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Several cast members from the 1988 film Stand and Deliver have written the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to request that late actress Vanessa Marquez be included in the In Memoriam segment during Sunday’s Oscars.

Marquez, who played Ana in the Oscar-nominated film and had a role on early seasons of the medical drama ER, was fatally shot by a police officer in South Pasadena during a welfare check at her home on Aug. 30, 2018. Marquez was 49 when she died.

Edward James Olmos and Lou Diamond Phillips led the cast of the film, which was directed by Ramón Menéndez.

After Marquez was left out of the In Memoriam segments at the Emmy Awards in September and the SAG Awards last month, several actors from the film began petitioning the Academy to ask that she be honored with other industry insiders who passed away over the last year.

“I’ve...

It was supposed to be a joyous moment on July 10 when 39-year-old Jannelle Villarreal of San Antonio, Texas, welcomed her baby girl. But just minutes after the planned C-section, things took a turn for the worst, leaving both mother and child fighting for their lives.

Jannelle, who lost a baby boy last year at just 21 weeks, went into the hospital on June 30 so doctors could closely monitor her because they suspected she had preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication characterized by high blood pressure and signs of damage to another organ system. Her baby girl, Eden Raine, had been developing slowly and...

When director Jan de Bont set about casting the various faces and secondary characters that populated bus #2525 in his 1994 actioner "Speed," it was very important to him that they reflect the multicultural identity of Los Angeles. Not only that, but he wanted there to be a heavy dose of realism in his choices, actors who seemed to be people you could look over on a morning commute and see reading the paper, sipping coffee, gazing out the window and starting their day. On the occasion of the film's 20th anniversary, I thought it would be interesting to track down as many of those actors as possible and tell the story of "Speed" from their perspective. It was a gargantuan task. While a number of them have remained in the industry in some way, many have moved on to other careers. But their individual stories are nevertheless as fascinating as the...