When Rutger Hauer spoke his famous last words, “time to die,” in the original Blade Runner movie, he might well have added … “again?!” Hauer was to die in character 46 times across his 50-year career. This makes him the 19th most killable screen actor, despite dying only half as often as the all-time number one Danny Trejo — asBored Panda’snew research reveals.
The Actors Who Have Died the Most in Their Careers
The 20 actors who have died the most on-screen have three things in common: they’re mostly character actors (or play eccentric leading roles), they mostly appear in genre movies and they’re all men.
Trejo and Roberts are so killable that they actually killed each other in the shootout of Death on the Border (2023). It was, perhaps, inevitable.
The Female Actors Who Have Died the Most in Their Careers
Look at it as an encouraging survival rate or lack of chances for female actors to express their full range on screen: no actresses make it to our top 20 dead actors (above). Partly, this is due to men having more roles than women. In 2023,77% of the top filmshad more male than female characters in speaking roles. There are more chances for a male actor to die, especially when their characters tend to bemore violent.
The female actors on our list are more conventionally ‘respectable’ than the actors who dominated our first list, who tended towards genre work. Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep and Vanessa Redgrave are among several female Oscar winners, while none of the men listed above have an Academy Award for acting.
Vanessa Redgrave is something of a neck-death specialist, dying from a broken neck or various forms of decapitation across multiple films. However, she has also died more respectably from old age or illness across others, such as Howards End (1992).
The Modern Actors Who Have Died the Most in Their Careers
A long life in the movies offers the opportunity to die many times. Our top 20 actors and female actors above are mostly of older generations, active across the latter half of the 20th century. To better diagnose life and death on the screen today, we narrowed our analysis to the 400 current most trending actors on IMDb.
The Actors Who Have Died the Most in Television Roles
The Actor with the Most Deaths Each Decade
Finally, here is a timeline of the actors with the most deaths over the past century of cinema. They tell a tale of evolving genres, from Bela Lugosi’s horror movies of the 1930s and ‘40s through Lee Van Cleef’s cowboy deaths of the 1950s to actor/stuntman Thomas Rosales Jr.’s many action movie deaths in the ‘90s and Ron Perlman’s doomed characters across the science-fiction resurgence of the 2000s.
Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi dominated over the 1930s and ‘40s with a string of ghoulish performances in genre-forming pictures for Universal Studios. He most famously played Dracula, but also died as a malign voodoo master in the first zombie movie, White Zombie (1931), and as various evil scientists.
In Lugosi’s final film, Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), he would be killed twice — the film mostly being shot after he had died in real life.
Die Another Day
Movie actors have the luxury of dying again and again, trying to achieve the perfect death — aesthetically perfect, at least — be it the slow-motion bullet ballet or the dignified fade to black. But just because they are so resilient doesn’t mean we should take them for granted.
After all, if veteran death jockey Sean Bean can refuse to die — “I just had to cut that out and start surviving, otherwise it was all a bit predictable,”says Bean— so might Danny Trejo, Rose MacGowan and idealistic fresh meat like Robert Pattinson. This could lead more actors to challengeKeanu Reeves, Alex Winterand Max von Sydow for their record of “actors who’ve fought the Grim Reaper the most in their careers.”
Methodology
We ranked 45,324 actors on the number of times they have died in their roles in film, television, video games and music videos.
All figures were obtained from cinemorgue.fandom.com and are equivalent to 132,708 actor deaths. We removed voice actors from the final rankings and separated actors based on their number of career deaths overall, per decade and for film and television in isolation.
The data was collected in April 2024 and considers actor deaths in roles between 1890 and March 2024.You May Like50 Best Actors To Have Ever Graced Our ScreensLinas SimonaitisSide-By-Side Pics Of Famous Actors’ First And Last Red Carpet PhotosAurelija Rakauskaitė143 Christmas Movie Trivia Questions To Ask Under The Christmas TreeAivaras Kaziukonis
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