Gig Young
Mary Kay Bergman, who originally played most of the female characters on South Park, committed suicide in 1999.
Ron Luciano, American League umpire famous for his run-ins with Baltimore manager Earl Weaver, and an author of several books, committed suicide in 1995.
If you can count self-inflicted death by misadventure (and not a deliberate attempt to kill oneself), Terry Kath, of the rock group Chicago accidently shot himself in the head believing the gun to be unloaded and attempting to “prove” it to a road manager. And Jon-Erik Hexum, star of a CBS show called Cover Up, was fooling around on the set with a gun loaded with blanks. He pointed the gun to his head and pulled the trigger. Hexum apparently didn’t realize that blank rounds have wadding to seal the powder in and the wadding is ejected from the barrel with enough force to injure or kill if the gun is fired at point-blank range. A quarter-sized piece of his skull was propelled into his brain. He lay in a coma for six days before he was taken off life support after permission was obtained from his mother.
Wikipedia has an entire article on celebrity deaths.
Hide, a semi-popular hard rock singer in Japan, killed himself in the exact same manner that Michael Hutchence supposedly did (there was never any speculation that Hide’s was accidental). After he died, he went from a face in the music crowd to a best-selling superstar who was made the top 20 charts for years afterward.
Juzo Itami, director of Tampopo and A Taxing Woman jumped to his death from his apartment balcony after a gossip magazine announced they were going to publish evidence that he had been cheating on his wife.
William Inge, the playwright.
James Tiptree (Alice Bradley Sheldon), the science fiction writer.
Elliott Smith (most likely).
He was camping and his trailer rolled over on top of him.
My favorite Thomas Chatterton celebrated poetry fraud from the 18th century, back when poetry fraud was something to be celebrated.
Charles Rocket of SNL infamy, most known for saying “fuck” on the air.
Oh my gosh. I knew he died, but I had no idea he did that. That makes me incredibly sad. I loved him in Anne of Green Gables.
Paul Hester’s suicide really shook me. I loved Crowded House and Split Enz as a teen. In fact, I’m listening to their greatest hits CD as I type this (“When You Come” is on now).
George Sanders commited suicide in his sixties:
Charles Boyer and his son Michael.
David, Mike, Chris & Kerry Von Erich.
I don’t know if it’s relevant – but it seems to me she’s famous because she committed suicide.
Richard Manuel of The Band.
Wrestlers Brute Bernard and Yukon Eric (who is best known for having been relieved of part of his cauliflower ear by a Killer Kowalski knee drop).
Iris Chang - not really a celebrity, but a very well-known author (The Rape of Nanking). There is speculation that she was haunted by her choice of subject.
I never heard she had died! When did this happen? I thought she had another book out fairly recently.
Death has never stopped authors from putting out books. Many become even more prolific.
from Wikipedia:
I guess this upset me when it happened because part of me was angry that she didn’t just walk away from the research when it was obvious that it was literally killing her, but yet, she felt such a sense of mission and responsibility to tell these forgotten stories of history that I don’t think she could have. It was as if she wasn’t strong enough to withstand reporting the horrors. The fact that a lot of the details were very similar to my husband’s manic episodes in 2000, which were triggered by (you guessed it) sleep deprivation, really hit me emotionally as well. Just very very sad.
Thanks for that…I guess I could have looked it up myself! That is really a shame. I have always admired her…we graduated the same year from the University of Illinois (although I did not know her). She was a real credit to the University, but for some reason is not as well-known as she should be.