Updated: 6/21/2012: Yahoo! has confirmed the news of Lynch’s passing. See update below.

This has yet to be confirmed, but I have received word from several notable sources that veteran actor Richard Lynch, best known for playing a wide array of heinous villains in a film and television career spanning nearly four decades, has died at the age of 76. At the moment there are no details as to the cause of his death, but we will keep you updated as we get information.

A native of Brooklyn, New York, Lynch was born on February 12, 1936, as one of seven children in his family. Beginning in 1958 Lynch served in the United States Marine Corps for four years, ending his military career at the rank of Corporal. Following his stint in the Marines, Lynch returned to New York to study acting under the legendary acting teachers Uta Hagen and Lee Strasberg. He became a lifetime member of the prestigious Actors Studio in 1970 and had appeared in many stage productions on and off Broadway, including William Shakespeare’s Richard III and Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge. Lynch made his feature acting debut in 1973’s Scarecrow alongside Gene Hackman and Al Pacino. Throughout the 1970’s the actor built up his resume with appearances in films like The Seven-Ups, The Happy Hooker, God Told Me To, and Deathsport and television shows such as Starsky and Hutch, Battlestar Galactica, and Buck Rogers.

Henry Hill, the former underworld mobster who became an anti-folk hero when he was immortalized in the film Goodfellas, died in Los Angeles yesterday after a long illness at the age of 69, reports TMZ.

Hill, who was born in Brooklyn, NY, and was an associate for the Lucchese crime syndicate, had been accused throughout that “career” of a litany of Mafia-related offenses, including extortion, theft, kidnapping, assault, and drug dealing. He got out of that dangerous existence by testifying against his former cohorts in the mob, leading to lengthy prison sentences for them and a place in the Witness Protection Program for him. As a result, it forced him to live in rural existences deep in the midwest of America.

Musician Bob Welch, who was part of the rock/pop group Fleetwood Mac in the era that was in between the band’s original blues sounds of the late 1960s to the later more superstar pop phase that started in the late 1970s, died today at his home in Nashville, TN, in an apparent suicide, a self-inflicted shotgun wound to the chest, reports the Los Angeles Times. A suicide note was left behind by Welch, who had suffered from undisclosed health issues.

Welch was born in 1945 in Los Angeles, CA, to parents who were in the Hollywood industry. His dad was movie producer and screenwriter Robert Welch, who worked with luminaries such as Bob Hope and singer Bing Crosby, and his mother was Templeton Fox, a singer and actress who had appeared various films throughout the mid 20th Century.

Prolific and award-winning sci-fi author Ray Bradbury passed away yesterday in Los Angeles at the age of 91 after a long illness. He is perhaps best known for his classic novels Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, and Something Wicked This Way Comes, but Bradbury also wrote hundreds of short stories, some 47 other books, as well as screenplays, teleplays, poems, essays, plays, and, according to his website, an opera (yes, an opera!) during his illustrious 70-year career.

Bradbury inspired generations to think beyond what was put in front of us, to dream, and to create. While he eschewed such modern inventions as video games and ATMs, and purportedly hated television, he adapted 65 of his stories for a TV series called The Ray Bradbury Theater, which aired first on HBO from 1985-1986 and then on the USA network from 1988-1992.

No fan of eBooks either, Bradbury finally relented last year and allowed Fahrenheit 451 to be published in ebook format, which we wrote about here.

Richard Dawson, the sarcastic British comedian best remembered for his stint as the host of TV’s Family Feud, being a regular on the WWII sitcom Hogan’s Heroes, and playing a dark, sadistic game show host in the sci-fi vehicle The Running Man, died yesterday at the age of 79 from complications stemming from esophageal cancer.

Dawson found his first success as the slick character Newkirk on Hogan’s Heroes, the long running CBS-TV sitcom which starred Bob Crane and ran from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Afterwards, he found greater success as a regular panelist on the long-running 1970s game show Match Game, also airing on CBS. His irascible style, jack of all trades Groucho Marx-esque wit and lovable charm made him a fan and contestant favorite. He used those traits when he became the host of the original version of Family Feud, a stint that lasted from 1976 to 1985 and was a show that won him a Daytime Emmy Award for his work in 1978. He’s best remembered for especially two things from that program: notoriously kissing every female contestant he encountered on the show (something which he once said he did “for love and luck”) and his bombastic, over the top catchphrase of Survey Said!, which became part of the American pop culture lexicon soon after he did it. On Feud, he parlayed a very decidedly English style and swagger, and the program was watched and beloved by millions of stalwart viewers of daytime television.