Family and friends gather for Natasha Richardson's funeral
A somber group of friends and family gathered in Lithgow, N.Y., yesterday to say a final farewell to Tony Award-winning actress Natasha Richardson.
Liam Neeson, in a dark suit and sunglasses, was at the head of the casket as he and five other pallbearers carried his wife's coffin into St. Peter's Episcopal Church, near the home where the two married in 1994.
He and Richardson's mother, actress Vanessa Redgrave, waved to the dozens of reporters crowded behind a police barricade on the dirt road leading to the tiny white clapboard church. The grieving family - including the couple's two sons, Micheal, 13, and Daniel, 12 - then paused to allow the media to photograph them in front of church before the service.
Ralph Fiennes, Alan Rickman, Laura Linney, Uma Thurman and Timothy Dalton were among the friends who filed into the church on the chilly spring afternoon.
After a graveside service under a large green tent, the 45-year-old actress was buried in a nearby cemetery, amid hilly horse farms about 80 miles north of New York City.
Richardson died Wednesday at a Manhattan hospital after falling while skiing last week at the Mont Tremblant resort in the Canadian province of Quebec. The New York City medical examiner's office said Richardson suffered from an epidural hematoma, bleeding between the skull and the brain's covering.
Theaters on Broadway and London's West End dimmed their lights last week in honor of Richardson.
Reality-TV star dies
Jade Goody's family asked for "privacy at last" after the death at age 27 of the brash former dental assistant who turned her tumultuous life and struggle with cervical cancer into a one-woman reality show.
Mocked as a slob, then celebrated as an everywoman, Goody lived one of the world's most public lives, with cameras capturing everything from her racial slurs to her cancer diagnosis and chemotherapy.
Goody gained fame in 2002 at age 21 when she joined the British version of the reality television show Big Brother, in which contestants live together for weeks and are constantly filmed.
During filming of an Indian version of Celebrity Big Brother in the summer of 2008, Goody received a diagnosis of cervical cancer by telephone from a doctor in Britain. The progress of her illness was chronicled in detail in the tabloid press and weekly magazines.
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