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Art Metrano, who played the officer Ernie Mauser in two Police Academy sequels and was a familiar face on episodic TV before a serious injury sustained in a home accident derailed his career in 1989, died of natural causes yesterday at his home in Aventura, Florida. He was 84.

“Yesterday I lost my best friend, my mentor, my dad,” Metrano’s son Harry Metrano posted today on Instagram. “He was and will always be the toughest man I know. I have never met someone who has over come more adversities than him…”

Metrano had already made appearances on such late-’60s TV series as Mannix, Mod Squad, The High Chaparral, Then Came Bronson, nearly a half-dozen episodes of Bewitched and in the 1969 Jane Fonda feature film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? when a 1970 stand-up comedy performance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson significantly boosted his profile. To Carson’s obvious delight,...

Hal Holbrook, the five-time Emmy-winning actor who was famed for portraying Mark Twain, has died at 95. Holbrook died on January 23 at his home in Beverly Hills, his assistant told The New York Times.

Born on February 17, 1925, in Cleveland, Ohio, he went on to have a highly decorated screen and stage career that spanned more than six decades.

Holbrook perhaps was best known for playing Mark Twain in his one-man stage show Mark Twain Tonight!, which first played on Broadway in 1966 and earned Holbrook a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play. A television showing of the stage show secured him an Emmy nomination a year later, he reprised the role on the Main Stem in 1977 and again in 2005.

Holbrook played former U.S. president Abraham Lincoln on television in Carl Sandburg’s 1974 mini-series Lincoln, which earned him one of five Emmy statuettes. His four other...

Perry Botkin Jr., the Grammy-winning composer behind “The Young and the Restless” theme song, died on Monday, his publicist confirmed. He was 87.

A TV and film composer whose work dominated the ’60s and ’70s, Botkin composed and arranged theme music and scores for hit series like “Happy Days,” “Laverne & Shirley,” “Mork & Mindy” and “The Smothers Brothers Show.”

The theme song for “The Young and the Restless,” best known as “Nadia’s Theme” for its association with Olympic gymnast Nadia Comăneci, was an original rearrangement of a piece he co-wrote with Barry De Vorzon and later earned him a Grammy award for best instrumental arrangement.

On film, Botkin’s credits include “Goin’ South,” “Skyjacked,” “Tarzan the Ape Man,” “They Only Kill Their Masters” and 1971’s “Bless the Beasts and Children,” for which he received a “Best Original Song” Oscar nomination for the title song performed by The Carpenters.

Botkin...

Perry Botkin Jr., the Oscar-nominated and Grammy-winning TV and film composer known for creating the The Young And The Restless theme, has died. Botkin’s friend and The Happy Days of Garry Marshall writer John Scheinfeld announced the musician’s death on Facebook, noting that the he died on Monday. He was 87.

“Today I share the news that the man who discovered Harry (Nilsson) and signed him to his first publishing contract, a gentleman and gentle-man named Perry Botkin, passed away on Monday at age 87,” Scheinfeld wrote. “Perry was a magnificently talented composer, arranger, producer and story-teller, perhaps best known for composing the Grammy-winning Nadia’s Theme for the CBS soap ‘The Young and the Restless.'”

Born in New York on April 16, 1933, Botkin kicked off his music career in Los Angeles as a trombone player in a high school jazz quartet. His musical passions brought him to Indiana University...

Sad news for TV fans and the Star Wars family as prolific character actor Jason Wingreen has passed away. Known for his roles in All in the Family, The Twilight Zone and Seinfeld, Wingreen is perhaps best known as the voice of iconic bounty hunter Boba Fett in the Star Wars franchise. Jason Wingreen died on Christmas Day at his home in Los Angeles. He was 95.

Jason Wingreen was a prominent fixture on television from 1955 until he retired in the mid-1990s. Along with voicing Boba Fett, the actor gained worldwide notoriety on the hit 70s sitcom All in the Family, playing Harry the bartender. The role also carried over into the spinoff sitcom Archie Bunker's Place. Jason's son Ned confirmed the news of his father's passing last week. The man has over 200 TV credits to his name.

A native of Brooklyn, Jason Wingreen would appear in three separate episodes of The Twilight Zone,...

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Oscar-nominated actor James Garner has passed away at the age of 86.

From AP:

Garner, whose whimsical style in the 1950s TV Western “Maverick” led to a stellar career in TV and films such as “The Rockford Files” and his Oscar-nominated “Murphy’s Romance,” was found dead of natural causes at his home in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles Saturday evening, Los Angeles police officer Alonzo Iniquez said early Sunday.

Police responded to a call around 8 p.m. Pdt and confirmed Garner’s identity from family members, Iniquez told The Associated Press.

There was no immediate word on a more specific cause of death. Garner had suffered a stroke in May 2008, just weeks after his 80th birthday.

Although he was adept at drama and action, Garner was best known for his low-key, wisecracking style, especially with his hit TV series, “Maverick” and “The Rockford Files.

Los Angeles — Ann Rutherford, the demure brunette actress who played the sweetheart in the long-running Andy Hardy series and Scarlett O'Hara's youngest sister in "Gone With the Wind," has died. She was 94.

A close friend, actress Anne Jeffreys, tells the Los Angeles Times ( ) that Rutherford died Monday night at her home in Beverly Hills. She had heart problems and was in declining health. http://lat.ms/MEPubi

The Andy Hardy series, a hugely popular string of comical, sentimental films, starred Lewis Stone as a small-town judge and Mickey Rooney as his spirited teenage son.

Rutherford first appeared in the second film of the series, "You're Only Young Once," in 1938, and she went on 11 more. She played Polly Benedict, the ever-faithful girlfriend that Andy always returned to, no matter what other, more glamorous girl had temporarily caught his eye. (Among the other girls: Judy Garland and Lana Turner.)

It was said...

Hollywood actor best known for the Hardy family films and her role as Careen, Scarlett O'Hara's sister, in Gone With the Wind

Ann Rutherford, who has died aged 94, was adept at portraying pluck and persistence. As Polly Benedict, Andy Hardy's ever-faithful girlfriend, in 13 of the 15 Hardy family film series made between 1937 and 1946, she had to wait around for Mickey Rooney's accident-prone adolescent to return to her after some dalliance with another girl. Andy would seek advice on romance from his stern but wise and fair father, Judge Hardy (Lewis Stone). "Dad, can I talk to you man to man? Can a guy be in love with two girls at once?" Inevitably, Andy would realise, with hints from his dad, that Polly was his own true love.

The Hardy series, one of the most popular in screen history, was the archetypal idealisation of small-town America and apple-pie family values, with...

Gone With The Wind Actress Ann Rutherford Dies. [Photo: Ann Rutherford as Carreen O'Hara, Evelyn Keyes as Suellen O'Hara in Gone with the Wind.]

Ann Rutherford‘s most notable screen roles were in films made away from both MGM and Wallace Beery. She was a young woman who falls for trumpeter George Montgomery in Archie Mayo’s 20th Century Fox musical Orchestra Wives (1942), and became enmeshed with (possibly) amnesiac Tom Conway in Anthony Mann’s Rko thriller Two O’Clock Courage (1945).

Following a couple of minor supporting roles — in the Danny Kaye comedy The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) at Goldwyn and the Errol Flynn costumer The Adventures of Don Juan (1948) at Warner Bros. — and the female lead in the independently made cattle drama Operation Haylift (1950), opposite Bill Williams, Ann Rutherford retired from the screen. (Rutherford would later say that her Operation Haylift experience was anything but pleasant.)

She then turned to television, making regular television appearances in the ’50s (The Donna Reed Show, Playhouse 90,...