Notable deaths last week

• Longtime Chicago radio and TV personality Roy Leonard, who introduced listeners and viewers to some of America's biggest celebrities as they were just getting started, has died. He was 83.

Leonard was well known around the Midwest for his decades of talk radio, celebrity interviews and movie reviews on Chicago's WGN Radio and TV, where he crafted an improvisational interview style around the art of listening and allowing a conversation to unfold.

Leonard's three-decade run at WGN was marked by interviews with an array of entertainers, ranging from the mime Marcel Marceau to Tom Cruise.

He caught many of them as they were just starting out, talking on location with Christopher Reeve about "Superman" and Dustin Hoffman about making "Tootsie" in 1982.

Kelly Leonard, executive vice president of comedy group The Second City, said his family's dinner table often resembled his dad's radio show, with discussions of music, politics and culture and occasional appearances by musicians and other entertainers themselves.

• A veteran TV political correspondent who covered the Vietnam War and the United States' space program has died in Washington, D.C. Bruce Morton was 83.

Morton spent 29 years at CBS, winning six Emmy Awards. He reported on the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and covered the unrest in China's Tiananmen Square in 1989.

He left CBS to join CNN in 1993. He retired in 2006.

Morton was born in Norwalk, Connecticut, and grew up in Chicago. He got his start in the news business while still a student at Harvard College, doing radio newscasts for Boston's WORL.

• Edgar Steele, who once represented Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler in a lawsuit that bankrupted the white supremacist group, has died in federal prison in California. Steele was 69.

Steele was serving a 50-year sentence at the federal prison in Victorville, California, after he was convicted of plotting to kill his wife.

• On "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1967, Joan Rivers joked about society's double-standard for women.

"A girl, you're 30 years old, you're not married, you're an old maid," she said. "A man, he's 90 years old, he's not married, he's a catch."

At the time, it was rare to see a female comic onstage, and even rarer for an entertainer to talk frankly about being a woman. A few years later, on "The Carol Burnett Show," Rivers boasted about wearing a pushup bra, laughed about the lack of sex in long marriages and blatantly said men like second wives better.

Rivers, who died Thursday at 81, was a trailblazer for all comics, but especially for women. Funeral services will be held Sunday at Temple Emanu-El in Manhattan, the assistant to Rabbi Joshua Davidson confirmed on Friday.

Among those who lauded Rivers for paving the way for female comedians was David Letterman, who called her "a real pioneer for other women looking for careers in stand-up comedy" in his monologue Thursday. "And talk about guts - she would come out here and sit in this chair and say some things that were unbelievable... The force of her comedy was overpowering."

Ellen DeGeneres, Kathy Griffin, Louis CK, Marlon Wayans and Wanda Sykes are among those who consider Rivers a hero.

"Thank you Joan for paving the way for broads like me," Sykes wrote on Twitter.

No topic was too taboo for Rivers, thus opening the door for Sarah Silverman to crack about racism and Margaret Cho to tell X-rated jokes and look cute while doing it.

"Every woman in comedy is indebted to her," Amy Poehler said in a statement.

• Argentine rock star Gustavo Cerati has died, four years after a stroke put him in a coma and ended the career of one of Latin America's most influential musicians.

The 55-year old was the former lead singer of the Argentine rock band Soda Stereo, which was among the most popular groups in the Spanish-speaking world in the 1980s and 1990s.

"He is eternal. He is by far the best musician to come out of Argentina in the past 50 years," Charly Alberti, the drummer for Soda Stereo, told Todo Noticias news channel.

• Andrew Madoff, Bernard Madoff's last surviving son, died of cancer on Wednesday, years after turning his father in and insisting he had been duped like the rest of the world into believing history's most notorious Ponzi king was an honest financier.

Madoff, 48, was "surrounded by his loving family" when he died at a hospital from mantle cell lymphoma, said his attorney, Martin Flumenbaum.

Andrew Madoff and his brother, Mark Madoff, worked on the legitimate trading side of their father's Manhattan firm, two floors removed from the private investment business where Bernard Madoff carried out his $65 billion Ponzi scheme over several decades.

Bernard Madoff, 76, was arrested in December 2008. He pleaded guilty to fraud charges months later and is serving a 150-year sentence at a federal prison in North Carolina. Two years after the father's arrest, Mark Madoff hanged himself in his Manhattan loft apartment as his 2-year-old son slept in another room.

• Charlie Powell, the San Diego sports all-star who was one of the first black NFL players and who later became a boxer and fought Cassius Clay, has died. He was 82.

• Jimi Jamison, who sang lead on Survivor hits such as "Burning Heart" and "Is This Love," has died. He was 63.

Booking agent Sally Irwin said Tuesday that Jamison died last weekend of an apparent heart attack at his home in Memphis, Tenn. He had returned to Memphis after performing in California.

• Thomas Nardelli, a former aide whose report of possible embezzlement led to a secret investigation of Gov. Scott Walker's staff when he was Milwaukee County executive, has died at age 70.

Nardelli was Walker's chief of staff when Walker was county executive and followed him to Madison, where Nardelli led the state Division of Safety and Buildings and then served as administrator for the state's Division of Environmental and Regulatory Services. He left the latter post in 2011.

The probe that ran between May 2010 and 2013 uncovered other problems as well and ended with six of Walker's aides and associates being convicted on various charges.

• A former newsman who worked for The Associated Press for 39 years has died in New York. Bruce Hodgman was 76.

• Former NHL defenseman Carol Vadnais, a six-time all-star, has died. He was 68.

Vadnais made his NHL debut in 1966-67 with his hometown Montreal Canadiens and played 17 NHL seasons, winning Stanley Cups in 1968 with Montreal and 1972 with Boston. He also played for the California Golden Seals and New Jersey Devils.

• Yves Carcelle, the former chief executive officer who turned Louis Vuitton into the world's largest and most valuable luxury brand, has died. He was 66.

Carcelle, who spent much of his career traveling the world looking for the next Vuitton outpost, became head of the brand in 1990, a year after joining LVMH, and set about transforming the trunk maker into LVMH's biggest and most profitable label. He hired Marc Jacobs as artistic director in 1997 and expanded Vuitton into ready-to-wear and, more recently, fine jewelry, while opening shops from Las Vegas to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

"A tireless traveler, Yves was a pioneer who embodied the image and values of Louis Vuitton," LVMH Chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault said in the statement. "Always curious, passionate and in motion, he was one of the most inspiring leaders of men and women I have ever had the privilege of knowing."

• Stefan Andrei, a foreign minister under communism who decreased Romania's dependency on the Soviet Union, has died. He was 83.

Andrei was named foreign minister in 1978 and developed ties with African and Asian countries which gave former Communist leader Nicolae Ceausescu a reputation as a maverick among Warsaw Pact leaders.

• A best-selling author, historian and speechwriter for then-New York Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller has died. Joseph Persico was 84.

His book "Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial" was made into a miniseries on Turner Network Television.