Esteemed actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who won a Best Actor Academy Award for his portrayal of Truman Capote in Capote, was found dead today in his Greenwich Village home in New York City, the victim of an apparent drug overdose, according to The New York Post. He was 46.

The actor, who has publicly talked about his struggles with drugs and had been in rehab several times, was reportedly found by his personal assistant in his bathroom with a hypodermic needle still in his arm.

Hoffman was an actor’s actor, a consummate individual who had a jack-of-all-trades kind of chameleonic feel to all his roles, and there were plenty of memorable ones. His sort of slept-in look, top shelf versatility, and intensity endeared him to the mainstream (he had appeared in the second theatrical installment of The Hunger Games, Catching Fire) and to the fringes (Boogie Nights, Capote, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, etc). There was a collective reverence for the man, his work and his art.

Arthur Rankin Jr., half of the Rankin/Bass Productions, responsible for co-producing countless holiday-themed classics like Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, died in his home in Bermuda on January 30, 2014 after a brief illness. He was 89.

With partner Jules Bass, the New York City-born Rankin created an empire of riches and creative success with Rankin/Bass almost on par with the likes of Walt Disney at its peak. Many of its shows, including the aforementioned Rudolph and Santa Claus — “Animagic” animated specials in which figures are shot a frame at a time to create seamless motion on screen — and other specials like Frosty the Snowman and Frosty’s Winter Wonderland (all released between 1964 – 1976) are still rerun today and are still as cherished as ever. Generations of fans in families — grandfathers, grandmothers, fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters — have all had Rankin/Bass specials pass their gazes, and it became a form of holiday Americana almost in a way, a trumpeting, flag-waving affirmation that the Christmas season had finally arrived once again, due to the annual airing of these specials. Rankin, with Bass, would only hire what seemed to be top shelf creative people and voice actors (people like James Cagney, Fred Astaire, veteran voice actor Paul Frees, Andy Griffith, Vincent Price, Burl Ives, and George Burns to name a few) to make productions that had a sense of class and freshness to them.

Internet sensation Biquette, the grindcore-loving goat from Mauriac, France, has died. She was 10 years old.

Tales of the concert-going goat spread in 2012 after Biquette (her proper name, which means “goat” in French) made her way to the front of a Wormrot concert being held at Mauriac, the French farmhouse/DIY venue she lived in, and photos of the event were posted online.

Biquette had been a dairy animal from a milking factory for the first half of her life, destined for the slaughterhouse after she could no longer produce milk. But, as luck would have it, the goat was instead given a home at Mauriac, where she would frequent the concerts held at the farmhouse venue.

Dave Madden, best remembered as a character actor on two successful sitcoms which spanned the late-1960s to the mid-1980s, (The Partridge Family and Alice respectively) has passed away at the age of 82 at his current residency in Fruit Cove, Florida.

Madden (who was born in Canada), kept himself busy as a utility player on many programs during the 1970s, and had a face, like Allan Melvin, best remembered as Sam the Butcher on The Brady Bunch, which was instantly recognizable to TV audiences. To those who discovered his two main shows, The Partridge Family and Alice originally or later on in reruns, Madden was known right away as a main presence on the programs, even if the man’s name itself wasn’t a household word.

Russell Johnson, whose name may not be readily household, but the character of The Professor he played on the hapless castaway sitcom Gilligan’s Island certainly was, has died at the age of 89 of natural causes at his home in Washington.

To massive amounts of generations who found Gilligan’s Island in syndication a few years after its cancellation as a mildly successful CBS program during its original run from 1964-1967, The Professor was one of the few level-headed and conscientious characters on the show, which already had thrown logic and any sense of reality out the window. Its basic premise was a group of travelers going on a three-hour tour by way of a boat ride wind up in inclement weather, so bad that the boat capsizes, and all aboard are somehow washed aboard a remote island, one that seemingly is immune to anyone else coming there to rescue its new inhabitants.