I don’t know why I feel compelled to observe the deaths of celebrities the way I do. I only know that I always have, going all the way back to a couple of brief sentences I scribbled in an old pocket calendar on the day Elvis Presley died in 1977. (I was seven years old at the time.) A former girlfriend once told me she thought I was morbid for having such an interest in the passing of people I didn’t even know. I see it differently, of course. No, I didn’t personally know the people I write tributes for, but that doesn’t mean I feel no attachment to them, no grief at the thought that they’re gone, or that their lives — or at least their work — has had no direct effect on my own. Given my interests and obsessions, movie and television actors, novelists, screenwriters, artists, composers, and rock stars have often had more effect on me than many of my own relatives.
In any event, a lot of things got away from me in 2010, including a great many topics I wanted to blog about, and my patented celebrity obits comprise a pretty large subset of those lost blogging opportunities. That’s a tremendous source of frustration for me; I feel like I’ve failed at some kind of calling, as pretentious and self-important as that probably sounds. But I feel what I feel, right?
To try and make up a little for my “In Memoriam” failings, I will now present a list of all the celebrities who died in 2010 that I felt worthy of mentioning. They all deserve more than a bullet point, but I’m afraid that’s all I have time to give them. A handful of them did get a little more, up toward the first of the year, before the Summer Work Apocalypse got its claws into me. Those people’s names are hyperlinked to the relevant posts.
And to anyone who may agree with that long-gone girl and thinks I’m being morbid, I assure you I really did feel some connection to everyone on this list, even if it was simply a sense of familiarity due to their faces being on TV all the time as I was growing up.

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