Dieing in the movies works a little differently than it does in real life. For starters, it’s not permanent, and it doesn’t actually hurt. Which is why, I presume, the majority of actors aren’t too fussed when they flick through their latest script to find that their character is going to be electrocuted, thrown off a cliff, and eaten by dinosaurs in the third act. Hey, that’s show business – when you gotta get eaten by dinosaurs, you gotta get eaten by dinosaurs, right?
Saying that, there are some actors whose entire careers seem to hinge on the nature of their on-screen deaths. Almost as if it’s impossible to cast them unless you adhere to a small line of print in their contracts that details: “Actor must not survive until the end of the movie. Character must be shot, stabbed, thrown from a height, or killed by explosives.” Or perhaps a long career spent playing bad guys means they really have no choice but to die, ’cause typecasting.
Join me as I take a look at 10 actors whose collected responsibility appears to be “do all the dieing for the movies, ever.” Sometimes these actors are playing heroes, sometimes they’re playing villains, or maybe they’re playing characters with no moral alignment at all. It doesn’t matter: with these guys, it all means death. Though it probably goes without saying, there are a ton of death-related spoilers inherent to this article in its entirety…
5. Mickey Rourke
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Notable Deaths Include: Rumble Fish, A Prayer For The Dying, Johnny Handsome, Picture Claire, Iron Man 2, Sin City, Once Upon A Time In Mexico, Sin City, Killshot, Passion Play, Immortals, White Sands, Double Team, Francesco, Bullet, Fall Time, Spun, Desperate Hours, The Last Outlaw, Man On Fire
Mickey Rourke looks like somebody who was born to be punched square in the jaw. That’s not an attack on him as an actor: he’s a big guy with a face like a leather punchbag, which makes him perfect for antagonising heroes and getting killed in the final moments of an action flick. Occasionally Rourke has played good guys or sympathetic characters, but he’s mostly spent his career playing villains. Way to rack up the deaths, Mickey.
You might be genuinely shocked to discover just how many times Mr. Rourke has succumbed to his wounds, though: it’s somewhere in the region of 20 movies, at least. Most of us remember when he met explosive doom at the hands of Tony Stark in Iron Man 2, of course, but even movies where Mickey is playing a character we can relate to still has to go out on an ambiguous finish. Take The Wrestler, which had to leave his death to interpretation. If the man’s career is anything to go by, though, he totally died when the screen cut to black.
4. Robert De Niro
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Notable Deaths Include: Bloody Mama, Bang the Drum Slowly, Mean Streets, Brazil, The Mission, Cape Fear, This Boy’s Life, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Heat, The Fan, Jackie Brown, Great Expectations, 15 Minutes, Hide and Seek, Machete, New Year’s Eye, 1900
Robert De Niro has never been an actor who I associate with consistent on-screen deaths, and that’s mainly because – in what are arguably his “greatest” roles to date – he doesn’t die: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas… he even “survives” in The Godfather Part II, because he’s playing a younger Don Corleone, and Marlon Brando handles the iconic death scene for that one.
But when you consider just how huge Robert De Niro’s filmography is to date, you begin to realise that the actor has been killed on-screen a lot. Like, loads. Mostly ol’ Bobby has been gunned down, because that’s the only real way you can take down a Robert De Niro character, apparently. In fact, in nearly every single one of the movies mentioned above (there are just a few exceptions), De Niro’s characters die after having been shot.
3. Gary Oldman
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Notable Deaths Include: Sid and Nancy, Prick Up Your Ears, State of Grace, Leon, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Fifth Element, Leon, Air Force One, The Book Of Eli, True Romance, Lost In Space, JFK, Hannibal, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Gary Oldman never really had a chance, did he? Aside from all the bad guys that the actor has spent his career immortalising, he has also taken on a fair few biopics that had to end in tragedy no matter what, assuring his death from the beginning: that’s what you get when you play Sid Vicious and Joe Orton, I guess. But Gary has lit up the silver screen with some truly monstrous and brilliantly evil creations over the course of his career.
For a while, in fact, he was Hollywood’s go to guy for mentally unstable or insanely quirky bad guys. As his career pushed on into the 2000s, the actor made the decision to stop playing such sinister characters, taking on roles in Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies and a few Harry Potter flicks. But even his turn in the Potter movies ensured that his performance would end in death (though it was one of his least violent offings). Still, it remains a pleasure to watch him get murdered over and over again. There has to be a better way to say that.
2. John Hurt
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Notable Deaths Include: Alien, Spaceballs, The Wild And The Willing, Gideon’s Way, Sinful Davey, 10 Rillington Place, The Ghoul, I, Claudius, East Of Elephant Rock, Speectre, Watership Down, The Elephant Man, Heaven’s Gate, The Osterman Weekend, The Hit, After Darkness, The Black Cauldron, Jake Speed, Aria, Deadline, Little Sweetheart, Scandal, Monolith, Tabloid, Contact, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, Hellboy, The Proposition, Beyond The Gates, V For Vendetta, Masters Of Science Fiction, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Lost Souls, Outlander, Sailcloth, Whistle And I’ll Come To You
When you think of John Hurt, you probably don’t think of an actor who has spent a career being mutilated on screen quite as much as you think “lovely old British bloke,” but Hurt has been, uh… hurt… a lot. In more than 40 of his movie appearances to date, John Hurt has ended up dead. Despite the fact that the actor is often brought in to be a movie’s calming or intellectual presence, he also makes a great bad guy (he’s posh and English, which helps on that front). And bad guys, as you full well know, rarely make it through alive.
Hurt’s most famous movie death, of course, also happens to be one of the famous movie deaths of all time (if not the most famous), in which the actor is literally bust wide open by a monster known as “the chestburster” in Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi classic Alien. Though his character his offed rather early, the death remains truly iconic even today. Hurt even opted to die again in exactly the same way when he parodied this role in Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs. Man just likes gettin’ his chest burst, I guess. It’s what he does best.
1. Sean Bean
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Notable Deaths Include: Patriot Games, GoldenEye, Airborne, Essex Boys, The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship Of The Ring, Don’t Say A Word, Equilibrium, The Island, Far North, The Hitcher, Outlaw, Cash, Death Race 2, Black Death, Age Of Heroes, Red Riding, Lorna Doone, Caravaggio, The Field, Henry VIII, War Requiem
Who else did you really think was going to be sitting pretty here at number one? Yes, the actually loveable and otherwise modest English actor has found infamy the world over as “that actor who gets killed in every movie he’s in.” And to be totally honest, it’s a reputation well-deserved: Sean Bean has been killed 22 times over the course of his career, an amount which takes up the majority percentage of his roles to date (something like 90% of Sean Bean movie roles end in death, whereas with John Hurt it’s about 50%).
So in which inventive ways his our friend Sean kicked the bucket? You’ll know doubt remember him falling to his death at the hands of Pierce Brosnan in GoldenEye, only to be pierced (and exploded) by falling debris. Then there’s that horrid moment in Black Death where Sean gets ripped apart by two horses moving in separate directions (you have to see it). He’s also been chased off a cliff (by cows, no less), murdered in his bed, and shot, like, six times with gigantic arrows in Lord of the Rings.
We appreciate it, Sean. Nobody dies quite like you. Or anywhere near as often.
Source.
Saying that, there are some actors whose entire careers seem to hinge on the nature of their on-screen deaths. Almost as if it’s impossible to cast them unless you adhere to a small line of print in their contracts that details: “Actor must not survive until the end of the movie. Character must be shot, stabbed, thrown from a height, or killed by explosives.” Or perhaps a long career spent playing bad guys means they really have no choice but to die, ’cause typecasting.
Join me as I take a look at 10 actors whose collected responsibility appears to be “do all the dieing for the movies, ever.” Sometimes these actors are playing heroes, sometimes they’re playing villains, or maybe they’re playing characters with no moral alignment at all. It doesn’t matter: with these guys, it all means death. Though it probably goes without saying, there are a ton of death-related spoilers inherent to this article in its entirety…
5. Mickey Rourke
Notable Deaths Include: Rumble Fish, A Prayer For The Dying, Johnny Handsome, Picture Claire, Iron Man 2, Sin City, Once Upon A Time In Mexico, Sin City, Killshot, Passion Play, Immortals, White Sands, Double Team, Francesco, Bullet, Fall Time, Spun, Desperate Hours, The Last Outlaw, Man On Fire
Mickey Rourke looks like somebody who was born to be punched square in the jaw. That’s not an attack on him as an actor: he’s a big guy with a face like a leather punchbag, which makes him perfect for antagonising heroes and getting killed in the final moments of an action flick. Occasionally Rourke has played good guys or sympathetic characters, but he’s mostly spent his career playing villains. Way to rack up the deaths, Mickey.
You might be genuinely shocked to discover just how many times Mr. Rourke has succumbed to his wounds, though: it’s somewhere in the region of 20 movies, at least. Most of us remember when he met explosive doom at the hands of Tony Stark in Iron Man 2, of course, but even movies where Mickey is playing a character we can relate to still has to go out on an ambiguous finish. Take The Wrestler, which had to leave his death to interpretation. If the man’s career is anything to go by, though, he totally died when the screen cut to black.
4. Robert De Niro
Notable Deaths Include: Bloody Mama, Bang the Drum Slowly, Mean Streets, Brazil, The Mission, Cape Fear, This Boy’s Life, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Heat, The Fan, Jackie Brown, Great Expectations, 15 Minutes, Hide and Seek, Machete, New Year’s Eye, 1900
Robert De Niro has never been an actor who I associate with consistent on-screen deaths, and that’s mainly because – in what are arguably his “greatest” roles to date – he doesn’t die: Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas… he even “survives” in The Godfather Part II, because he’s playing a younger Don Corleone, and Marlon Brando handles the iconic death scene for that one.
But when you consider just how huge Robert De Niro’s filmography is to date, you begin to realise that the actor has been killed on-screen a lot. Like, loads. Mostly ol’ Bobby has been gunned down, because that’s the only real way you can take down a Robert De Niro character, apparently. In fact, in nearly every single one of the movies mentioned above (there are just a few exceptions), De Niro’s characters die after having been shot.
3. Gary Oldman
Notable Deaths Include: Sid and Nancy, Prick Up Your Ears, State of Grace, Leon, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Fifth Element, Leon, Air Force One, The Book Of Eli, True Romance, Lost In Space, JFK, Hannibal, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Gary Oldman never really had a chance, did he? Aside from all the bad guys that the actor has spent his career immortalising, he has also taken on a fair few biopics that had to end in tragedy no matter what, assuring his death from the beginning: that’s what you get when you play Sid Vicious and Joe Orton, I guess. But Gary has lit up the silver screen with some truly monstrous and brilliantly evil creations over the course of his career.
For a while, in fact, he was Hollywood’s go to guy for mentally unstable or insanely quirky bad guys. As his career pushed on into the 2000s, the actor made the decision to stop playing such sinister characters, taking on roles in Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies and a few Harry Potter flicks. But even his turn in the Potter movies ensured that his performance would end in death (though it was one of his least violent offings). Still, it remains a pleasure to watch him get murdered over and over again. There has to be a better way to say that.
2. John Hurt
Notable Deaths Include: Alien, Spaceballs, The Wild And The Willing, Gideon’s Way, Sinful Davey, 10 Rillington Place, The Ghoul, I, Claudius, East Of Elephant Rock, Speectre, Watership Down, The Elephant Man, Heaven’s Gate, The Osterman Weekend, The Hit, After Darkness, The Black Cauldron, Jake Speed, Aria, Deadline, Little Sweetheart, Scandal, Monolith, Tabloid, Contact, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, Hellboy, The Proposition, Beyond The Gates, V For Vendetta, Masters Of Science Fiction, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Lost Souls, Outlander, Sailcloth, Whistle And I’ll Come To You
When you think of John Hurt, you probably don’t think of an actor who has spent a career being mutilated on screen quite as much as you think “lovely old British bloke,” but Hurt has been, uh… hurt… a lot. In more than 40 of his movie appearances to date, John Hurt has ended up dead. Despite the fact that the actor is often brought in to be a movie’s calming or intellectual presence, he also makes a great bad guy (he’s posh and English, which helps on that front). And bad guys, as you full well know, rarely make it through alive.
Hurt’s most famous movie death, of course, also happens to be one of the famous movie deaths of all time (if not the most famous), in which the actor is literally bust wide open by a monster known as “the chestburster” in Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi classic Alien. Though his character his offed rather early, the death remains truly iconic even today. Hurt even opted to die again in exactly the same way when he parodied this role in Mel Brooks’ Spaceballs. Man just likes gettin’ his chest burst, I guess. It’s what he does best.
1. Sean Bean
Notable Deaths Include: Patriot Games, GoldenEye, Airborne, Essex Boys, The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship Of The Ring, Don’t Say A Word, Equilibrium, The Island, Far North, The Hitcher, Outlaw, Cash, Death Race 2, Black Death, Age Of Heroes, Red Riding, Lorna Doone, Caravaggio, The Field, Henry VIII, War Requiem
Who else did you really think was going to be sitting pretty here at number one? Yes, the actually loveable and otherwise modest English actor has found infamy the world over as “that actor who gets killed in every movie he’s in.” And to be totally honest, it’s a reputation well-deserved: Sean Bean has been killed 22 times over the course of his career, an amount which takes up the majority percentage of his roles to date (something like 90% of Sean Bean movie roles end in death, whereas with John Hurt it’s about 50%).
So in which inventive ways his our friend Sean kicked the bucket? You’ll know doubt remember him falling to his death at the hands of Pierce Brosnan in GoldenEye, only to be pierced (and exploded) by falling debris. Then there’s that horrid moment in Black Death where Sean gets ripped apart by two horses moving in separate directions (you have to see it). He’s also been chased off a cliff (by cows, no less), murdered in his bed, and shot, like, six times with gigantic arrows in Lord of the Rings.
We appreciate it, Sean. Nobody dies quite like you. Or anywhere near as often.
Source.