It's impossible to deem the passing of any influential arts, entertainment or pop culture figure more "important" than that of another.
It is possible, however, to observe that two performers who died in 2007 managed to transcend the traditional boundaries between art and entertainment like no others: opera's beloved Italian tenor and American soprano, Luciano Pavarotti and Beverly Sills.
Both Pavarotti, who died in September of pancreatic cancer at age 71, and the Brooklyn-born Sills, a nonsmoker who succumbed to lung cancer in July at age 78, wooed the world by being as comfortable on the TV screen as the opera stage. Both gave opera a human face: Pavarotti as one of the wildly popular "Three Tenors" and Sills, dubbed "America's Queen of Opera" by Time magazine, as the kind of spunky performer who could relish a duet with Miss Piggy on "The Muppet Show."
And 2007 saw the loss of quite a few performers who, unlike these opera superstars, made an indelible mark with something small. Actor Dick Wilson, who died in November at 91, spent 21 years begging TV audiences not to squeeze the Charmin as aggrieved grocer Mr. Whipple. And, for better or worse, some of your brain cells are most likely occupied with the lyrics to Bobby "Boris" Pickett's "Monster Mash"; the singer who co-wrote the Halloween novelty song died in April at 69.
Then there was ex-Playmate Anna Nicole Smith, who . . . well, what did she do, exactly? One online obituary calls her a "reality TV star"; let's go with that. The very famous, very blond widow of billionaire J. Howard Marshall II died in a hotel room in February; she was 39.
Other notable passings in entertainment, the arts and literature, in no particular order, included:
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Kurt Vonnegut, novelist, 84: Noted for biting satirical commentary on war, technology, materialism and other societal ills, his novels include "Slaughterhouse-Five," "Cat's Cradle," "Mother Night" and "Breakfast of Champions."
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Norman Mailer, author, 84: The audacious two-time Pulitzer Prize winner wrote nearly 50 books that included fiction, biography, history, essays and the hybrid genre that became known as New Journalism, the novelistic rendering of factual stories including 1979's "The Executioner's Song," about double-murderer Gary Gilmore. Other books include "The Naked and the Dead" (1948), "Ancient Evenings" (1983) and "The Gospel According to the Son," an "autobiography" of Jesus (1997).
