We lost legends and landscape-changers, singers and celebrities, groundbreakers and earth-shakers in 2024.
Some of those celebrities who died over the past 12 months stopped in Wisconsin along the way — sometimes as performers, sometimes as tourists and sometimes just coming back home.
And Milwaukee Journal, Sentinel and Journal Sentinel photographers captured many of them.
Like Gena Rowlands, the Oscar-nominated actor born in Cambria, Wisconsin, who died on Aug. 14 at age 94. After finding success on Broadway and in television, she came back to her home state in March 1958 to promote her feature-film debut, “The High Cost of Loving,” making two appearances at Milwaukee’s Tower Theatre.
“I’m hoping to get enough time off from all the things that are planned for me to spend a few hours on the phone calling everyone I know,” Rowlands told The Milwaukee Journal.
Sometimes the celebrities combined work with community outreach. When James Earl Jones, who died Sept. 9 at age 93, was in Milwaukee in November 1977 for a brief run of his one-man show about singer-activist Paul Robeson, he stopped by Harambee Community School to talk about Robeson with the students, who were studying his life and work. Robeson “was not a man who said, ‘Follow me,'” Jones told the students, though he could have been talking about himself and his own legacy. “He stood as a standard.”
Some of the celebrities we lost this year made appearances at Summerfest, from former Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh and singer-songwriter Kris Kristofferson to bossa nova maestro Sergio Mendes and R&B legend Frankie Beverly to talk-show pioneer Phil Donahue.
Some played even bigger Milwaukee stages. Singer Liam Payne, who died in October at age 31 after authorities say he jumped from a hotel balcony in Buenos Aires, joined the rest of One Direction for the boy band’s first (and only) Milwaukee performance at what was then Miller Park in 2015.
A few of those we lost were captured performing at long-gone Milwaukee entertainment spots, like the Melody Top Theater (Chita Rivera, Janis Paige, Mimi Hines), the Crown Room at the Pfister Hotel (The Amazing Kreskin), the Avant Garde (John Koerner), Hanna’s (Kinky Friedman), the Red Lion Room at the Hotel Knickerbocker (Jack Jones) and Curro’s Lounge (Benny Golson).
Sometimes they were just visiting. Barbara Rush — who starred opposite Frank Sinatra in “Robin and the Seven Hoods,” Paul Newman in “The Young Philadelphians” and a crash-landing alien in “It Came From Outer Space” — stopped by for the holidays in 1952 with then-husband Jeffrey Hunter, whose parents lived in Whitefish Bay. (Rush and Hunter, an actor best remembered for roles in “King of Kings” and “The Searchers,” divorced in 1955; Rush died in March of this year at age 97.)
For a look at more than 40 photos of celebrities we lost in 2024 who made a stop in Milwaukee, go to jsonline.com/life/green-sheet.