Patrick Swayze has passed away. The hunky actor who danced his way into moviegoers’ hearts with “Dirty Dancing” and then broke them with “Ghost,” died Monday after a battle with pancreatic cancer. He was 57.

“Patrick Swayze passed away peacefully today with family at his side after facing the challenges of his illness for the last 20 months,” his publicist, Annett Wolf, said in a statement Monday evening. Swayze died in Los Angeles, Wolf said, but she declined to give further details.

Fans of the actor were saddened to learn in March 2008 that Swayze was suffering from a particularly deadly form of cancer. He kept working despite the diagnosis, putting together a memoir with his wife and shooting “The Beast,” an A&E drama series for which he had already made the pilot.

Swayze said he opted not to use painkilling drugs while making “The Beast” because they would have taken the edge off his performance. The show drew a respectable 1.3 million viewers when the 13 episodes ran in 2009, but A&E said it had reluctantly decided not to renew it for a second season.

When he first went public with the illness, some reports gave him only weeks to live, but his doctor said his situation was “considerably more optimistic” than that. Swayze acknowledged that time might be running out given the grim nature of the disease.

“I’d say five years is pretty wishful thinking,” Swayze told ABC’s Barbara Walters in early 2009. “Two years seems likely if you’re going to believe statistics. I want to last until they find a cure, which means I’d better get a fire under it.”

Off-screen, he was an avid conservationist who was moved by his time in Africa to shine a light on “man’s greed and absolute unwillingness to operate according to Mother Nature’s laws,” he told the AP in 2004.

Swayze was married since 1975 to Niemi, a fellow dancer who took lessons with his mother; they met when he was 19 and she was 15. A licensed pilot, Niemi would fly her husband from Los Angeles to Northern California for treatment at Stanford University Medical Center.

In February, Swayze wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post titled, “I’m Battling Cancer. How About Some Help, Congress?” in which he urged senators and representatives to vote for the maximum funding for the National Institutes of Health to fight cancer as part of the economic stimulus package.

He also appeared in the September 2008 live television event “Stand Up to Cancer,” where he made this moving plea: “I keep dreaming of a future, a future with a long and healthy life, a life not lived in the shadow of cancer, but in the light. … I dream that the word ‘cure’ will no longer be followed by the words ‘is impossible.’”

With family and friends gathered around, Adam “DJ AM” Goldstein was laid to rest during a private ceremony in Los Angeles on Wednesday afternoon, September 2.

Taking place just after 3:00 PM PST, mourners including girlfriend Hayley Wood, ex-fiance Nicole Richie and good pal Travis Barker (pictured above) comforted one another over the loss of their loved one at Hillside Memorial Park and Mortuary.

Lasting only 15 minutes, the service honored the celebrity DJ, who passed away at the age of 36 this past Friday of a drug overdose.

Meanwhile, there’s a memorial set up to honor the life of DJ AM at the Hollywood Palladium at 7:00 PM tonight – with “the format of the evening to be in the style of an open 12-step meeting. Adam’s friends both from his life in recovery, as well as those from other areas of his life, are welcome.”

 

DJ AM was found dead in his New York apartment early this evening. He was 36.

Sources say he was found in his apartment at around 5:20 PM. Drug paraphernalia was found at the scene.

Sources say DJ AM had not been seen or heard from for a few days — one of his friends went to check on him, but got no response after knocking on his apartment door.

The friend called the cops, but it was the fire department who finally entered his apartment and found the body.

Prescription pill bottles were found by DJ AM’s body this afternoon. As of 7:51 PM ET, his body has not been removed from the apartment.

Back in September of 2008, DJ AM and Travis Barker survived a plane crash in South Carolina. Four people died in the crash — which was caused when the airplane aborted takeoff and then ran off the runway. DJ AM and Barker were the only survivors.

DJ AM posted his final tweet on Tuesday afternoon.

The lyric is the opening line to the famous Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five song “New York, New York.”

How eerie.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the last surviving brother in an enduring political dynasty and one of the most influential senators in history, died Tuesday night at his home on Cape Cod after a yearlong struggle with brain cancer. He was 77.

In his half-century in the public glare, Ted Kennedy was, above all, heir to a legacy – as well as a hero to liberals, a foil to conservatives, a legislator with few peers.

Ted was the only of the Kennedy men of his generation, he lived to comb gray hair, as the Irish poet had it. It was a blessing and a curse, as he surely knew, and assured that his defeats and human foibles as well as many triumphs played out in public at greater length than his brothers ever experienced.

He was the only Kennedy brother to run for the White House and lose. His brother John was president when he was assassinated in 1963 a few days before Thanksgiving; Robert fell to a gunman in mid-campaign five years later. An older brother, Joseph Jr., was killed piloting a plane in World War II.

Ted’s congressional career is now judged one of the most accomplished in the history of the Senate. “I’m a Senate man and a leader of the institution,” he said more than a year ago in an Associated Press interview. He left his imprint on every major piece of social legislation to pass Congress over a span of decades.

He once startled a Republican senator’s aide, tracking her down by phone in Poland, part of an attempt to complete a bipartisan compromise.

For years, he left the Capitol once a week to read to a student at a nearby public school as part of a literacy program.

When a longtime Senate reporter fell terminally ill, Kennedy dispatched one of his watercolors to her room in a nursing home, and cheered her with chatty phone calls.

Obama calls Kennedy “one of the greatest senators of all times,” says that though his life is over “the extraordinary good he did lives on” and numbers himself among those “who loved Ted Kennedy.”

After delivering his statement, a somber Obama stepped away from the microphones. He did not take questions.

The stopwatch that ticks through the CBS television newsmagazine “60 Minutes” perfectly encapsulates the straightforward, unadorned approach that the program — created by Don Hewitt, who died Wednesday at age 86.

He died of pancreatic cancer at his Bridgehampton home, CBS said. His death came a month after that of fellow CBS legend Walter Cronkite.

Hewitt joined CBS News in television’s infancy in 1948, and produced the first televised presidential debate in 1960.

His lasting legacy took shape in the late 1960s when CBS agreed to try his idea of a one-hour broadcast that mixed hard news and feature stories. The television newsmagazine was born on Sept. 24, 1968, when the “60 Minutes” stopwatch began ticking.

He dreamed of a television version of Life, the dominant magazine of the mid-20th century, where interviews with entertainers could co-exist with investigations that exposed corporate malfeasance.

Hard-driven reporter Mike Wallace, Hewitt’s first hire, became the journalist those in power did not want on their doorsteps. Harry Reasoner, Morley Safer, Ed Bradley, Steve Kroft, Diane Sawyer and Dan Rather were among others who also reported for the show.

“60 Minutes” won 73 Emmys, 13 DuPont/Columbia University Awards and nine Peabody Awards during Hewitt’s stewardship, which ended in 2004.

Les Paul, 94, a Grammy Award-winning guitar virtuoso and inventor who helped bring his instrument, typically assigned to chug along rhythmically and compliantly, to the forefront of jazz performance, died today at a hospital in White Plains, N.Y. He had pneumonia.

Mr. Paul first came to prominence for his fast and flashy jazz-guitar style. In the 1940s and early 1950s, he and singer Mary Ford, his wife, had hits with “How High the Moon,” “The Tennessee Waltz,” “Vaya con Dios” and “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise.”

All along, he refined musical inventions in his workshop. He was an early designer of an electric guitar that had a solid body, and his model managed to reduce sound distortions common to acoustic instruments.

In the summer of celebrity deaths, we’ve now lost a studio pioneer and creator of one of the sexiest guitar designs of all time. You will be missed, Les!

 

Eunice Kennedy Shiver, the younger sister of President John F. Kennedy and the mother of California First Lady Maria Shriver Schwarzenegger, died at around 2 a.m. Tuesday, her family has announced.

Eunice was 88 and the cause of her death was not disclosed, though for the past week she was listed in critical condition at Cape Cod Hospital in Barnstable, Mass., where family members, including the Schwarzeneggers and brother Sen. Edward Kennedy, had gathered.

In a statement, the family called Shriver “a living prayer, a living advocate, a living center of power. She set out to change the world and to change us, and she did that and more.”

Eunice Shriver organized the first Special Olympics in 1968, inspired in part by the struggles of her mentally disabled sister, Rosemary. Shriver’s son, Tim, now runs the Special Olympics, and her husband, Robert “Sargeant” Shriver, Jr., the first director of the Peace Corps, also survives her, along with their five children and 19 grandchildren.

The world said goodbye to Michael Jackson today in a very special memorial service at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California.

Thousands of fans, friends, and family gathered at the home of the LA Lakers to pay tribute to the late King of Pop, with memorable eulogies and performances abounding.

Stevie Wonder addressed the crowd, “This is a moment that I wished I didn’t live to see come. But as much as I can say that and mean it, I do know that God is good. And I do know that as much as we may feel, and we do, that we need Michael here with us, God must have needed him far more. Michael I love you and I’ve told you that many times so I’m at peace with that.”

Also offering words of love was Queen Latifah who said, “I’m here representing millions of fans who grew up listening to Michael, being inspired and loving Michael from a distance. All of you. Somehow when Michael Jackson sang and when he danced, we never felt distant. We felt like he was right there. Right before us. You believed in Michael and he made you believe in yourself.”

She continued, “I loved him all my life. One of the first records my brother and I ever bought was Dancing Machine and I never forget the two of us trying to get the robot going, trying to be like the Jackson 5. Thank you. Thank you. Michael was the biggest star on earth. He let me know that as an African-American, you could travel the world — there was a world outside of America. Other people. All you people who came here to pay respect for someone who you felt was one of you — a human being first.”

Among the musical performances were John Mayer’s rendition of “Human Nature,” Mariah Carey and Trey Lorenz’s reprise of their 1992 cover of “I’ll Be There,” and Stevie Wonder’s “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer.”

Rest in peace, Michael.

This is shocking and tragic. Michael Jackson has died at age 50.

Michael suffered a cardiac arrest earlier this afternoon at his Holmby Hills home and paramedics were unable to revive him. We’re told when paramedics arrived Jackson had no pulse and they never got a pulse back.

A source tells us Jackson was dead when paramedics arrived. A cardiologist at UCLA tells TMZ Jackson died of cardiac arrest.

Once at the hospital, the staff tried to resuscitate him but he was completely unresponsive.

One of the staff members at Jackson’s home called 911.

La Toya ran in the hospital sobbing after Jackson was pronounced dead.

Michael is survived by three children: Michael Joseph Jackson, Jr., Paris Michael Katherine Jackson and Prince “Blanket” Michael Jackson II.

 

Farrah Fawcett passed away this morning at 9:28 am PST at age 62. Fawcett had been bravely battling anal cancer for several years.

Fawcett died at St. John’s Heath Center in Santa Monica, Calif.; she was with longtime partner Ryan O’Neal, friend Alana Stewart, friend and hairdresser Mela Murphy and her doctor Lawrence Piro. She had recently returned to St. John’s for treatment of complications from anal cancer, first diagnosed three years ago.

In our hearts and minds, though, she lives on forever and will be remembered in that iconic swimsuit flashing that mega-watt smile.

Our condolences to her family and friends and everyone who was touched by her work, her life and her spirit.

“She’s gone. She now belongs to the ages. She’s now with he mother and sister and her God. I loved her with all my heart. I will miss her so very, very much. She was in and out of consciousness. I talked to her all through the night. I told her how very much I loved her. She’s in a better place now.”

O’Neal says that Farrah was surrounded by her many doctors and close friends when she passed away. He says, “She was with her team when she passed … Her eyes were open, but she didn’t say anything. But you could see in her eyes that she recognized us.”

Though O’Neal recently said that he and Fawcett had planned to wed, they did not tie the knot. “There just wasn’t time, and Farrah wasn’t in any condition to do it,” says O’Neal.

Ryan says a funeral service will be held at the downtown Catholic cathedral in Los Angeles in the next few days.