Peter Mayhew, actor, dies
Actor Peter Mayhew, who went from a job as a hospital orderly to co-starring in the Star Wars films as Chewbacca, dies at the age of 74. Following filming on Star Wars, with no way to anticipate the movie’s upcoming blockbuster success, Mayhew returned to his orderly job, continuing that line of work after the filming of both 1980‘s The Empire Strikes Back and 1983‘s Return Of The Jedi, before becoming a full-time fixture at Star Wars and science fiction conventions (and, later, the internet, regaling fans with behind-the-scenes stories both in person and online). He had some prior monster-suit-acting experience before George Lucas hired him for Star Wars, but not enough to amount to a steady stream of work. He reprised the role of Chewie in 2005‘s Revenge Of The Sith and 2015‘s The Force Awakens before handing the Wookiee suit off to former basketball player Joonas Suotamo, but still received a consulting credit for 2017‘s The Last Jedi, coaching Suotamo during filming. He had also put on the Wookiee suit for any number of promotional appearances, playing the character on The Muppet Show and Donny & Marie, as well as the infamous 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, which afforded Chewie a larger role than some of the movies did.
Actor Robert Forster, a fixture in films and TV since the 1960s, dies at the age of 78 following a brief battle with brain cancer. Cult sci-fi fans may know him best as Captain Dan Holland in 
Actor Stephen Moore, who originated the woeful voice of Marvin the Android in the original 
The eleventh Star Wars movie, 
Honor Blackman, who rose to fame portraying Cathy Gale in the second and third seasons of 
Legendary Italian film composer Ennio Morricone dies at the age of 91. With over 500 film and TV credits to his name, he was one of the most prolific composers by either Hollywood or European standards, and his early partnership with director and college classmate Sergio Leone led to his first international success, the score from the 1966 spaghetti western The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly. That brought Morricone to Hollywood’s attention, and he went on to score such films as Once Upon A Time In The West, Two Mules For Sister Sara, Guns For San Sebastian, Duck You Sucker, Exorcist II, La Cage aux Folles, Orca, The Thing, Once Upon A Time In America, Red Sonja, The Untouchables, Bugsy, In The Line Of Fire, Mission To Mars, The Hateful Eight, and many others.
Scottish actor Sean Connery, forever associated with originating the character of super-spy James Bond on film (in 1962’s Dr. No), dies at the age of 90. He played the role of Bond in six films from 1962 through 1971, relinquishing the role to Roger Moore so he could try to expand his career beyond the Bond character and franchise, though he returned to the role for a one-off 1983 film, Never Say Never Again, which was produced outside of the “official” Bond continuity and dared to acknowledge the character’s (and actor’s) advancing age. In the meantime, he had amassed a number of appearances in movies both well-regarded and otherwise, including the bizarre post-apocalyptic sci-fi film Zardoz (1974) and the sci-fi crime drama Outland (1981). In 1986, his appearance in Highlander saw the beginning of a number of films in which he played the mentor of a given movie’s nominal star, including The Untouchables (1987) and Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade (1989). His experiences in filming his final live-action film appearance, 2003’s League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen, convinced him to retire from acting; family members said that he suffered from dementia in his final years.
Soyuz MS-19 is launched to the International Space Station from Baikonur Cosmodrome, carrying a three-person crew (the first all-Russian Soyuz crew since Soyuz TM-30 in 2000) to a brief stay aboard the International Space Station. Cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov, a veteran of three previous flights, commands and pilots the mission, whose other crewmembers, film director Klim Shipenko and actress Yulia Peresild, are passengers visiting the station to shoot approximately 40 minutes of footage for a movie to be released at a later date. The revival of “space tourism” aboard the ISS sparks new controversy about the topic, particularly within the Russian space program, mirroring similar controversy surrounding the burgeoning suborbital passenger spaceflight industry. Shipenko and Peresild return to Earth after 12 days aboard the ISS, catching a ride home aboard Soyuz MS-18 alongside returning ISS Commander Oleg Novitskiy; Shkaplerov remains aboard the ISS to assume command. Soyuz MS-19 will return the current ISS crew to Earth in March 2022.