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Legendary B-movie king Roger Corman, who directed and produced hundreds of low-budget films and discovered such future industry stars as Jack Nicholson, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, has died. He was 98.

Corman died May 9 at his home in Santa Monica, Calif., surrounded by family members, the family confirmed to Variety.

“His films were revolutionary and iconoclastic, and captured the spirit of an age. When asked how he would like to be remembered, he said, ‘I was a filmmaker, just that,'” the family said in a statement.

Corman’s empire, which existed in several incarnations, including New World Pictures, and Concorde/New Horizons, was as active as any major studio and, he boasted, always profitable. He specialized in fast-paced, low-budget genre movies — horror, action, science fiction, even some family fare — and his company became a work-in-training ground for a wide variety of major talents, from actors like Nicholson (“Little Shop of Horrors”) and De Niro (“Boxcar Bertha”) to directors like Francis Ford Coppola (“Dementia 13”) and Scorsese (“Boxcar Bertha”).

Sad to hear of the passing of a great actor, Louis Gossett Jr, who was the first black man to win an oscar as a supporting actor.
Louis Gossett Jr, the first Black man to win a supporting actor Oscar and an Emmy winner for his role in the seminal US TV miniseries Roots, has died aged 87.
Gossett died on Thursday night in Santa Monica, California. No cause of death was revealed.
Having started acting in high school after suffering behind sidelined from the school basketball team due to injury, Gossett went on to roles on stage, film and television, debuting on Broadway at the age of 16.
He broke through on the small screen as Fiddler in the groundbreaking 1977 miniseries Roots, which depicted the atrocities of slavery on TV. The sprawling cast included Ben Vereen, LeVar Burton and John Amos.
In 1983 Gossett became the third Black Oscar nominee in the supporting actor category.
He won for his performance as the intimidating Marine drill instructor in An Officer and a Gentleman opposite Richard Gere and Debra Winger. He also won a Golden Globe for the same role.
"More than anything, it was a huge affirmation of my position as a Black actor," he wrote in his memoir.
"The Oscar gave me the ability of being able to choose good parts in movies like 'Enemy Mine,' 'Sadat' and 'Iron Eagle,'" Gossett said in Dave Karger's 2024 book 50 Oscar Nights.
Louis Gossett Jr later said he "needed to be free" of his Oscar. He said his statue was in storage.
"I'm going to donate it to a library so I don't have to keep an eye on it," he said in the book.
"I need to be free of it."
Gossett appeared in such TV movies as The Story of Satchel Paige, Backstairs at the White House, The Josephine Baker Story, for which he won another Golden Globe, and Roots Revisited.
But he said winning an Oscar didn't change the fact that all his roles were supporting ones.
He played an obstinate patriarch in the 2023 remake of The Color Purple.
Gossett struggled with alcohol and co***ne addiction for years after his Oscar win. He went to rehab, where he was diagnosed with toxic mould syndrome, which he attributed to his house in Malibu.
In 2010, Gossett announced he had prostate cancer, which he said was caught in the early stages. In 2020, he was hospitalised with COVID-19.
Gossett went to Hollywood for the first time in 1961 to make the film version of A Raisin in the Sun. He had bitter memories of that trip, staying in a cockroach-infested motel that was one of the few places to allow Black people.
In 1968, he returned to Hollywood for a major role in Companions in Nightmare, NBC's first made-for-TV movie that starred Melvyn Douglas, Anne Baxter and Patrick O'Neal.
This time, Gossett was booked into the Beverly Hills Hotel and Universal Studios had rented him a convertible. Driving back to the hotel after picking up the car, he was stopped by a Los Angeles County sheriff's officer who ordered him to turn down the radio and put up the car's roof before letting him go.
Within minutes, he was stopped by eight sheriff's officers, who had him lean against the car and made him open the trunk while they called the car rental agency before letting him go.
"Though I understood that I had no choice but to put up with this abuse, it was a terrible way to be treated, a humiliating way to feel," Gossett wrote in his memoir.
"I realised this was happening because I was Black and had been showing off with a fancy car — which, in their view, I had no right to be driving."
After dinner at the hotel, he went for a walk and was stopped a block away by a police officer, who told him he broke a law prohibiting walking around residential Beverly Hills after 9 pm. Two other officers arrived and Gossett said he was chained to a tree and handcuffed for three hours. He was eventually freed when the original police car returned.
"Now I had come face-to-face with racism, and it was an ugly sight," he wrote.
"But it was not going to destroy me."
In the late 1990s, Gossett said he was pulled over by police on Pacific Coast Highway while driving his restored 1986 Rolls Royce Corniche II. The officer told him he looked like someone they were searching for, but the officer recognised Gossett and left.
He founded the Eracism Foundation to help create a world where racism doesn't exist.
He is survived by sons Satie, a producer-director from his second marriage, and Sharron, a chef whom he adopted after seeing the 7-year-old in a TV segment on children in desperate situations. His first cousin is actor Robert Gossett.
Gossett's first marriage to Hattie Glascoe was annulled. His second, to Christina Mangosing, ended in divorce in 1975 as did his third to actor Cyndi James-Reese in 1992.

Sad to hear that actor Matthew Perry, best known for his role as Chandler Bing in Friends, has passed away.

Emergency services reportedly responded to calls of a cardiac arrest at the actor’s home on Saturday about 4pm, where he was found unresponsive. Reports claim he was found in his whirlpool bath.

Perry, 54, was well known for his character Chandler Bing on the hit 90s sitcom Friends which aired for 10 seasons. He was also well known for his roles in Fools Rush In, The Whole Nine Yards and 17 Again alongside Zac Efron.Perry’s first credited role was a small part in the drama “240-Robert” in 1979. From there other bit parts came his way in shows including “Charles In Charge,” “Silver Spoons” and “The Tracey Ullman Show.”

His first film role was while still in high school, playing opposite River Phoenix in the 1988 film “A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon.” The year before the film’s release Perry starred in the sitcom “Second Chances” (later renamed “Boys Will Be Boys”) about a man who dies and returns to earth to mentor his younger self, played by Perry. The series failed to find its audience and Perry continued to land more high profile roles in projects including “Growing Pains,” “Who’s The Boss” and “Beverly Hills, 90210.”

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