Happy Days star Tom Bosley dies, aged 83

Tom Bosley, whose long acting career was highlighted by his hugely popular role as the understanding father on television's nostalgic, top-rated 1970s comedy series Happy Days, died yesterday. He was 83.
Bosley died of heart failure at a hospital near his Palm Springs home. Bosley's agent, Sheryl Abrams, said he was also battling lung cancer.
TV Guide ranked Bosley's Happy Days character No. 9 on its list of the 50 Greatest TV Dads of All Time in 2004. The show debuted in 1974 and ran for 11 seasons. After Happy Days ended, Bosley went on to a recurring role in Murder, She Wrote as Sheriff Amos Tucker. He also was the crime-solving priest in television's The Father Dowling Mysteries, which ran from 1989 to 1991.
When he was first offered the co-starring role in Happy Days, a series about teenage life in the 1950s, he turned it down.
"After rereading the pilot script," he recalled in a 1986 interview, "I changed my mind because of a scene between Howard Cunningham and Richie. The father/son situation was written so movingly, I fell in love with the project."
Propelled by the nation's nostalgia for the simple pleasures of the 1950s, Happy Days, which debuted in 1974, slowly built to hit status, becoming television's top-rated series by its third season.
It made a star of Henry Winkler, who played hip-talking, motorcycle-riding hoodlum Arthur "Fonzi" Fonzarelli. His image initially clashed with that of Richie and his "straight" friends. But over the show's 11-season run Fonzarelli would transform himself from high school dropout to successful businessman.
Although Happy Days brought him his widest fame, Bosley had made his mark on Broadway 15 years before when he turned in a Tony Award-winning performance in the title role in Fiorello!
His Broadway triumph depicted the life of New York's colorful reformist mayor of the 1930s and '40s, Fiorello La Guardia.
For two years, Bosley stopped the show every night when he sang in several languages, depicting La Guardia during the years the future mayor worked at New York's Ellis Island, aiding arriving immigrants.
The play won a Pulitzer Prize and Bosley received the Tony for best actor in a musical.
After failing to duplicate his success in Fiorello!, Bosley moved to Hollywood in 1968. He would not return to Broadway until 1994 when he originated the role of Belle's father in Disney's production of Beauty and the Beast.
In Hollywood, the rotund character actor found steady work appearing in the occasional movie and as a regular on weekly TV shows starring Debbie Reynolds, Dean Martin, Sandy Duncan and others.
During the 1990s, Bosley toured in Beauty and the Beast and Show Boat, playing Captain Andy in the latter.
Bosley made only a handful of theatrical movies. Among them: Love With the Proper Stranger, Divorce American Style, The Secret War of Henry Frigg, 'Yours, Mine and Ours.
Bosley married dancer Jean Eliot in 1962 and the couple had one child, Amy. Two years after his wife's death in 1978, Bosley married actress-producer Patricia Carr, who had three daughters from a previous marriage.

Leave it to Beaver mum Barbara Billingsley dies at 94

Barbara Billingsley, who gained TV supermum status for her gentle portrayal of June Cleaver, the warm, supportive mother of a pair of precocious boys in Leave it to Beaver, died on Saturday. She was 94.
Billingsley, who had suffered from a rheumatoid disease, died at her home in Santa Monica, said family spokeswoman Judy Twersky.
When the show debuted in 1957, Jerry Mathers, who played Beaver, was nine, and Tony Dow, who portrayed Wally, was 12. Billingsley's character, the perfect stay-at-home 1950s mum, was always there to gently but firmly nurture both through the ups and downs of childhood.
Beaver, meanwhile, was a typical American boy whose adventures landed him in one comical crisis after another.
Billingsley's own two sons said she was pretty much the image of June Cleaver in real life, although the actress disagreed. She did acknowledge that she may have become more like June as the series progressed.
"I think what happens is that the writers start writing about you as well as the character they created," she once said. "So you become sort of all mixed up, I think."
A wholesome beauty with a lithe figure, Billingsley began acting in her primary school's plays and soon discovered she wanted to do nothing else.
Although her beauty and figure won her numerous roles in movies from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, she failed to obtain star status until Leave it to Beaver, a show that she almost passed on.
"I was going to do another series with Buddy Ebsen for the same producers, but somehow it didn't materialise," she told The Associated Press in 1994. "A couple of months later I got a call to go to the studio to do this pilot show. And it was 'Beaver'."
Decades later, she expressed surprise at the lasting affection people had for the show.
"We knew we were making a good show, because it was so well written," she said. "But we had no idea what was ahead. People still talk about it and write letters, telling how much they watch it today with their children and grandchildren."
After Leave it to Beaver went off the air in 1963 Billingsley largely disappeared from public view for several years.
She resurfaced in 1980 in a hilarious cameo in the film Airplane!, playing a demur elderly passenger not unlike June Cleaver.
When flight attendants were unable to communicate with a pair of jive-talking hipsters, Billingsley's character volunteered to translate, saying, "I speak jive." The three then engage in a raucous street-slang conversation.
"No chance they would have cast me for that if I hadn't been June Cleaver," she once said.
She returned as June Cleaver in a 1983 TV movie, Still the Beaver, that co-starred Mathers and Dow and portrayed a much darker side of Beaver's life.
In his mid-30s, Beaver was unemployed, unable to communicate with his own sons and going through a divorce. Wally, a successful lawyer, was handling the divorce, and June was at a loss to help her son through the transition.
"Ward, what would you do?" she asked at the site of her husband's grave. (Beaumont had died in 1982.)
The movie revived interest in the Cleaver family, and the Disney Channel launched The New Leave It to Beaver in 1985.
The series took a more hopeful view of the Cleavers, with Beaver winning custody of his two sons and all three moving in with June.
In 1997 Universal made a Leave it to Beaver theatrical film with a new generation of actors. Billingsley returned for a cameo, however, as Aunt Martha.
In later years she appeared from time to time in such TV series as Murphy Brown, Empty Nest and Baby Boom and had a memorable comic turn opposite fellow TV mums June Lockhart of Lassie and Isabel Sanford of The Jeffersons on the Roseanne show.
"Now some people, they just associate you with that one role (June Cleaver), and it makes it hard to do other things," she once said. "But as far as I'm concerned, it's been an honour."
In real life, fate was not as gentle to Billingsley as it had been to June and her family.
Born Barbara Lillian Combes in Los Angeles on December 22, 1922, she was raised by her mother after her parents divorced. She and her first husband, Glenn Billingsley, divorced when her sons were just two and four.
Her second husband, director Roy Kellino, died of a heart attack after three years of marriage and just months before she landed the Leave it to Beaver role.
She married physician Bill Mortenson in 1959 and they remained wed until his death in 1981.
Survivors include her sons, three stepchildren and numerous grandchildren.

Farewell Joan Sutherland, the grandest dame of Australian opera, dead at 83

DAME Joan Sutherland, the Australian opera singer who became one of the greatest coloratura sopranos of the 20th century, has died in Switzerland at the age of 83.
The Sydney-born Sutherland, who retired from the stage almost exactly 20 years ago, had been in poor health for many months, following a fall in her garden at her home at Les Avants, near Geneva.
After her debut in Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor, at Covent Garden in 1959, Sutherland sang at most of the world's main opera houses, made a host of recordings, and become as famous as her great Australian predecessor, Dame Nellie Melba.
Sutherland was married for 56 years to the pianist and conductor Richard Bonynge, who survives her, along with their son, Adam, whose wife, Helen, last night said: ''She's a very important person all over the world but for us this is our family and we're just trying to come to terms with this.
''She's had a long life and (gave) a lot of pleasure to a lot of people.''
Her family said she died peacefully early yesterday morning, Melbourne time.
Sutherland will be remembered by most Australians not only for her supreme voice, but how she always kept this country at the forefront of her affections and, indeed, her artistry. In 1965, she made a triumphant return to Australia in the exhaustive Sutherland Williamson Opera season, in which she sang at least four of her most renowned roles. In the early '70s, she became almost the house soprano for the Australian Opera - the company with which she made her last full-length dramatic appearance, in Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots, in October 1990. Her final stage appearance was the following January, in a gala production of Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus, at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.
Sutherland was born in Sydney in 1926, and was first taught by her mother, before more formal studies. She made her debut in Sydney in a production of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. In the early 1950s she won a scholarship to London, and sang various roles - Wagner, Mozart, Poulenc - before being guided into the bel canto repertoire for which she became renowned. She made Donizetti, Handel and Verdi sound as new, through her fearless technique and formidable range.
Among her honours are a Companion of the Order of Australia, Dame of the British Empire, and the Order of Merit.
For a diva, Joan Sutherland was always refreshingly down to earth, sometimes preferring needlework to singing - but always delivering the utmost in performance and vocal skills. As she once said: "You can listen to what everybody says, but the fact remains that you've got to get out there and do the thing yourself."