Foreign News
Friends stars and family remember ‘brilliant’ actor Matthew Perry
Matthew Perry’s loved ones and co-stars say they have been left “heartbroken” by his death aged 54.
The US actor – best known for playing Chandler Bing in hit ’90s show Friends – was found dead at his LA home.
The sitcom’s creators said he was a “brilliant talent” and “always the funniest person in the room”, while his family said he had “brought so much joy to the world”. Perry was praised in recent years for speaking openly about mental health.
Friends, which followed the fortunes of six friends living in New York, aired from 1994 until 2004 and became a cultural touchstone of the era. More than 52 million viewers in the US alone tuned in for its 2004 finale, making it the most watched TV episode of the 2000s.
The creators of the show, Marta Kauffman and David Crane, and its executive producer Kevin Bright, said Perry’s death “still seems impossible”. In a joint statement they said: “We will always cherish the joy, the light, the blinding intelligence he brought to every moment – not just to his work, but in life as well. “He was always the funniest person in the room. More than that, he was the sweetest, with a giving and selfless heart.” Referencing the style used for the titles of Friends episodes, they finished their tribute: “This truly is The One Where Our Hearts Are Broken.”
In a statement issued to People magazine, his family said they were “heartbroken”, adding: “Matthew brought so much joy to the world, both as an actor and a friend.” Perry’s fans “meant so much to him and we appreciate the tremendous outpouring of love”, they continued.
Actress Gwyneth Paltrow shared how she and Perry spent a “magical summer” together in 1993, where they swam in creeks, shared beers and “kissed in a field of long grass”. “He had shot the pilot of Friends but it had not aired yet. He was nervous, hoping his big break was just around the corner. It was.” She added: “I hope Matthew is at peace at long last. I really do.”
Maggie Wheeler, who played on-screen girlfriend Janice, said the joy he brought to so many in his “too short lifetime will live on”.
Morgan Fairchild, who played Perry’s on-screen mother and erotic novel writer Nora Bing, said: “I’m heartbroken about the untimely death of my ‘son’, Matthew Perry. The loss of such a brilliant young actor is a shock,” she added.
Paget Brewster, who played love interest Kathy in the sixth series of Friends, said Perry “won’t rest in peace” because “he’s already too busy making everyone laugh up there”. In a post on X, formerly known as Twitter, she urged people to read Perry’s 2022 memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, describing it as his “legacy to help”.
The book recounts his struggles with addiction to painkillers and alcohol during his sudden rise to fame, and lifelong struggles with mental health problems. Perry experienced health problems including a burst colon in 2018 due to his drug usage, which required several operations. In 2016, he told BBC Radio 2 that he could not remember three years of filming during Friends, because of his drink and drug use.
Perry’s efforts to help others struggling with addiction was reflected in a tribute from actor Hank Azaria, who appeared in five episodes of Friends. Azaria said Perry had been a “brother” when the pair first moved to LA, and revealed it was Perry who took him to his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting when he was struggling with addiction.
Born in Massachusetts in 1969, Perry was raised in Ottawa, Canada, where he attended elementary school with Justin Trudeau, who later became Canadian prime minister.
Canada’s leader wrote on X: “Matthew Perry’s passing is shocking and saddening. I’ll never forget the schoolyard games we used to play, and I know people around the world are never going to forget the joy he brought them. “Thanks for all the laughs, Matthew. You were loved – and you will be missed.”
Perry moved to Los Angeles as a teenager. He starred as Chazz Russell in Boys Will Be Boys and had roles in shows including Growing Pains. But it was his role in Friends – alongside Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, David Schwimmer, Matt LeBlanc and Lisa Kudrow – that launched him to international stardom.
Perry was cast as the awkward Chandler Bing, famous for his sarcastic one-liners and his childish behaviour with room-mate Joey Tribbiani. The role earned him an Emmy nomination in 2002. Regular reruns and streaming services have allowed it to find a new generation of devotees.
Tributes have also been paid by famous fans of the show, including singer Adele, who said she felt she had a connection with Perry after decades of watching Friends, despite having never met him in person. “I just want to say how much I love what he did for all of us,” she said in a video message.
Warner Bros, which produced the show, described Perry as a “true gift to us all”.
Despite the universal popularity of Friends, Perry spoke about not being able to watch the show in an interview last year.
“I didn’t watch the show, and haven’t watched the show, because I could go, ‘Drinking, opiates, drinking, cocaine,'” he said. “I could tell season by season, by how I looked. That’s why I don’t wanna watch it, because that’s what I see.”
Perry’s film credits include fools Rush In, Almost Heroes and the Whole Nine Yards and he won critical acclaim for later TV roles.
His role as associate White House counsel Joe Quincy in Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing earned him two Emmy nominations for outstanding guest actor in a drama series in 2003 and 2004.
He played the lead role in Sorkin’s later series, Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, then wrote and produced his own show called Mr Sunshine in which he also played the lead character.
Lucy Davis, who starred in Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, said it was an “honour” to work with Perry on the show.
In a post on X, she wrote:”He was as funny off screen as he was on screen. He was really kind to me: I had one week where I was having difficulty with something at work and he came up to me and told me not to worry because he had my back. “Thanks for all the laughs Matthew. You made a great impact on me.”
The Friends cast reunited in 2021 for a televised reunion, where Perry once again opened up about his mental health struggles during the peak of the show’s success. He recalled “freaking out” and feeling “like I would die” if the audience didn’t laugh at one of his lines, describing his mindset at the time as “not healthy”.
The LA Times and TMZ, which first reported that Perry had died, said the actor was found unresponsive in a hot tub at his house.
A Los Angeles Fire Department spokesperson told the BBC that first responders went to an address in the Pacific Palisades area, regarding a “water emergency” of an unknown type, but did not name Perry.
Perry’s final Instagram post published a few days ago, shows him relaxing in a rooftop pool. It has since attracted a stream of tributes from fans.
Perry leaves parents John Bennett Perry and Suzanne Perry, who split up when he was a baby. He has five half-siblings. He never married and had no children.
(BBC)
Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, who snapped one of the most famous photographs taken in outer space, has died at the age of 90.
Officials say a small plane he was flying crashed into the water north of Seattle, Washington.
Anders’ son Greg confirmed that his father was flying the small plane, and that his body was recovered on Friday afternoon. “The family is devastated. He was a great pilot. He will be missed,” a statement from the family reads.
Anders – who was a lunar module pilot on the Apollo 8 mission – took the iconic Earthrise photograph, one of the most memorable and inspirational images of Earth from space.
Taken on Christmas Eve during the 1968 mission, the first crewed space flight to leave Earth and reach the Moon, the picture shows the planet rising above the horizon from the barren lunar surface.
Anders later described it as his most significant contribution to the space programme.
The image is widely credited with motivating the global environmental movement and leading to the creation of Earth Day, an annual event to promote activism and awareness of caring for the planet.
Speaking of the moment, Anders said: “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing that we discovered was the Earth.”
Officials said on Friday that Anders crashed his plane around 11:40PDT (1940BST).
The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said the 90-year-old was flying a Beechcraft A A 45 – also known as a T-34. The agency said that the plane crashed about 80ft (25m) from the coast of Jones Island.
Anders also served as the backup pilot to the Apollo 11 mission, the name of the effort that led to the first Moon landing on July 24, 1969.
Following Anders’ retirement from the space programme in 1969, the former astronaut largely worked in the aerospace industry for several decades. He also served as US Ambassador to Norway for a year in the 1970s.
But he is best remembered for the Apollo 8 mission and the iconic photograph he took from space.
“In 1968, during Apollo 8, Bill Anders offered to humanity among the deepest of gifts an astronaut can give. He traveled to the threshold of the Moon and helped all of us see something else: ourselves,” Nasa Administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement.
Mark Kelly, a former astronaut who now serves as a US Senator for the state of Arizona, said in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that Anders “inspired me and generations of astronauts and explorers. My thoughts are with his family and friends”.
[BBC]
A Chinese spacecraft carrying rock and soil samples from the far side of the Moon has lifted off from the lunar surface to start its journey back to Earth, according to state media.
The achievement on Tuesday is a world first and the latest leap for Beijing’s decades-old space programme, which aims to send a crewed mission to the Moon by 2030.
The Xinhua News Agency, citing the China National Space Administration (CNSA), said that the ascender of the Chang’e-6 probe took off at 7:38am local time on Tuesday (23:38 GMT) and entered a preset orbit around the moon.
It described the move as “an unprecedented feat in human lunar exploration history”.
The Chang’e-6 probe was launched last month and its lander touched down on the far side of the Moon on Sunday. It used a drill and robotic arm to dig up soil on and below the Moon’s surface, according to Xinhua.
After successfully gathering its samples, the Chang’e-6 unfurled China’s national flag for the first time on the far side of the Moon, it said.
The agency cited the CNSA as saying that the spacecraft stowed the samples it had gathered in a container inside the ascender of the probe as planned.
[Aljazeera]
China says its uncrewed craft has successfully landed on the far side of the Moon – an unexplored place almost no-one tries to go.
The Chang’e 6 touched down in the South Pole-Aitken Basin at 06:23 Beijing time on Sunday morning (22:23 GMT Saturday), the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said.
Launched on 3 May, the mission aims to collect precious rock and soil from this region for the first time in history. The probe could extract some of the Moon’s oldest rocks from a huge crater on its South Pole.
The landing was fraught with risks, because it is very difficult to communicate with spacecraft once they reach the far side of the Moon. China is the only country to have achieved the feat before, landing its Chang’e-4 in 2019.
After launching from Wenchang Space Launch Center, the Chang’e 6 spacecraft had been orbiting the Moon waiting to land. The lander component of the mission then separated from the orbiter to touch down on the side of the Moon that faces permanently away from Earth.
During the descent, an autonomous visual obstacle avoidance system was used to automatically detect obstacles, with a visible light camera selecting a comparatively safe landing area based on the brightness and darkness of the lunar surface, the CNSA was quoted as saying by state-run Xinhua news agency.
The lander hovered about 100m (328ft) above the safe landing area, and used a laser 3D scanner before a slow vertical descent. The operation was supported by the Queqiao-2 relay satellite, the CNSA said.
Chinese state media described the successful landing as an “historic moment”. The state broadcaster said “applause erupted at the Beijing Aerospace Flight Control Center” when the Chang’e landing craft touched down on the Moon early on Sunday morning.
The lander should spend up to three days gathering materials from the surface in an operation the CNSA said would involve “many engineering innovations, high risks and great difficulty”. “Everyone is very excited that we might get a look at these rocks no-one has ever seen before,” explains Professor John Pernet-Fisher, who specialises in lunar geology at the University of Manchester.
He has analysed other lunar rock brought back on the American Apollo mission and previous Chinese missions. But he says the chance to analyse rock from a completely different area of the Moon could answer fundamental questions about how planets form.
Most of the rocks collected so far are volcanic, similar to what we might find in Iceland or Hawaii. But the material on the far side would have a different chemistry . “It would help us answer those really big questions, like how are planets formed, why do crusts form, what is the origin of water in the solar system?” the professor says.
The mission aims to collect about 2kg (4.4lb) of material using a drill and mechanical arm, according to the CNSA.
The South Pole–Aitken basin, an impact crater, is one of the largest known in the solar system.
From there, the probe could gather material that came from deep inside the lunar mantle – the inner core of the Moon – Prof Pernet-Fisher says.
The Moon’s South Pole is the next frontier in lunar missions – countries are keen to understand the region because there is a good chance it has ice.
The capsule in the last Chinese moon mission, Chang’e 5, brought back soil and rocks in 2020 (BBC)
Access to water would significantly boost the chances of successfully establishing a human base on the Moon for scientific research.
If the mission succeeds, the craft will return to Earth with the precious samples on board a special return capsule.
The material will be kept in special conditions to try to keep it as pristine as possible.
Scientists in China will be given the first chance to analyse the rocks, and later researchers around the world will be able to apply for the opportunity too.
This is the second time China has launched a mission to collect samples from the Moon.
In 2020 Chang’e 5 brought back 1.7kg of material from an area called Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon’s near side.
China is planning three more uncrewed missions this decade as it looks for water on the Moon and investigates setting up a permanent base there.
Beijing’s broader strategy aims to see a Chinese astronaut walk on the moon by around 2030.
The US also aims to put astronauts back on the moon, with Nasa aiming to launch its Artemis 3 mission in 2026.
(BBC)
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