The Memorial Wall

Richard Lewis, the stand-up comedian who also starred alongside Larry David in “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” died Tuesday night at his Los Angeles home due to a heart attack, Variety has confirmed. He was 76.

Lewis announced last April he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease and was retiring from stand-up comedy. He most recently appeared in Season 12 of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” currently airing on HBO.

In 2021, Lewis announced he would not appear in Season 11 of “Curb” in order to recover from three surgeries. He surprised viewers by returning to set for one Season 11 episode, telling Variety at the time, “When I walked in and they applauded, I felt like a million bucks. Larry doesn’t like to hug, and he hugged me and told me how happy he was after we shot our scene.”

Lewis, who played a semi-fictionalized version of himself throughout the 24 years of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” was known for his neurotic, self-deprecating style of comedy. After making his screen acting debut in 1979’s “Diary of a Young Comic,” Lewis rose to prominence in the 1980s and ’90s with appearances on “The Tonight Show” and the “Late Show With David Letterman.” He showcased his dark, yet brightly animated persona in his 1985 Showtime comedy special “I’m in Pain,” following it up with the HBO specials “I’m Exhausted” (1988), “I’m Doomed” (1990) and “Richard Lewis: The Magical Misery Tour” (1997).

In 1989, Lewis landed a leading role in the ABC sitcom “Anything but Love,” in which he starred opposite Jamie Lee Curtis as coworkers at a Chicago magazine who fall in love and fail to uphold a strictly professional relationship. The series ran for 56 episodes across four seasons before ending in 1992. Lewis landed other ’90s sitcom roles in the short-lived “Daddy Dearest” starring Don Rickles and “Hiller and Diller” featuring Kevin Nealon.

Lewis’ film roles include the 1993 comedy “Robin Hood: Men in Tights,” the 1995 drama “Leaving Las Vegas” and the 1997 rom-com “Hugo Pool.” In “Drunks” — starring an ensemble including Faye Dunaway, George Martin, Parker Posey, Howard Rollins, Spalding Gray and Dianne Wiest — Lewis played a struggling alcoholic and drug addict.

Throughout his career, the comedian has also been candid about his own battle with drug and alcohol addiction, referencing his recovery and struggles with depression and anxiety in his comedy. Lewis, formerly a user of cocaine and crystal meth, said his decision to get sober was partly inspired by John Candy’s 1994 death.

In 2021, upon returning to “Curb Your Enthusiasm” after various health struggles, Lewis told Variety, “I’ve devoted my life to comedy and my sobriety the last almost 27 years. I’m overwhelmed with joy right now. I never learned how to keep joy in my head for more than a minute, but I’m breaking all records for my life today.”

In a statement shared with Variety by HBO, David said of his longtime co-star and friend, “Richard and I were born three days apart in the same hospital and for most of my life he’s been like a brother to me. He had that rare combination of being the funniest person and also the sweetest. But today he made me sob and for that I’ll never forgive him.”

HBO added in a statement, “We are heartbroken to learn that Richard Lewis has passed away. His comedic brilliance, wit and talent were unmatched. Richard will always be a cherished member of the HBO and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ families, our heartfelt condolences go out to his family, friends and all the fans who could count on Richard to brighten their days with laughter.”

Lewis is survived by his wife, Joyce Lapinsky.

Restaurateur, owner of Antonio's Mexican Restaurant. In the 1970's, he changed the perception of how people thought of Mexican food, beyond tacos and burritos, and started a trend that continues to this day, where more traditional dishes were brought to the mainstream as Mexican Cuisine. He was born in Monterrey, Mexico in 1937. The fifth child (of seven brothers and three sisters) to Maria and Antonio Sr. In the 1950's, he came to Los Angeles not yet able to speak the language, but eager to learn and make his dream of owning his own restaurant a reality. He worked in almost every restaurant and nightclub in town, as a dishwasher, busboy, and eventually when he learned enough English, as a waiter. He met the love of his life Yolanda, and together they raised five children. In the early 1960's, he worked in the commissary of Warner Brothers studios. As a waiter, he took care of Frank Sinatra, Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, Francis Ford Coppola, and even took care of the head of the studio Jack Warner. When having asked Mr. Warner advice about him opening a restaurant, Mr. Warner told him "don't go into the restaurant business! You won't make any money!" After working at the studio,he'd come home, have a bit of dinner, take a short nap and then get ready for his second job as a waiter at "The Chianti" a popular Italian restaurant on Melrose Avenue. He would often times, come home very late and very tired. Next day, he'd start his routine working at the studio. He did this for ten years, until he saved enough money to open his own restaurant. In 1970, on April 6, he finally opened his restaurant "Antonio's" on Melrose Avenue, only a few blocks away from The Chianti! The same day he opened his restaurant, his youngest child was born. A son, named Antonio Jr. After many years of hard work and struggles, his dream came true, and people loved the cuisine, and many celebrities enjoyed it as well. After 50 years in operation, his restaurant closed. He had been in declining health because of Parkinson's disease and dementia. He passed away peacefully, at home, surrounded by his loving family who cared for him till the end. He is survived by his wife of sixty plus years Yolanda, and their five children. The youngest having died in an auto accident at the age of twenty. He is also survived by his seven grand children and five great grand children. He was an incredible human being, very much loved, and will be truly missed by all who knew him.

Mickey Cottrell, the PR executive who specialized in the indie film business and worked both as an actor and a producer, died on New Year’s Day at the Motion Picture & Television Fund in Woodland Hills. He was 79.

His death was confirmed by his sister, Suzie Cottrell-Smith, who said he suffered from Parkinson’s disease. Cottrell experienced a stroke in 2016 and had gone to live with his sister in Arkansas before returning to Los Angeles in 2019.

Cottrell was born September 4, 1944, in Springfield, IL, and spent part of his childhood in Monroe, LA. At age 8, he moved with his family to Little Rock, AR, where he grew up. He attended the University of Arkansas and spent more than 30 years in the film and PR industries, co-owning multiple firms including most recently Inclusive PR, repping pics including Bill Cunningham: New York, Stones in Exile, Ballets Russes, Down to the Bone, Body of War and Outfest winners Keep the Lights On and Weekend, among others.

“Some of my successes have given new life to films that might not otherwise have had the chance, ranging in scale from big budget to minute,” he wrote in his LinkedIn bio. “I have had the great joy of representing many important film artists

Among the filmmakers whose careers he championed was Phillip Noyce; he served as a publicist on Noyce’s 1989 thriller Dead Calm starring Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill and Billy Zane.

“He did a lot for Phillip,” Cottrell’s sister Suzie told Deadline. “When Phillip first came to Hollywood, he didn’t know anybody. Mickey was instrumental about getting his films recognized.”

Cottrell’s acting credits include roles in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, Paper Hearts, Apt Pupil and The Fluffer as well as John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus and two Star Trek series: The Next Generation and Voyager. Cottrell-Smith said her brother wrote some of his own dialogue for My Own Private Idaho, playing a client of street hustler Mikey Waters (River Phoenix).

Cottrell was also a producer of indie films, most recently 2014’s Perfect Cowboy.

At the MPTF, Cottrell was a member of the writing club the Grey Quill Society. As part of the fund’s Giving Day in 2020, Matthew McConaughey read an excerpt from Cottrell’s short story The Fireman’s Equipment.

Cottrell was a famed raconteur, often holding court in a booth at Musso & Frank Grill in Hollywood (the restaurant is located near Cottrell’s office, a space formerly occupied by Debbie Reynolds’ company).

“He was the most fun brother ever,” Cottrell-Smith said. “So many good memories of when I was a kid — we’d sing together, dance, just all kinds of fun things that went on all the time when he was around. … He was just so fun, full of life, entertaining. Every woman in the neighborhood adored him. He had a job when he was a teenager where he would take the bus downtown and he had to walk two or three blocks home from the bus stop, and he’d be singing and dancing all the way home. And all the ladies in the neighborhood would come outside and watch him.”

She added: “He knew every movie ever made and every little bit actor that was in movies. It was amazing. I could just ask him the question and he always knew the answer when it came to a movie.”

John McAvoy, a colleague of Cottrell’s at Inclusive PR from 2014-19, told Deadline: “I don’t want to reduce his life down to his work as a publicist because in many ways you feel that it was his journey as a person and an artist that allowed him to practice PR in the way that he did… He was an artist first and he taught me that, at its best, publicity is about pure enthusiasm and joy and that it can be a vital part of a broader creative process rather than merely a necessary lubricant in the sales process. RIP to the Wizard.”

Cottrell is survived by his sisters Suzie and Gigi. He was predeceased by his older brother, Rod.

Jane was an artist. She graduated from Art College in 1968 and was awarded a travel scholarship to study temple art in India. We met as students and were married in 1969 after her return from her travels. She originally taught in special education schools before moving to teach Art, but after 10 years she gave up teaching altogether and became a freelance artist, craft maker, machine knitter and silk painter. We moved into in our current home in 1975 as it provided her with the studio space she needed after she went freelance. She was known to her many friends as Flossie.

Flossie continued to paint, draw and make collages for the next 40 years, but as well as this she learnt machine knitting and produced a huge variety of knitted pieces bearing the label ‘Designed and Made by Flossie’. She loved sourcing good wool - hand dyed, hand spun, as well as different specialist wools. She sold her work at the Country Market and at a variety of craft events and craft shops in the area. No two pieces were the same except that is for the soft, fine lambswool lace shawls, which always sold well. She also learnt the skills of silk painting and produced for sale many hand painted scarves and other items. She really enjoyed singing in a local choir and was also a member of an art class for many years.

Flossie was a remarkable and fiercely independent woman and thinker. She would never follow convention for the sake of it and always determined her own course. In her art and in her life, she was independently minded. She was strong and adventurous. Her paintings and collages were drawn almost entirely from her imagination and were made to meet her own creative needs. They were a most important part of who she was and how she saw the world. She never exhibited them.

The diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease came about ten years ago. We were both helped enormously not only by Parkinson’s UK but also by the specialist PD nurses, whom we saw regularly. We were also members of a great local PD support group. Eventually the disease, and the associated dementia robbed her of her motivation, her enthusiasm, her energy and her courage. She lost her ability to write, and most importantly lost her drawing and painting skills. She also lost her love of reading, even her beloved Jane Austen. 

It was a huge privilege to have been married to Flossie for over 50 years. She was kind, caring and very loving. We had lots of laughs and lots of fun. Don

Bill Pinella, a guiding force behind The Press Democrat’s sports section for nearly two decades and a beloved editor over his 45-year career in newsrooms, where close friends called him “Sweet,” died November 15, 2023.

He was 76 and had lived for years with Parkinson’s disease.

At The Press Democrat, as assistant sports editor from 1994 until his retirement in 2012, Pinella was chief among the PD’s many unsung heroes. He was the brace behind writers — and at times the brains — but was content to remain in the background.

He stayed late on Thanksgiving night to read copy about night games, and he helped lay out the sports pages because daily newspapers don’t take a day off for holidays. He worked New Year’s Eve because someone had to be in charge. He was honored to do it.

“For many years Bill and I worked in a tiny office, face-to-face with our desks jammed together,” said former Press Democrat sports editor George Manes. “You learn a lot about a person that way and I learned to admire his humor, calm demeanor and steady commitment to our work. He was a whiz on deadline, corralling recalcitrant, and sometimes ornery, reporters, banging out headlines, editing copy and transforming the often-chaotic mess of daily journalism into a coherent, respected seven-day-a-week sports section.”

He was “a man of soft edges” in a profession where elbows and egos can dominate, said retired PD columnist Chris Smith. He was a salve and support, especially, for his reporters.

“One thing people need to understand about writers and reporters: We tend to get stressed out,” said Press Democrat staff writer and former sports columnist Phil Barber. “Managing workload is hard. Interviews can be hard. Deadlines are VERY hard. If you sense that your editor is wound up about a story, it adds to the anxiety. Bill was the opposite. I never saw him stressed on the job. If something was amiss, he’d tell you, but he always lowered the emotional temperature. That unflappability was confidence inspiring.”

His tenure at the PD came with numerous national awards for sports coverage, and he helped elevate the careers and work of many journalists, among them football writers Matt Maiocco (now with NBC Sports Bay Area) and Eric Branch (now with the San Francisco Chronicle), baseball writer Jeff Fletcher (now with the Orange County Register), Brian Murphy (now with KNBR radio), longtime PD columnist Bob Padecky — and the writer of this story.

He was a fount of story ideas and had a sharp eye for sports trends, spotting them before almost anyone.

When the Oakland Athletics, among the cheapest teams in the big leagues, played a postseason series against the New York Yankees with a gigantic payroll, he ran a chart showing the salaries of all nine starters for each team. The A’s came across like a minor-league outfit and the innovative and humorous chart was a favorite among readers.

In 1996, he suggested to the writer of this story that something strange was going on in baseball. Batters were hitting tons of home runs, and no one could explain why. Bill assigned this writer to investigate the balls. Were they juiced — hopped up?

The search for an answer led to UC Berkeley, where a famous physics professor dropped an old-style ball and a so-called new, juiced-up ball off the Campanile. Luckily no one got beaned. The juiced ball — wound more tightly to fly farther off bats, we would later learn — bounced higher after hitting the ground. (The resulting article won The Associated Press’ award for best sports story in California that year.)

Years later, Bill and the whole world learned it wasn’t only the balls that were juiced. It was almost certainly the players, too, some notoriously taking performance-enhancing drugs. Bill, taking in that controversy, offered his wonderful laugh — which meant life plays tricks on all of us and that’s part of the glorious spectacle.

William Pinella was born March 16, 1947, in Clarksburg, West Virginia. He spoke often and fondly of his upbringing there with his dear sister, Claudia, and he loved to tell stories of their close-knit Italian community.

After graduating from West Virginia University, where he studied journalism, Bill began his 45-year career as a sports journalist, including as sports editor of what was then the San Diego Evening Tribune, where he worked for about a decade, starting in 1983.

In 1982 he met the love of his life, Judy Tuttle. They married in 1984 and raised three children.

His close friends called him Sweet, and that requires an explanation. Between 1986 and 2010 one of the most famous major-league baseball managers was Lou Piniella. People called him Sweet Lou. Although his name is spelled differently from Bill Pinella’s both names are pronounced the same — Pin-nel-la.

Hence, Bill became Sweet.

“Sweet was the best sports editor I ever worked for. His nickname was perfect. He was one of the sweetest men I ever met,” said baseball journalist and senior Sportico writer Barry Bloom, who worked with him in San Diego from 1984 to 1992. “We had a great staff at the Tribune from top to bottom. His job was putting people in the right place and utilizing us. He did that with great calm and tremendous humor. I’ll never forget it. Those days were an incredible foundation for my career. I wouldn’t be where I am today without that experience and without Bill.”

He had a nose for good stories.

“In fact, he suggested two of the most satisfying pieces I ever wrote for our sports section,” said Barber. “One was about the time Rocky Marciano trained for a heavyweight title fight in Calistoga. The other was along the lines of ‘Who was Ernie Nevers and why is a Santa Rosa athletic field named after him?’ They were stories some editors would have seen as old news, or not splashy enough. Bill encouraged his writers to pursue the unexpected.”

He had special affection for the accomplishments of local high school athletes whose efforts often go unrecognized. He spent hours organizing and staging The Press Democrat’s annual high school student-athlete award ceremonies. His love for that work and the job shone through.

“We’re sure not doing this for the money,” he’d say.

Former Press Democrat sports editor Jim Barger, who grew up near Pittsburgh, recalled Pinella grew up a Yankees fan.

“The first time I met him, I’m emptying my stuff to put in the office, and I have a Bill Mazeroski bobblehead,” Barger said. (Mazeroski had ended the 1960 World Series with a game 7, walk-off home run that gave his Pittsburgh Pirates the victory over the Yankees, one of the most famous homers in baseball history.)

“Bill goes, ‘Oh my God!’ He was horrified. But we got over that,” Barger said.

“I counted on him so much. He made out the schedules, a thankless job. He did the night hours. He was a prince,” he added. “A few Christmases ago he sent me a T-shirt for the Grafton Bears — Grafton is a town in West Virginia (population 4,651) and I had covered those guys. I still wear that shirt. God, he was such a good guy.”

He was a devout Catholic and felt great pride in never missing Mass. He was a parishioner at Holy Spirit Catholic Church in Santa Rosa.

As the limits imposed by Parkinson’s disease weighed on his later life, he remained active, walking miles a day, still maintaining his warm disposition, friends said.

“Before I moved out of Sonoma County in 2021, we’d meet for lunch,” said retired Press Democrat copy editor Robert Rubino. “He never wanted to dwell on his illness. We talked about our shared nostalgia for sports and about how rewarding it had been to work at The Press Democrat in the 1990s when newspaper journalism still thrived. In the last two years, we’d talk by phone. Bill was always positive, always receptive to humor, even with his health failing. He set such a dignified example of how to deal with illness.”

He is survived by his wife Judy Pinella of Santa Rosa, their sons Willie of South Lake Tahoe and Timothy of Santa Rosa, daughter Christine Pinella of Santa Rosa, grandson Billee, sister Claudia Randolph of Clarksburg, West Virginia, and by nephew Christopher Edwards of Morgantown, West Virginia, niece Caryl Banks of Bowie, Maryland, grandnephews Chase and Dominic, and grandniece, Lizzy.