Notable deaths last week

• Pavel Landovsky, 78, a Czech actor, anti-communist dissident and a friend of late president and playwright Vaclav Havel, has died.

Landovsky appeared in numerous movies, including "Closely Watched Trains," the Academy Award winner for the best foreign language film in 1967.

Many remember him for his role of a brewery official in Havel's play "Audience." In a famed 1976 recording he made with Havel, Landovsky tries to persuade a brewer worker-dissident to spy on himself.

After Landovsky signed the Charter 77 human rights manifesto, he faced communist persecution and emigrated to Austria. He returned home after the 1989 Velvet Revolution led by Havel ousted the communist regime.

• Former "Saturday Night Live" cast member Jan Hooks, 57, whose impressions ranged from Nancy Reagan to Sinead O'Connor to Tammy Faye Bakker during a five-year stint on the show, has died.

Hooks, a Decatur, Georgia, native, moved into prime time in 1991 as a cast member on the sitcom "Designing Women." She later did an Emmy Award-nominated turn on "3rd Rock From the Sun."

She also appeared in 1992's "Batman Returns" and voiced convenience store owner Apu's wife on "The Simpsons" for several years.

On "SNL," she was part of a 1986 cast infusion that included fellow standouts Dana Carvey and Phil Hartman that helped the show after the previous season's ratings dive.

Her screen work became much more sporadic after the 1990s. On "30 Rock" in 2010, she played the avaricious mother of Jane Krakowski's character, Jenna Maroney.

• Comer Cottrell, a black hair-care entrepreneur who made millions with a cheap kit that brought the glossy celebrity Jheri curl into the homes of average African Americans, has died. He was 82.

With $600, Cottrell founded Pro-Line Corp. in downtown Los Angeles in 1970. Military bases were his first customers.

Sales ballooned after Pro-Line introduced the Curly Kit in 1980 and later the Kiddie Kit for youngsters. An at-home product, Curly Kit allowed people to reproduce the loose, shiny Jheri curl hairstyle invented by Jheri Redding and popularized by Michael Jackson, Rick James and other performers.

• Harley Clark, the former Texas cheerleader credited with introducing the "Hook'em Horns" hand signal used by tens of thousands of Longhorns faithful over the past six decades, has died at his farm outside of Austin, school officials said. He was 78.

The school didn't release details or a cause of death for Clark, who watched his hand sign become one of the most recognizable and familiar signs of support in college athletics. Clark introduced the hand sign - the index and pinky fingers extended and the two middle fingers tucked under the thumb - at a 1955 pep rally. It quickly caught on and became a universal symbol for the school and its athletic teams.

• Melissa Bonney Ratcliff, a one-time aide to former Vice President Al Gore, has been killed by an elderly motorist's out-of-control car in San Diego.

The coroner's office says the 45-year-old Ratcliff was struck Tuesday afternoon as she got out of her vehicle in the La Jolla area and was pronounced dead at a hospital.

From 1999 to 2000, Ratcliff was deputy director of communications for Gore. She was also a press secretary for the Democratic National Committee.

• Thomas Eric Duncan, the first Ebola patient diagnosed in the United States, grew up next to a leper colony in Liberia and fled years of war before later returning to his country to find it ravaged by the disease that ultimately took his life.

Duncan, 42, arrived in Dallas in late September, realizing a long-held ambition to join relatives. He came to attend the high-school graduation of his son, who was born in a refugee camp in Ivory Coast and was brought to the U.S. as a toddler when the boy's mother successfully applied for resettlement.

"His son had told his mother, 'I want to see my dad. Can we help my dad to come?' And they fixed his papers to come to this country," said Duncan's brother Wilfred Smallwood, whose son, Oliver Smallwood, is quarantined with the household that hosted Duncan before he was diagnosed.

The trip was the culmination of decades of effort, friends and family members said. But when Duncan arrived in Dallas, though he showed no symptoms, he had already been exposed to Ebola. His neighbors in Liberia believe Duncan become infected when he helped a pregnant neighbor who later died from it. It was unclear if he knew about her diagnosis before traveling.

Duncan's life reflected the hardships of many Liberians who fled or endured the country's 14 years of civil war.

• Vic Braden, an innovative tennis coach who used computers, psychology, television and laughter to popularize his sport and who made key contributions to using biomechanics in sports, has died at 85.

Braden, a onetime professional tennis player who later became a school psychologist, used both disciplines in creating his original and widely popular approach to coaching tennis. He rolled tennis balls to toddlers, taught the sport to people in wheelchairs, ran a chain of "tennis colleges" and made instructional videos viewed by millions.

• Sarah Goldberg, who starred in the television series "7th Heaven" and the film "Jurassic Park III," has died. She was 40.

Goldberg died in her sleep of natural causes at her family's cabin in Wisconsin, her mother Judy Goldberg said. She said a heart ailment is suspected, although an autopsy failed to determine the exact cause of death.

"She went to sleep and didn't wake up," she said.

Goldberg's entertainment career started as a bumblebee in a Chicago City Ballet production of "Cinderella," her mother said, and gained momentum when she was asked to be an extra on the Julia Roberts movie "My Best Friend's Wedding." She got the role because her mother co-owned a company providing table linens for a set. A film staffer saw her helping arrange tablecloths and asked her to be in a scene, her mother said.

Goldberg went on to appear in television series including "90210," "Judging Amy," "The Beast," and "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."

In "7th Heaven" she played Jewish medical student Sarah Glass Camden who fell in love with the son of a Christian pastor.

"She wanted to go to medical school, and instead for three years she played a doctor on '7th Heaven,"' Judy Goldber said of her daughter, who graduated from Amherst College in 1996 with a degree in microbiology, according to her IMDB biography.

Goldberg also played a college student looking for drugs in the Denzel Washington movie "Training Day."

The actress sometimes was credited under the stage name Sarah Danielle Madison.

Goldberg was born in 1974 in Springfield, where her father worked as a lawyer.

• Marian Seldes, an actress who during six decades on stage became one of the most admired figures in American theater, renowned particularly for her interpretations of the works of Edward Albee, died Oct. 6 at her apartment in New York City. She was 86.

Towering in height as well as in stature, and seemingly ethereal in her features, Seldes was widely revered for her ability to inhabit roles comic and tragic, subtle and flamboyant.

Among her rarest achievements was her run in Ira Levin's "Deathtrap," in which she portrayed Myra Bruhl, the wife of a homicidal playwright, and for which she received one of her five Tony Award nominations in 1978. Seldes appeared in approximately 1,800 consecutive performances of the show before it closed in 1982- a feat recognized by Guinness World Records.

• James Bell, a Navy captain and pilot who was held prisoner for seven and a half years during the Vietnam War, has died at 83.

Flying a reconnaissance plane on a mission north of Haiphong on Oct. 16, 1965, then-Lt. Cmdr. Bell was shot down by antiaircraft fire.

Among his co-prisoners in Vietnam were future Arizona senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain, whose Navy aircraft was shot down over Vietnam in 1967. McCain and Bell were in the same compound at one point and had given each other haircuts.

• German author Siegfried Lenz, whose works frequently addressed the moral quandaries faced by ordinary people, has died at 88.

Born 1926 in what is now part of Poland, Lenz was drafted into the German navy toward the end of World War II, deserting in its final days.

Starting in 1951, Lenz wrote dozens of novels, short stories and children's books that have become part of the canon of German post-war literature.

His best-known work abroad is the 1968 novel, "The German Lesson," which explores the blind sense of duty that led some Germans to follow orders unquestioningly during the Nazi era.

• Philadelphia radio and TV sports announcer Bill Campbell, whose career spanned more than seven decades, has died at 91.

• Heinz-Horst Deichmann, the billionaire owner of the German shoe retailer that became the largest in Europe and opened stores such as Rack Room and Off Broadway in the U.S., has died. He was 88.

Trained as an orthopedic surgeon and a theologian, Deichmann opened the family-owned retailer's first stores in Essen, Dusseldorf and Oberhausen following the death of his father, who founded the company as a cobbler's shop in 1913.

• Geoffrey Holder, a Tony Award-winning director, actor, painter, dancer and choreographer who during an eclectic show business career led the groundbreaking show "The Wiz" to Broadway, pitched 7-Up on TV and played a scary villain in a James Bond film, has died. He was 84.

The 6-foot-6, Trinidad-born Holder won Tonys in 1975 for directing and designing the costumes for his all-black retelling of "The Wizard of Oz." In 1978, he directed and choreographed the lavish Broadway musical "Timbuktu!" starring Eartha Kitt and earned another Tony nomination for best costumes.

On TV, Holder played roles on TV's "Tarzan," voiced the leader on the PBS Kids animated show "Cyberchase" and pitched 7-Up as "the un-cola" in a commercial in which he wore a white suit and hat, purring "maaarvelous" as he drank the soda.

His film roles include playing Punjab in the 1982 film version of "Annie," a role in 1967's "Doctor Dolittle" with Rex Harrison, opposite Eddie Murphy in "Boomerang," narrating Tim Burton's "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," and playing the top-hatted voodoo villain Baron Samedi in "Live and Let Die" - the first of the 007 movies to star Roger Moore.

Holder co-authored and illustrated a collection of Caribbean folklore, "Black Gods, Green Islands" in 1959, and had a book of recipes, "Geoffrey Holder's Caribbean Cookbook" in 1973. He painted throughout his life and received a Guggenheim fellowship in fine arts in 1956.

• A Wisconsin Public Radio reporter who has covered the stories of northern Wisconsin for nearly 25 years has died.

WPR announced the death of Mike Simonson, 57, on its website.

• Jimmy Feix, Western Kentucky's winningest football coach and its former athletic director, has died. He was 83.