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Film editor Sally Menke, who edited all of Quentin Tarantino’s films and was nominated for Oscars for Pulp Fiction and Inglourious Basterds, was found dead this morning in L.A.’s Beechwood Canyon, where she’d gone hiking with her dog.  sallymenke1

Menke had gone hiking in the morning amid the extreme heat Monday, and her friends alerted police after she failed to come home. Search dogs, an LAPD helicopter and officers from patrol units spent hours in Griffith Park searching for her.  Her locked car was found in a Griffith Park parking lot. Menke’s dog was found alive, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. No cause of death was immediately reported, and it’s unclear whether the heat was a factor. [LA Times]

For every dog that realizes its owner is having a heart attack and dials 911 with its paw, there are three that just sit there licking their own balls, waiting for the corpse to throw the frisbee again.  It was probably a Boston terrier, those things are idiots. Cause of death?  “I dunno, it was hot.” Anyway, our prayers our with the family.

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Meanwhile, Menke wasn’t the only dead person in the news, as Titanic‘s Gloria Stuart also passed on yesterday. At the age of 100.  No word on whether it was drugs, a car crash, or foul play.

Gloria Stuart, the 1930s Hollywood beauty who gave up acting for 30 years and later became the oldest Academy Award acting nominee as the spunky survivor in “Titanic,” has died.
In her youth, Stuart was a blond beauty who starred in B pictures as well as some higher-profile ones such as “The Invisible Man,” Busby Berkeley’s “Gold Diggers of 1935″ and two Shirley Temple movies, “Poor Little Rich Girl” and “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.” But by the mid-1940s she had retired.

She resumed acting in the 1970s, doing occasional television and film work, including Peter O’Toole’s 1982 comedy “My Favorite Year.” But Stuart’s later career would have remained largely a footnote if James Cameron had not chosen her for his 1997 epic about the doomed luxury liner that struck an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage in 1912.

Stuart co-starred as Rose Calvert, the 101-year-old survivor played by Kate Winslet as a young woman. Both earned Oscar nominations, Winslet as best actress and Stuart as supporting actress.

Cameron wanted an actress who was “still viable, not alcoholic, rheumatic or falling down,” Stuart once said. Then in her mid-80s, Stuart endured hours in the makeup chair so she could look 15 years older, and she traveled to the Atlantic location, where the wreck of the real Titanic was photographed.
It was the first time in Oscar history that two performers were nominated for playing the same character in the same film, and it made the 87-year-old Stuart the oldest acting nominee in history. [Newser]

She eventually lost the Oscar to Kim Basinger in L.A. Confidential.  Some say she died of a broken heart. Just kidding, it was respiratory failure.

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