How much should we mourn celebrities whom we don't even know?

With Tim Russert, "stranger mourning" makes sense with those folks who watched him every week and made him "one of our family" in their homes. TV by its very nature was designed to create such relationships.

I recall a one-two-three-four series of deaths in 1980 that rather affected me, all coming in the same year:

-- Steve McQueen, at 50. After overtaking Paul Newman to become the young superstar of the sixties (it took "Bullitt" to do it in '68), McQueen had an on-off career in the early seventies and then had a huge hit (WITH Paul Newman) in 1974's "Towering Inferno." Steve grabbed his profits from that one and pretty much took the rest of the 70's off, becoming a hermit in Malibu.

McQueen made a film of Ibsen's "Enemy of the People" in '77 that was barely shown (he did the movie in a mop of long hair and beard), and then "came back" in 1980 with two weird releases: "Tom Horn," a downbeat little real-life Western in which McQueen is hanged at the end, and "The Hunter" , an amateur TV-movie-for-the-big-screen action thriller that hurt anyone with memories of "Bullitt." Hopes were high that McQueen was just rusty and would soon make good movies again-- he looked great, rumpled and rugged and slender.

But it was not to be. As soon as we got McQueen back for movies in 1980, we lost him in life for good. Cancer. Sudden onset. Age 50. Just like that. No more Steve McQueen movies.

To show us what we lost: after McQueen's death, Paul Newman's career rather coincidentally came back to life in the 80's -- "Absence of Malice," "The Verdict" and "The Color of Money" -- and Newman got 25+ more years of career (and life; here's hoping Paul stays around a bit longer, but he's made it to his 80's, already).

---

Peter Sellers. Sellers had been a mainstay of British-import comedy movies in the fifties and early sixties, and then worked the one-two 1964 combination of "Dr. Strangelove" and "The Pink Panther" to rocket to full stardom. But he was nuts, and a druggie, and he had a heart attack in his thirties (also in 1964) that weakened him severely. His career plummeted until he agreed to do a new, clunkier "Pink Panther" in 1975. It hit, and then two more 70's "Pink Panthers" kept him afloat at the box office, and then in 1979, he gave a superb comic-dramatic performance in "Being There." They gave him a Time cover.

And in 1980, while preparing another Pink Panther movie, Sellers long-weakened heart gave out, and he was gone, too. No more Peter Sellers movies.

--John Lennon. Rather like Steve McQueen, John Lennon had gone the hermit house-husband route for much of the 70's, but he came back with a splash and a new album in 1980, with a hit tune "Starting Over" to reflect his return. He did some interviews.

Saturday Night Live did a tour of the Dakota apartment complex where Lennon lived that year (outside only). Shortly thereafter, Lennon was shot and killed there, right where SNL had filmed. Age 40. No more John Lennon tunes. And of course, no more possiblity of a Beatles reunion.

That one REALLY hurt.

It's funny how all these years later I remember this. But Lennon and McQueen were major icons, and Sellers certainly had a name.

It was my first inkling of how connected to celebrities we can get. Their personal loss should only matter to their family and closest friends.

But certainly when they die young -- and as violently as John Lennon did -- its a double shock: we lose the artist, and we lose all the art that could have been. All the movies, all the songs...never to be.

P.S. Oh, we lost Alfred Hitchcock in 1980, too. Natural causes, AT age 80. No more Alfred Hitchcock movies...but then, we weren't really expecting them. It was as if Hitchcock figured it was time to pass the baton to Spielberg for good.

Peter Sellers was like a family treasure in the 1970's; we went to see Return of The Pink Panther three times while it ran at a theater in downtown Cincinnati (it ran at that theater, to peak business, for almost a year). And the two Pink Panther movies that followed were a big deal for us--same for Being There. We also made a point of watching his films on television; during the 1970's, NBC ran not only A Shot in The Dark, but also The Mouse That Roared, The Party, After The Fox, and The World of Henry Orient (which had not only Sellers, but also the wonderful Paula Prentiss). A great comedy education.

The sad thing about McQueen is that he died of Mesothelioma, an awful form of cancer that is prevalent among people who worked with asbestos; during his time in the military, McQueen stripped ships lined with asbestos--the tumor that had developed in his body, which he had removed just before his death, weighed close to 50 pounds.

Sellers was quite a treasure, though evidently his own worst enemy.

His 1964 heart attack occurred while filming Billy Wilder's rather extreme sex farce "Kiss Me Stupid" with fellow stars Dean Martin and Kim Novak. Lotsa guys turned down Sellers' part (Jack Lemmon and Tony Randall among them) and in desperation, Wilder filled it with Ray Walston, a good character guy but hardly a star.

I neglected to mention that Sellers, too, died rather young: 55. Another surprise, though he'd been rumored ill for a decade.

I seem to recall that about McQueen's asbestos-related death, now. Early blame was laid to cigarettes and/or racing car fumes (that one didn't quite work; Paul Newman has raced into his 70's.)

P.S. Since my original post on celebrity deaths, we've lost another one: George Carlin. A whole other kind of icon. Not quite Lennon, McQueen, Sellers, or Hitchcock though. 1980 was a helluva year for celebrity death.

Sellers drove Billy Wilder crazy on the set of Kiss Me, Stupid; Wilder and Diamond had gone to the trouble of writing a script, and Sellers insisted on improvising (the irony, according to Wilder, is that in trying to keep up with him, Dean Martin proved to be much more inspired in his improvisations than Sellers was--Sellers was later a guest on Martin's TV show, and the two seemed to be working completely off-the-cuff; and Martin was, as far as I was concerned, several miles ahead of his guest). Ray Walston would hardly have been my first choice for the film, either, but he was awfully good, particularly in his jealous rages. The movie has what might be regarded as a "European" attitude about adultery--it was based on an Italian costume farce.

Walston was good, but the movie was really designed to be a three-star triangle, and it was out of whack with a character guy at one point.

"Kiss Me Stupid" was the beginning of Billy Wilder's end. He'd made the classic Some Like It Hot, the Best Picture "The Apartment," Cagney's last movie (for 20 years) "One, Two, Three" and then the biggest hit of his career "Irma La Douce".

And then came "Kiss Me Stupid." "Irma La Douce" had shown the way: far more broad, unfunny and brash than "The Apartment," "Irma" made its money on early-60's audience cravings for more sex in movies (it was about a hooker and her hooker friends and her competing pimps.)

Having upped the ante on sex with "Irma," Billy figured he could go all the way (sans nudity) with "Kiss Me Stupid," in which aspiring small desert town songwriter Ray Walston passes off local hooker Kim Novak as his wife so as to allow passing entertainer Dino (guess who) to seduce the wife and buy Walston's songs out of guilt. For his part, Dino plays "himself," as a sex-crazed egotist who has to get laid once a day to avoid headaches.

Well, "Kiss Me Stupid" got condemned by the Church and banned in many cities, and United Artists wouldn't even put its corporate name on it (they shipped it to indiefilm distributor Lopert films, thus killing off full distribution hopes.)

And Billy Wilder never had a hit again, though he made six more movies.

I like "Kiss Me Stupid" more than "Irma La Douce." Dino is wonderfully self-parodistic, Kim Novak is gorgeous, vulnerable and come-hither (she's really playing her "Vertigo" role, but funny) and yes, Walston has his moments (though Ray Walston bedding Kim Novak just doesn't play.)

Dean Martin was evidently hilarious around the set, telling off an overcontrolling Billy Wilder one day with a stream of profanity and a final: "If you wanted a real actor, why'd you hire me? Why didn't you get Marlon Brando?"

Funny thing was, Dean Martin WAS a real actor -- Marlon Brando, who co-starred with Martin in "The Young Lions" and coached him for "Rio Bravo," said so -- but at a certain point, Martin just didn't give a damn ABOUT acting anymore. Gimme a drink, gimme a Western (his favorite type of movie to appear in and to watch at home, where he liked to stay), that's all I want, said Dino.

His Number One TV variety show proved Martin's prowess at improv. The deal was that his guest stars performed in a week's rehearsals with a stand-in for Dean, until Sunday, during which he sat in a soundstage trailer watching football on one TV screen and his show's final rehearsal on the other. Then he went out for a couple of hours on stage with the guest stars and performed the broadcast version, pretty much off the cue cards and off of his own head.

Dean's reward: he was one of the richest men in Hollywood, thanks to the TV deal, movies ("Airport" made him millions), records (a bigger seller than Sinatra in the 60's), Vegas --- and buying up half of Southern California's real estate.

Dean Martin was one cool cat, if a very reclusive and unconnected kind of guy. I'm sorry Martin Scorcese never made his movie about him.