
Malcolm-Jamal Warner of ‘The Cosby Show' dies at 54 in drowning accident
According to Costa Rica's judicial investigation department (OIJ), Warner was pulled out to sea by strong currents and pronounced dead at the scene by Red Cross lifeguards. His representatives have yet to issue a statement regarding the incident.
Warner rose to fame as Theo Huxtable, the only son of Cliff Huxtable, played by Bill Cosby, in *The Cosby Show*. The series, which aired from 1984 to 1992, was groundbreaking for its positive portrayal of a Black American family, countering prevailing stereotypes of the time.
Born on August 18, 1970, in Jersey City, New Jersey, Warner was named after civil rights leader Malcolm X and jazz musician Ahmad Jamal. His mother, Pamela, managed his early acting career, which led him to attend The Professional Children's School in New York.
Though he had minor roles before *The Cosby Show*, his performance as Theo became his breakout role, earning him an Emmy nomination in 1986 for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. Warner later appeared in spin-off *A Different World* and had notable roles in *Sons of Anarchy* and *Suits*.
Warner, who was private about his personal life, is survived by his wife and daughter, whose names he never publicly disclosed. - Reuters
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


The Star
13 hours ago
- The Star
Pedro Pascal hopes to give Marvel bounce with Fantastic Four reboot
The Fantastic Four actors Pascal (left) and Kirby play a superpower couple in the movie who's ready to welcome their child into the world. — AP American-Chilean actor Pedro Pascal stars as a stretchy Earth saviour in Marvel's latest blockbuster The Fantastic Four: First Steps , out now at cinemas, that will test the appetite for more superhero films. After wielding a sword in Gladiator 2 and a gun in The Last Of Us , the 50-year-old plays the elastic Mister Fantastic alongside the character's wife, the Invisible Woman (Vanessa Kirby), his best friend the Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach), and his brother-in-law the Human Torch (Joseph Quinn). The film is set in a retro-futuristic New York and is hoping to do better than previous reboots of the franchise which have struggled at the box office. The plot sees Mister Fantastic and his wife overwhelmed with joy at a long-hoped-for positive pregnancy test before their lives are upended by news that Galactus, a galactic Godzilla-like character who devours planets, is heading for Earth. While such apocalyptic threats are nothing new in the Marvel universe – or in previous Fantastic Four films – the pregnancy storyline is a rare twist in the world of superheroes. 'Motherhood is something that you can incorporate in all areas of your life, it affects every area of your life in a beautiful way,' Kirby told journalists at a recent press event in Paris. In his double role as superhero and doting dad, Pascal continues to shape his image of a thoughtful, emotionally intelligent man that fuels his popularity. 'I'm not original by any means when it comes to human decency,' he told reporters in Paris, adding that treating people and himself with respect was 'a human thing and I think a very, very basic and beautiful standard to live by'. Previous versions of the Fantastic Four franchise from the Marvel stable – which includes X-Men, the Avengers, Iron Man and Spider-Man – have been resounding flops. A 2015 remake made just US$168mil (RM708.29mil today) at the global box office. Variety magazine wrote that the latest incarnation 'succeeds where earlier attempts have faltered – and good thing, too, since the studio has a lot more riding on this franchise now'. Marvel movies would earn 'upwards of US$1bil (RM4.22bil) at the box office' at their peak, 'but they've lost steam of late', the magazine noted. Marvel has struggled this year to score with audiences, with its biggest releases Thunderbolts and Captain America: Brave New World struggling for acclaim. – AFP


The Star
17 hours ago
- The Star
At 70, Godzilla keeps on smashing expectations and buildings.
Steve Ryfle remembers scouring the TV Guide each week to find the monster movies and Universal horror films he loved. 'You had to make an appointment with yourself to be by the TV, so it was really special,' recalls Ryfle, an author and co-writer of the Emmy-winning documentary Miracle On 42nd Street. 'The Japanese films always appealed to me the most. 'They were intriguing because they took place in a world that was unfamiliar, a culture that was unfamiliar.' Godzilla, he says, was especially captivating to a dinosaur-loving kid. 'Of course, when you're younger, you're into dinosaurs,' he says. 'Godzilla seemed like the greatest dinosaur I'd ever seen, and it did all these crazy things, and I just loved it.' A statue of the Godzilla inside the Toho Studio head office building in Tokyo, Japan. — AKIO KON/Bloomberg But back then, beyond a few fanzines or horror magazines, it wasn't as easy as it is now to find information about less mainstream interests or connect with like-minded fans. 'There really wasn't anything to read about these films in any detail. And I remember as a child asking a bookstore clerk if there were books on Godzilla, and he actually laughed at me and asked why I would ever want to read anything like that,' says Ryfle. 'That stuck in my brain.' Clearly. Along with Ed Godziszewski – with whom he co-wrote 2017's Ishiro Honda: A Life In Film – Ryfle is the co-author of the massive new book Godzilla: The First 70 Years , a 432-page, 2kg book filled with stories, interviews, breakout boxes, and more than 900 photos of one of cinema's most enduring figures. The writing duo will be appearing as part of an overall Godzilla onslaught at this year's San Diego Comic-Con. 'Godzilla, at its very heart, is a monster rooted in trauma,' says author Ryfle. — Famous Monsters/Instagram Reflection of the times The book, which features introductions by Halloween and The Thing directing legend John Carpenter and recurring Godzilla actress Megumi Odaka, is the culmination of an effort by the publisher and Toho Studios to mark the anniversary with the ultimate English-language book examining the narrative and visual history of the films, says Ryfle. 'Dating back to 1954, Godzilla has, of course, gone through all of these different iterations and evolutions and changes and its motivation and its personality and the way it's depicted on screen, and even the techniques that are used to bring it to life,' says Ryfle, who points to the recent box office success and critical respect for 2023's Godzilla Minus One . 'I mean, who would have thought 70 years ago that a Godzilla movie made in Japan would win an Academy Award? It would have been impossible, and yet here we are.' 'It's a real evolution from the time when these movies were sort of misunderstood and just relegated to the scrap heap of low-budget cinema they were assumed to be.' 'Obviously, there are interesting stories to tell about these movies and the people who made them,' he says. 'It's really kind of a celebration of the people and the culture that they come from. The people who made these movies were proud of the work that they did, because they were basically, by and large, handmade films.' History of Godzilla is looked into extensively in a massive new book titled Godzilla: The First 70 Years. — TNS Rooted in trauma Unlike other schlocky mid- century genre movies, the original Godzilla films reflected Japan's experience during and after World War II. The films were a response not only to the devastation caused by the United States detonating atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also to the firebombing of Tokyo in which nearly 300 US planes dropped 1665 tonnes of napalm on the city, creating a firestorm and killing 100,000 people in what the Truman Library Institute called 'the most devastating aerial bombardment in history'. 'Godzilla, at its very heart from the very beginning, is a monster rooted in trauma,' says Ryfle. 'It's also really about that collective experience of the war and the struggle and the hardships that people went through – and also the collective experience of the post-war period when the economy was in shambles and there were food shortages and political unrest and unemployment and deprivation of extreme magnitude.' There are images in the original film that directly correspond to wartime destruction, says Ryfle. 'When I'm giving talks about the first Godzilla film, I'll show stills of Tokyo on fire,' says Ryfle, referring to actual photos taken during wartime bombing raids. 'I'll put up these two pictures side by side ... it's almost like a mirror image.' As well as exploring the film's inspirations – such as the original King Kong, which had been a huge success upon re-release just a few years before the initial Godzilla film – Ryfle and Godziszewski did interviews and scoured archives for fresh insights – and found things that surprised them despite having decades of experience writing about the films. 'Ed and I've been writing together for a number of years and working on a lot of different projects. We actually met 30 years ago at the very first Godzilla convention that they had in Chicago,' says Ryfle, praising his writing partner Godziszewski as 'a legend' when it comes to knowing the topic and where to dig up information. Not only did they discover the audio elements of the iconic Godzilla roar – many of the monster cries were made with different musical instruments, says Ryfle – but they also learned something surprising about the changing face of Godzilla over the years. 'From 1954 to, say, 1975, the suit looks different pretty much in almost every film, and I always thought that was on purpose. 'But no, they actually made the suits, at least for about the first 15 years, from the same mould. They just came out differently every time,' says Ryfle, who credits the actor inside the suit, Haruo Nakajima, both for his artistry and his superhuman stamina. 'The very first suit was almost unusable. It weighed so much and the interior of it was almost inflexible ... the guy tried to walk in it and just tipped over.' 'It was impossible to be inside without suffocating if you were in it for more than a few minutes ... it was almost a death sentence to do this stuff,' says Ryfle, adding that Nakajima would sweat out dozens of pounds during filming. 'They would have to pour the sweat out of the suit every day, and then dry out the interior for the next day, because it was just a sauna in there. Though the 'man-in-the-suit' aspect could sometimes be viewed as comical, Ryfle says Nakajima's work was instrumental in the creature's evolution and popularity. 'I attribute a large part of the success of those movies to Haruo Nakajima, who played Godzilla for roughly the first 18 years of the first cycle of Godzilla films,' says Ryfle, while also praising the original film's special effects wizard, director and cast. 'He was just a wonderful man who died a couple of years ago. 'He loved his work, and he's largely responsible for the personality that starts to come through.' 'He turns Godzilla from a walking nuclear bomb into a character over a period of time,' says Ryfle. In the beginning, original King Kong films served as an inspiration for Godzilla movies. Presently, the two gigantic creatures have appeared together in Hollywood films. — Handout Lasting power While we discussed a range of topics and there's much more in the book, Ryfle summed up the project as we were concluding the conversation. 'Someone asked me, like, what was your goal at the start of it?' he says. 'We wanted to make the best Godzilla book for the widest possible audience. 'I've always felt from the beginning that (the films) were unfairly maligned and misunderstood, and that maybe I could help, especially after I started meeting the creators and realising what passion they had for their work, and starting to understand how culturally specific these films are.' But he also understands another reason for Godzilla's lasting power. 'On a gut level, no matter what's going on in the film and how quote-unquote 'serious' it is as a movie,' says Ryfle, 'people really want to see the spectacle of Godzilla destroying things.' – The Orange County Register/Tribune News Service


The Star
a day ago
- The Star
Scheffler shows 'em how
Scottie Scheffler celebrates his win at the Open, another chapter in a dominant campaign underscored with a second major this year. — AP THE world of golf was again illuminated by the craftsmanship of Scottie Scheffler, who is making the game look like an art – this time so eloquently illustrated on his way to a first British Open title. The American, a long way ahead of the rest, is the world No. 1 and judging by the way he has dug his heels in, he'll be there for so time yet.