Joey Ramone

popular name: Michel Legrand

date_of_death: January 26, 2019

age: 86

cause_of_death: Septicemia

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: It is difficult to pin the multi-talented Michel Legrand down into one single category. This amazingly versatile French singer, songwriter, composer, arranger, conductor and producer has enjoyed a whirlwind career, excelling in an impressively broad range of domains from film soundtracks and French 'chanson' to jazz and classical music. An international star, who has won as much respect in the States as he has in Europe, Legrand was a prolific composer, having written over 200 film and television scores, in addition to his vast repertoire of songs. His scores for two of the films of French New Wave director Jacques Demy, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967), earned Legrand his first Academy Award nominations. Legrand won his first Oscar for the song "The Windmills of Your Mind" from The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), and additional Oscars for Summer of '42 (1971) and Barbra Streisand's Yentl (1983). In the end Legrand composed more than two hundred film and television scores and won three Oscars, five Grammys and was nominated and/or won American Emmy awards, Australian Film Institute awards and too many other great honors to list here.

popular name: Franco Ventriglia

date_of_death: November 28, 2012

age: 90

cause_of_death: Natural causes

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Franco Ventriglia was an opera singer who sang bass in every major European opera house during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Serving in the 1st Marine Aircraft Wing in the South Pacific during World War II upon return stateside Franco was working at his brother's filling station in Easton, Connecticut when Mario Pagano, a maestro de Canto at the American Theatre Wing Professional School heard from one of Ventriglia's coworkers about his singing talent. Ventriglia passed an audition and went on to attend the school on the G.I. Bill. After Pagano's death, Ventriglia and his wife Jean boarded the ocean liner SS Constitution for Italy. On board, after singing Ol' Man River for a group in first class, he met a businessman who asked him to contact Toti Dal Monte, a great coloratura soprano who also taught voice in Rome. Ventriglia took singing lessons from Dal Monte and eventually made his operatic debut in Palermo, singing in the Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. He later sang with Luciano Pavarotti in La bohème and Rigoletto. He performed in Samson and Delilah at La Scala, a performance he considered the highlight of his career. He returned to the U.S. in 1978, where he continued to perform at venues including Carnegie Hall, and traveled to perform in southeast Asia, until his retirement in 2001 at age 79. Upon his death he was laid to rest at Oak Lawn Cemetery in Fairfield, CT.

popular name: Frankie Lymon

date_of_death: February 27, 1968

age: 25

cause_of_death: Heroin overdose

claim_to_fame: Music

best_know_for: Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers were five kids from Washington Heights, just north of Harlem where they sang doo-wop under the streetlight on the corner of 165th and Amsterdam. After just a few months of rehearsal they cut their first record, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” which made it to the top of the national charts. It was 1956 and overnight Frankie Lymon was the hottest singer in America, off on a world tour. At 13-years old he was the hottest singer on the charts, at 14 he quit to go solo, at 16 he was a has-been and at age 25 he was dead of a heroin overdose.