John Henson, one of the sons of the late Jim Henson, who had created an empire with his puppet creations The Muppets, died of a heart attack on Friday. He was 48 years old. A rep from The Jim Henson Company confirmed the news on Facebook on Saturday, stating that Henson was at his home in Saugerties, NY, with his daughter at the time of his death.

Henson had been full-fledged involved with his father’s creations; he was a puppeteer for the Muppets and had performed as Sweetums the Ogre in several Muppet-themed films, including Muppet Treasure Island and The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz. He was also a shareholder and board member of The Jim Henson Company.

Ralph Waite, best known to television audiences as the patriarch of the household on the 1970s CBS-TV series The Waltons, has died, according to the New York Times. He was 85. No cause of death was reported.

With his big hearted, weathered yet tender and reassuring demeanor, Waite’s character of John Sr. was the rock in the sea of trials and tribulations on The Waltons, and the presence of Waite’s performance gave a kind of father figure to everyone on the show as well, something that no doubt was probably felt by the actors when filming the program.

Legendary funnyman Sid Caesar, whose wild-eyed, rubbery, and improvisational characterizations made him one of the pioneers of the early Golden Age of Television during the 1950s with the program Your Show of Shows, has died at the age of 91. His death was revealed via a Twitter post by talk show maven Larry King.

Caesar represented one of the very first funny men of television. His Your Show of Shows, along with sidekick and equally funny and manic Imogene Coca, and with sketches written by people who would become absolute luminaries in television, Broadway, and films, like Carl Reiner, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and others, was a smash hit during the early 1950s. It also won scores of Emmy awards, was performed live each week, and most importantly, was an early proponent of the sketch comedy that programs like Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and especially Saturday Night Live would later flower and crystallize. Caesar’s zany, off-the-cuff, off-the-radar, maniacal energy, which borderlined on lunatic, seemed to take every ounce of his inner grit to bring to fruition. In a way, other than maybe arguably Jerry Lewis, no other performer sweated to make his comedy 100 percent successful more than Sid Caesar did.

Shirley Temple, the legendary child star of the 1930s, has passed away at the age of 85. The actress-turned-ambassador died Monday night surrounded by her family in her home near San Francisco.

Temple was a shining light in the darkness that was the Great Depression, and was one of the top box office performers from 1935 to 1938, even beating out some of the greatest actors ever to live such as Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Joan Crawford, Bing Crosby, and Robert Taylor. Her work in movies like Curly Top and The Littlest Rebel helped to save 20th Century Fox from bankruptcy.

Philip Seymour Hoffman starred in two movies written by fellow Academy Award winner Aaron Sorkin: Charlie Wilson’s War, which scored him an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and Moneyball. The two also shared something else in common: they both struggled with addiction, Sorkin to cocaine and Hoffman to the heroin that ultimately took his life.

Sorkin wrote a short but impactful obituary for Hoffman, which touched on some of the time the two spent together. Continue reading to see what he had to say.