Roger Ebert, the famed film critic whose career spanned decades in which his examinations of cinema and movies helped propel him to become one of the more prominent critics of the modern age, passed away today at the age of 70 from cancer, according to CNN.

For Ebert, it ended a long struggle with the disease, which had left him without a jaw in recent years and unable to speak. Of course the man still rang through loud and clear in his words and reviews, in which he dissected film and all its glories in an honest, erudite, literary manner as he had always done, putting him on par with like-careered colleagues like Pauline Kael and Vincent Canby. Getting his start in the late 1960s and writing right up until the present day at the Chicago Sun Times and in cyberspace as well on his own website (and even co-penning the cult classic Russ Meyer film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls in 1970), Ebert became a celebrity himself as the years went on, winning the Pulitzer Prize for film criticism in 1975 and even earning a star on The Hollywood Walk of Fame, something that a film critic had never been able to attain.

Clive Burr, who was the original drummer for the British heavy metal band Iron Maiden, has passed away at the age of 56 from complications from Multiple Sclerosis. His former band members report that the drummer died peacefully in his sleep at home on March 12, 2013.

Burr joined the legendary group in 1979. Iron Maiden was and remains to this day one of the more high profile bands of the New Wave of British Metal during the late 1970s. Burr had lent his drum talents to the first three Iron Maiden albums, which are still regarded by Maiden fans around the world as some of the band’s best musical achievements: the self-titled Iron Maiden debut album, Killers, and The Number of the Beast. Those first two albums also sported the original singer Paul Di’Anno, who was later replaced by the soaring high-pitched vocalist Bruce Dickinson. By the time of The Number of the Beast, the band was on the crest of achieving worldwide success and legendary status as a Heavy Metal unit.

Alvin Lee, one of the unsung guitar players from the late 1960s, whose absolutely blazing work in the British band Ten Years After endeared him and solidified his niche to the hard rock/electric blues scene of that era, has died at the age of 68, according to his official website.

Lee, who made an art out of playing his guitar with a hyper fast yet with an extremely passionate bluesy soul style, will truly go down as one of the greats of all time, even though he never really was a household name in musical circles. Usurped for the most part by his peers like Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Ritchie Blackmore, and the like, Alvin Lee really stood in a class by himself. Combining all the elements of the aforementioned men and amplifying old blues artists and their respective styles like Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, and early rock pioneer Chuck Berry, Alvin Lee brought a twofold sensibility to rock and roll; he took the past and contemporized it in the present.

Bonnie Franklin, best known for playing Ann Romano on the hit CBS sitcom One Day At A Time, has died at the age of 69.

Born in Santa Monica, CA, Franklin had gotten her start as an actress at the young age of 9, when she appeared on the popular program The Colgate Comedy Hour during the 1950s. She had done some theater work in the early part of her career as well. It wasn’t until landing the main role on One Day At A Time in 1975 that she found success.

That program, produced by Norman Lear, responsible for some of the adult-themed shows of the era (All in the Family, Maude, Sanford and Son to name a few), showed the divorced Ann Romano, played expertly and headstrong by Franklin, raising two teenagers and all the trials and tribulations being a struggling single mom looking to raise the two kids and all the various growing pains they go through. Valerie Bertinelli and Mackenzie Phillips played the younger and older daughters respectively. Pat Harrington Jr. played the wise-cracking yet respectful janitor with a heart of gold Schneider.

Reg Presley, the frontman of the 1960s British group The Troggs, which flirted with a sound between garage, mod, and an even quasi-flower power sound, has died at the age of 71 after a long successive battle with lung cancer reports BBC.com.

The Troggs were slightly more than just a curio of the kind of bands of a certain type of ilk, bands that were immortalized as one, two or three hit wonders and collected on American collections such as the famed “Nuggets” series, or sundry versions of “Best of the ’60s” collections. While they never really made a huge impact in this country, they did have the good fortune to be remembered as the band who did the successful cover of the legendary song “Wild Thing,” which was written by an American, (Chip Taylor, whose real name is James Voight and is the brother of the famous actor Jon) and became a number one smash for the band, in July of 1966, helped strongly by the raucous vocalizing of Reg Presley. The stop start rhythmic patterns of the song, sort of an electric derivative of Bo Diddley’s musical musings, is still regarded as a highlight of the song catalog to come from the 1960s. The song itself has been covered by artists as diverse as Jimi Hendrix, Amanda Lear, The Runaways, and even Sam Kinison, who used his unapologetic style and banshee wailing to full effect on his version of the tune.