Peter O'Toole, an eight-time Academy Award nominee and star of Lawrence of Arabia, has died at the age of 81. He passed away after a long illness.

Doris Lessing, the British author of several novels including The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, has died at the age of 94. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.

While the rest of the world grieves for the loss of Breaking Bad, one group of die-hard fans has taken a more literal approach to mourning the show's demise.

Helen Thomas, whose long run as part of the White House press corps earned her the unofficial title of its "dean", has died at the age of 92.

Simpsons creator Matt Groening's mother Margaret Ruth (née Wiggum) recently passed away at the age of 94. That's bad.

Sometimes Rebecca likes to type Clark's email address into her Gmail search box, pulling up hundreds of old messages and chats, laughs and apologies, acute pain and faint hope. What she shares of this trove is worth reading. [Image: marema/Shutterstock]

Derek Miller's public goodbye would properly be called an "auto-obituary," but the title affixed to his final blog entry is plainer and more effective. "The last post" is both a touching farewell and evidence that blogs can still surprise and move people.

Indie musician Mark Linkous—psych-folk pioneer of acclaimed band Sparklehorse—committed suicide last night, his second known attempt and the second time he has been legally dead. He was in his forties.

George Butler, who documented Arnold Schwarzenegger's early career as a bodybuilder in the documentary film Pumping Iron, was one of the notables who died in 2008, according to PBS host Charlie Rose. Oops, wrong Butler!

CBS is laying people off at CNET — no surprise, since the entire media business is fitfully contracting, and after a merger, cuts are a given. But it signals the end of CNET's grandiose ambitions.

The author of The Andromeda Strain and Prey, best known recently as creator of the TV series ER, died of cancer Tuesday. I remember Crichton for his article in Wired's fourth issue, "Mediasaurus." Crichton forecast in 1993 that "The mass media will be gone within ten years. Vanished, without a trace." He was more…

Fred Baron, a Texas trial lawyer, died last Thursday of cancer. Fellow litigators remember him for the "toxic tort" lawsuits he filed; politicos know him as the man who relocated former presidential candidate John Edwards's mistress, Rielle Hunter, to Santa Barbara, in the hopes of keeping her away from the public…

Joerg Haider, the extreme right wing Austrian politician who once said the Nazis had "an orderly employment policy" and referred to the concentration camps as "the punishment camps of National Socialism," died in a car crash last night. He was 58. "Haider was pronounced dead in a hospital shortly after his Volkswagen…

Legendary actor and philanthropist Paul Newman died of cancer at his home in Westport, Connecticut, yesterday. He was 83. The Method-trained actor studied his craft at Yale and the Actors' Studio before becoming one of Hollywood's most successful—and challenging—leading men in such edgy films as The Long Hot Summer, …

Robert Giroux, who helped build one of the most important publishing houses of the 20th Century, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, died in his sleep yesterday morning at an assisted living facility in Tinton Falls, NJ. He was 94. The legends that he published amount to a stunningly daunting list that includes T.S. Eliot,…

Old Timey wrestler Walter "Killer" Kowalski died yesterday of a heart attack in Everett, Mass. He was 81. Though he came to prominence pretty much at the dawn of television, after he retired from wrestling in 1977 he founded a pro-wrestling school in Boston that turned out 1980s bad guy Big John Studd and, later,…

The Gulag Archipelago author Alexander Solzhenitsyn died today at the age of 89. "The Nobel laureate and former dissident died of heart failure at 11:45 pm (1945 GMT), the writer's son said, according to the [Itar-Tass news] agency. Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1970 after writing harrowing works…