Morning Obits 2/21
Posted: Mon Feb 21, 2005 7:45 am
LOS ANGELES - Sandra Dee, who at the height of her fame in the 1960s was arguably the biggest female teen idol of her time, has died, leaving a legacy of film roles that includes "Gidget" and "Tammy and the Doctor."
"She was Gidget, and she was Tammy, and for a time she was young America's ideal," film historian Leonard Maltin once said of her. Dee later married another pop icon, singer Bobby Darin.
Dee died of complications Sunday morning from kidney disease at the Los Robles Hospital & Medical Center in Thousand Oaks, her family said. She was 62.
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ASPEN, Colo. - Hunter S. Thompson, the hard-living writer who inserted himself into his accounts of America's underbelly and popularized a first-person form of journalism in books such as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," [which was made into a movie starring Johnny Depp in 1998,] has committed suicide.
Thompson was found dead Sunday in his Aspen-area home of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, sheriff's officials said. He was 67. Thompson's wife, Anita, had gone out before the shooting and was not home at the time.
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LOS ANGELES (AP) - Though in his later years he joked that he had become best known as singer Bonnie Raitt's father, John Raitt was famous in his own right as the robust baritone who livened musicals such as "Carousel" and "The Pajama Game."
Raitt died Sunday of complications from pneumonia at his Pacific Palisades home, said his manager, James Fitzgerald. Raitt was 88.
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Sympathies to the families. 
