Celebrity Watch!

Joe Santos, best known for playing Lt. Dennis Becker, the frustrated L.A. policeman pal of James Garner's private detective on The Rockford Files, died Friday. He was 84.

Santos suffered a heart attack at his Los Angeles home Wednesday and was put on life support. He died in a Santa Monica hospital, he said.

The Brooklyn native played Becker, who had a love-hate relationship with Garner's Jim Rockford, on 112 episodes of The Rockford Files, which ran on NBC from 1974-80. He was nominated for an Emmy for outstanding supporting actor in a drama series in 1979 and reprised the role for several telefilms.

"He's the kind of guy who lights up a set just by showing up," Garner said of Santos in a 1977 story in TV Guide. "And there aren't too many around like that. He's so good and so professional, and he's got so much enthusiasm. He's one hell of an actor, and he's one tough little dude. But mostly, Joe is a pussycat."

His 40-year career was filled with roles as good cops on such series as Police Story, Magnum, P.I. and Hardcastle and McCormick and on the 1973 miniseries The Blue Knight opposite William Holden, though he played a bad guy, Consigliere Angelo Garepe, on The Sopranos.

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Frank Sinatra Jr., the son of the legendary entertainer who had a long musical career of his own, died Wednesday, said manager Andrea Kauffman.

He was 72.

Kauffman said Sinatra died at a Daytona Beach, Florida, hospital. Singer Nancy Sinatra said on her Facebook page that her brother died of cardiac arrest.

"Sleep warm, Frankie..." she wrote.

Sinatra was on his "Sinatra Sings Sinatra" tour and was scheduled to perform at the Peabody Auditorium on Wednesday. An announcement on the venue's Facebook page said the singer had taken ill.

Sinatra followed his father's singing career path and was a 19-year-old on tour when he was kidnapped in 1963. After three days, two of the men collected a $240,000 ransom paid by his father, while the other abductor let the son free. Days later, that kidnapper confessed to his brother, who called the FBI.

Sinatra, whose voice and looks were very much like his father's, released about a half dozen albums.

Sinatra also did some acting, appearing in almost 20 shows, including Adam-12, the animated series "Family Guy," and playing himself in an episode of "The Sopranos."

"My lack of success does not trouble me at this stage in my life," he told the Guardian four years ago.

And he recently told the Daytona Beach News-Journal that he wasn't upset that his life as a singer was nowhere close to his famed father's career.

"I think in my generation, when I came along in the early '60s, the type of music that was in vogue in society in those days had moved on to another kind of music," Sinatra told the newspaper. "I was trying to sell antiques in a modern appliance store."