Hope No Longer Springs Eternal

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Hopeless

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Hope Sinks
Dolores Hope, who spent more than 70 years giving away Bob Hope’s hard-earned money, has died at the age of 102, giving the couple an impressive combined age of 202. The “singer” married Bob Hope in 1934, primarily out of curiousity if it’s true what they say about men with big noses. Draw your own conclusions from their 69-year marriage. While Bob was Zagating his way through Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and the rest of the world’s finest resort locales, Dolores was donating 80 acres of prime Palm Springs real estate for the Eisenhower Medical Center, earning herself the chair of the center’s board. Bob kept the place afloat with his titular golf tournament. Longevity wasn’t the only thing that rubbed off on Dolores during all that rubbing. Noting Bob’s passion for racking up the frequent flier miles, for their 50th wedding anniversary she gave him a paperweight inscribed, "Don't think these three weeks haven't been fun."

Old Bay

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Baying at the Tomb
Frances Bay, the Rye Lady from Seinfeld, has died at the age of 82. She didn’t begin acting until the 1950s, but found notable roles witnessing Betsy Russell’s bareback riding in Private School, playing grandmother to Fonzie and Happy Gilmore, Kyle MacLachlan's doddery aunt in Blue Velvet, Rosco P. Coltrane’s sister, and therefore, Boss Hogg's sister-in-law, and of course, Mrs. Menges in Critters 3. She found a final slice of fame as Mabel Choate, the woman Jerry steals a rye bread from, which eventually cost Jerry’s dad the presidency of Del Boca Vista.

Just Sand

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I. Was. Spartacus.

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The Original Legionnaire’s Disease
Andy Whitfield, star of the Starz soft-core series “Spartacus: Boobs and Sand,” has died of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at the age of 39. The no-name Australian actor jumped to stardom with the gore and groping look at the life of the Thracian gladiator/rebellion leader, following The Tudors and Game of Thrones as the latest cable attempt to develop interest in a costume drama by having the characters spend most of their time out of their costumes.

With Great Death Comes Great Burial

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Can You Hear Me Now?

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Sorry Charly

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Come Back, Shame
Hollywood snitch Cliff Robertson has died at the age of 88. Robertson won the Oscar in 1969 playing the titular Charly, continuing Hollywood’s tradition of soothing its guilt over mocking the handicapable by handing out Oscars to every non-special actor who does a half-way decent job depicting a differently abled character. Even then, Robertson was careful not to go full retard in his depiction of Charly, a “just a little slow” bakery employee who undergoes experimental surgery to become smarter and finds that hyperintelligent people are rapey goateed douchebags. Other gigs included the Batman baddie Shame, a Shane-less parody of the Alan Ladd classic, the Twilight Zone classic creep out “The Dummy,” which single-wooden-handedly established the omniscient ventriloquist dummy genre, and “A Hundred Yards Over the Rim,” where he wanders from 1847 Ohio into 1961 New Mexico in search of penicillin for his ailing son. Robertson spent four years as persona non grata after turning in Columbia Pictures president David Begelman for forging his name on a check. Begelman was head of MGM before the justice-obsessed Hollywood elite had let Robertson out of the doghouse for turning on one of their own. Most recently, he spent 10 years hawking AT&T and guiding Spider-Man from beyond the grave as Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben.

Sooner Later

Lee Roy Selmon, Don Nee’s real father, has died of complications following a stroke at the age of 56. Selmon and his brothers Dewey and Lucious dominated on the Oklahoma Sooners defense en route to back to back national championships in 1974 and 1975. His reward – being the first player ever drafted by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where he would lose his first 26 games as a professional, and probably would have lost to Oklahoma, if given the chance. It would have been much worse without him, as he racked up 78 ½ sacks in 9 seasons, earning 6 Pro Bowl selections and entry in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, to go along with selection in the College Football Hall of Fame, the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame and the Florida Sports Hall of Fame.