LOS ANGELES (AP) - Spoony Singh Sundher, who once said he founded the world famous Hollywood Wax Museum to give tourists who couldn't find any real celebrities in Hollywood the next best thing, has died at age 83.
Singh died Wednesday at his Malibu home of congestive heart failure, his family announced Friday.
He was visiting California in'64 when he spent a day popping into Hollywood hot spots in search of famous faces. The closest he came to finding any was seeing the stars' footprints in the courtyard of Grauman's Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard.
"So, I thought, let's bring the stars back to Hollywood Boulevard. Let's allow people to get close and look into the eyes of their favourite entertainers," he recalled years later. "Believe me, I didn't know if it would even work."
When he opened his museum down the street from Grauman's on Feb. 26,'65, people were lined up for almost a kilometre waiting to get in.
The almost 200 famous figures change over the years as individual celebrities' fame tends to ebb and flow. Marilyn Monroe, however, has remained a perennial favourite.
To save costs, the sculpted heads and hands of celebrities are placed on fibreglass bodies, allowing the heads of the fading celebrities to be removed and stored in anticipation of the day they might make a comeback.
Over the years, visitors have also noticed that souvenir hunters will sometimes abscond with wax celebrity fingers, leading some critics to complain of an air of cheesiness at the museum.
The criticism never bothered Singh.
"Look, I know other museums are more stately and artistic," he told the Los Angeles Times in'70. "But on Hollywood Boulevard, dignity kind of gets lost in the shuffle."
The lifelong entrepreneur was born in Punjab, India, in'22, and moved to Canada with his family at age three. He was living in Victoria and was the operator of saw mills and an amusement park in British Columbia when he paid his fateful visit to Hollywood in'64.
Singh turned over the museum's day-to-day operations to family members in'90, but remained active in the business, guiding the development of the Hollywood Guinness World Records Museum, which opened in'91, and another Hollywood Wax Museum, which opened in Branson, Mo., in'96.
His family said he was responsible for the 45-metre-long Mount Rushmore-like facade at the Branson museum that includes the faces of John Wayne, Elvis Presley, Monroe and Charlie Chaplin.
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