGirl [Crain's]

Related: Atoosa, Former High School Loser, Is Hearst's New Cosmogirl Queen [Observer, 2000]

It's kind of hard to find an LGBT cause — or women's cause, for that matter — in which Del Martin wasn't a pioneer. In addition to the Daughters of Bilitis, which hosted public forums, provided support to individual women, and published a magazine called The Ladder, Martin also helped found the Lesbian Mother's Union and America's first gay political club, the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club. She campaigned to get the American Psychological Association to remove homsexuality from its list of mental illnesses, and she co-founded several advocacy groups for battered women. She also wrote the 1976 book Battered Wives, which the Midwest Book Review calls "the first (and still the best) general introduction to the problem of abuse." In its first chapter, Martin wrote,

The isolation of the battered wife is the result of our society's almost tangible contempt for female victims of violence. Until very recently, rape victims were believed to be guilty of precipitating the crime against them until proven innocent in a court of law. The rapist had been tantalized, led on, teased, played with until — who could blame him, the argument went — he lost control and forcibly took his temptress. Thanks to efforts growing out of the women's movement, these attitudes are being slowly chipped away. Hopefully, all rapists will soon be looked upon as sex offenders rather than victims of seductive women.

Martin's words still ring disturbingly true today, and rapists are still sometimes viewed as "victims of seductive women" — a powerful argument for the need to respect and remember Martin's legacy.

She also wrote that "nothing was ever accomplished by hiding in a dark corner," and asked, "why not discard the hermitage for the heritage that awaits any red-blooded American woman who dares to claim it?" This heritage continues in the hundreds of lesbian couples who married after Martin, and in Phyllis Lyon, who says of her partner's death, "I am devastated, but I take some solace in knowing we were able to enjoy the ultimate rite of love and commitment before she passed." The two had been together since 1953. In a 2003 interview, Lyon said, "If we had a secret, we would have written a book and made a million dollars. We love each other, we have similar interests. Our lives were very similar even before we met." Finishing her partner's sentence as was reportedly her wont, Martin added "And we're both losing our memories at the same time." Martin was a groundbreaking advocate for lesbians, for abuse victims, and for women as a whole — here's hoping we never lose our memories of her.

Del Martin, 87; Longtime Leader In Gay Rights Movement [LA Times]
Del Martin, Lesbian Activist, Dies at 87 [NY Times]
Lesbian Pioneer Dies Months After California Wedding [Reuters]

Related: Lesbian Pioneers Wed At San Francisco City Hall [CNN]
Del Martin And Phyllis Lyon: Partners in Love and Activism [Noe Valley Voice]
Battered Wives [Google]