Gino talks about three Hollywood stars who died over the weekend



In his Hollywood segement on Monday, December 16th on Studio A, Gino Salomone talks about some of the celebrity deaths we have seen over the past few weeks.

Actor Peter O'Toole died peacefully Saturday, December 14th in a hospital, his agent Steve Kenis said Sunday. He was 81.

O'Toole's first major film role in the title role of T.E. Lawrence in "Lawrence of Arabia" in 1962 was "absolute genius," British film critic Richard Fitzwilliams told CNN. It earned him the first of eight Academy Award nominations and propelled him to world stardom.

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Oscar-winning actress Joan Fontaine died Sunday, December 15th -- her longtime friend Noel Beutel said Monday. She was 96.

Fontaine died "very peacefully" in her sleep of natural causes, Beutel said. She was in her Carmel, California, home.

She is survived by her older sister, actress Olivia de Havilland. -- with whom she had not spoken for decades.

Fontaine was born Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland in 1916 in Tokyo, Japan, where her British father was a patent lawyer and teacher. She and her sister moved to Saratoga, California, with their mother in 1919 when her parents separated.

Fontaine was a teenager when she began her acting career as Joan Burfield in the 1935 film "No More Ladies." She later adopted the stage name Fontaine -- the name of her mother's second husband.

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Tom Laughlin, the actor who wrote and starred in the "Billy Jack" films of the 1970s, died Thursday, his family confirmed Sunday. He was 82.

Laughlin's Billy Jack character was a heroic Native American ex-Army Green Beret who used his karate skills to fight racism and oppression.

The second of the series -- titled "Billy Jack" -- was a low-budget independent film that became a box-office blockbuster in 1971. Laughlin's vigilante character defends a counterculture "Freedom School" from townspeople who harass and discriminate against the Native American students.

The film was criticized by those who saw its central theme as a message that violence was an answer to injustice.

Laughlin resorted to renting theaters himself to show the film after Hollywood studios refused to distribute it.

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Gino Salomone also discusses talking with Steve Carell and Paul Rudd on the upcoming Anchorman 2 film -- and reports that Lindsay Lohan is writing a tell-all book about herself!

Click the video link above for Gino's Studio A Hollywood segment!