Deaths from cancer in California

Mari Blanchard (born Mary E. Blanchard, April 13, 1923 – May 10, 1970) was an American film and television actress, known foremost for her roles as a B movie femme fatale in American productions of the 1950s and early 1960s.

Mervyn Lee Adelson (October 23, 1929 – September 8, 2015) was an American real estate developer and television producer who co-founded Lorimar Television.

Gerry Day (January 27, 1922 – February 13, 2013) was an American screenwriter. She was also a newspaper reporter for the Hollywood Citizen News in the mid-1940s.

Gertrude Augusta "Gussie" Moran (September 8, 1923 – January 16, 2013) was an American tennis player who was active in the late 1940s and 1950s. Her highest US national tennis ranking was 4th. She was born in Santa Monica, California and died in Los Angeles, California, aged 89.

Charles Leonard Aidman (January 21, 1925 – November 7, 1993) was an American actor of stage, film, and television.

Sherwood Bailey (August 6, 1923 – August 6, 1987) was an American child actor and civil engineer. His parents were nonprofessionals. He is most noted for appearing as Spud, the red-headed, freckle-faced bad boy and enemy of the gang in the Our Gang short subjects series from 1931 to 1932. Spud was characterized as the mama's-boy type who got away with everything and who also liked the girls a lot.
Bailey's most notable appearance was that of the spoiled, bratty stepbrother of Wheezer and Dorothy in 1931's Dogs Is Dogs. In that short, he is nearly convinced by Stymie that ham and eggs can talk and is later pushed down a well by his own dog, Nero. Bailey left the Our Gang series in 1932 at the age of nine.
Bailey quietly left the film industry in 1956. Before retiring from his professional acting career in 1956, Bailey appeared in a few movies, including The Big Stampede (1932) with John Wayne, Too Many Parents (1936), and Young Tom Edison (1940) with Mickey Rooney.
He graduated from Polytechnic High School in Long Beach, then studied engineering at UCLA but did not graduate. He later earned his state civil engineering license and worked as a civil engineer in Huntington Beach.

Margo (born María Marguerita Guadalupe Teresa Estela Bolado Castilla y O'Donnell, May 10, 1917 – July 17, 1985) was a Mexican actress and dancer. She appeared in many film, stage, and television productions, including Lost Horizon (1937), The Leopard Man (1943), Viva Zapata! (1952), and I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955). She married actor Eddie Albert in 1945 and was later known as Margo Albert.

Andrew Simpkins (April 29, 1932 – June 2, 1999) was an American jazz bassist.
Born in Richmond, Indiana, he first became known as a member of the group The Three Sounds, with which he performed from 1956 to 1968. After that, until 1974, he was a member of pianist George Shearing's group, and from 1979 to 1989 toured with singer Sarah Vaughan. Throughout and after that time, during which he settled in Los Angeles, Simpkins became respected as a top-quality bassist and widely known as a solid and reliable studio musician. He performed with singers Carmen McRae and Anita O'Day, instrumentalists Gerald Wiggins, Monty Alexander, Buddy DeFranco, Don Menza, and Stéphane Grappelli, and many others. He recorded three albums as a leader.
He also played acoustic bass on the 1997 covers album In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy by artist Pat Boone.
Simpkins died of stomach cancer in Los Angeles.

Martin Magner (March 5, 1900 – January 30, 2002) was a German-American theatre, radio, and television director.
Magner was born in Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland); his father was a Lutheran director of a shipping line and his mother a Jewish concert pianist. He acted in the Hamburg Chamber Theatre from the age of 18 and replaced the general director of the company when he left for fear of the Nazis, despite his protest that he was himself Jewish. Four years later, on March 21, 1933, after being ordered to fire the company's remaining Jews, he fled to Vienna.For the following three years he worked there, in Breslau (now Wrocław, Poland), and in Prague, where he directed operas. During these years he won praise from George Bernard Shaw, who liked his production of his play Too True to Be Good enough to call Magner an exception to his rule that "Youth is wasted on the young", and Sigmund Freud, who offered to train him as a lay psychoanalyst on the strength of a play about a psychiatrist. He declined.In 1936 Magner emigrated to the United States, settling in Chicago, where a Prague friend, Kurt Adler, was doing theatre work. For a while he taught at Northwestern University and again directed opera. In the 1940s he moved to radio and then in 1943 to television, working as a producer and director for 25 years, first for NBC and then from 1950 to 1965 for CBS in New York. His work included pioneering shows like Studio One, The Goldbergs, Lamp Unto My Feet, and Robert Montgomery Presents, and he hired a young Studs Terkel.After having to retire when he reached the age of 65, he moved to California and returned to theatre; he became the artistic director of the Inglewood Playhouse and started the New Theatre Inc. with Hope Summers. He made a practice of celebrating his birthday by directing a challenging play: for his 98th, Friedrich Dürrenmatt's Play Strindberg and for his 99th, the West Coast premiere of Thomas Hurlimann's The Envoy. He preferred classics; other examples were Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, Ben Jonson's Volpone, Jean Paul Sartre's The Condemned of Altona, Somerset Maugham's The Sacred Flame, and Athol Fugard's Blood Knot. He often used multi-racial casts.The Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle gave him a special award in 1975 and a lifetime achievement award in 1989.Magner enjoyed mountain climbing. He was married for the third time to the photographer Marion Palfi; she died of breast cancer in 1979. He died of cancer in Los Angeles.

Harry Randell Van Horne Jr. (February 10, 1924 – September 26, 2007) was an American singer and musician. Van Horne's musical group, the Randy Van Horne Singers, performed the theme songs for many classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons including The Flintstones, Top Cat, The Jetsons and The Huckleberry Hound Show.