Entertainment

LOS ANGELES — Roger Daltrey is smacking his head.

Larry Harmon, who turned the character Bozo the Clown into a show business staple that delighted children for more than a half-century, died Thursday of congestive heart failure. He was 83.

Approaching his 20th anniversary as talk radio’s most dominant force, Rush Limbaugh has signed a lucrative new deal with Premiere Radio Networks that will keep him on the air until 2016.

Paul Sills, one of the founders of the improvisational comedy group The Second City, which has turned out some of North America’s best-known comedians, died Monday.

Mel Ferrer, the tall, darkly handsome star of such classic films as Lili, War and Peace and The Sun Also Rises, as well as producer and director of movies starring his wife, Audrey Hepburn, has died at age 90.

WASHINGTON — The man whose parents’ battle to save him from a nerve disease was told in the movie “Lorenzo’s Oil” died Friday at his home in Virginia, having lived more than 20 years longer than doctors had predicted.

Television producer Sophie Altman, who created the long-running quiz show It’s Academic, pitting teams of high school students against each other, has died. She was 95.

Thelma Keane, the inspiration for the Mommy character in the long-running Family Circus comic created by her husband, Bil Keane, has died.

LOS ANGELES — Academy Award-winning director Sydney Pollack, a Hollywood mainstay who achieved commercial success and critical acclaim with the gender-bending comedy “Tootsie” and the period drama “Out of Africa,” has died. He was 73.

Dick Martin, the zany half of the comedy team whose Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In took television by storm in the 1960s, making stars of Goldie Hawn and Lily Tomlin and creating such national catch-phrases as “Sock it to me!” has died.