Re: John Ritter, I don’t think he collapsed on stage during a taping. I’m pretty sure he “felt ill” during a rehearsal and went to his dressing room to lie down. After a while, he was taken to Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center, across the street from the studio where he died.
In fact, his family sued the hospital alleging they wasted time mis-diagnosing him and could have saved him had they given him immediate serious attention. According to People magazine he spent a fair amount of time at the hospital, so he certainly didn’t die “on set”.
The year you see in parentheses following a movie title is the release date, not the filming date. The IMDb is full of examples of movies that were released after actors who appeared in them died. Movies are often released long after after filming finishes. It can take months or longer to complete special effects, editing, music, dubbing and other post-production work.
Next, deals for distribution have to be worked out. This is a complicated business. Contracts stipulating royalties, TV broadcasts and DVDs have to be worked out for each country where the movie will be shown. In world-wide distribution, that’s a lot of contracts.
Sometimes the release of a movie will be delayed because the studio fears it will do poorly against another movie with a similar theme, or the lead actor has been involved in a scandal and the studio wants to wait until the bad publicity subsides. Sometimes the studio delays the release because of current events - there were a couple of movies with terrorism themes whose releases were delayed following 9/11.
This is completely untrue. The writer, director, and one of the voice actors for Transformers: The Movie bring up this rumor on the commentary track on the 20th Anniversary DVD, and debunk it, saying that all of Unicron’s lines of dialogue as heard in the movie are Welles and Welles alone, and not Nimoy (albeit enhanced with audio tricks, since Welles was so sick at the time that his voice was weak and shaky).
Tragic trivia about the aforementioned Jon-Erik Hexum: his fiancee at the time was Elizabeth G. Daily, the voice actress for Tommy on Rugrats and Buttercup on Powerpuff Girls.
The observations by drm and Sonia Montdore are no doubt sufficient to explain how Kinnear turned up as a voice artist in The Princess and the Goblin in 1993, five years after his death. The circumstances surrounding Return of the Ewok are somewhat more unusual, but since it was filmed in 1983 there’s little mystery about how he managed to be in it.
Kinnear was very well-known as a comic actor in Britain, though he’d probably be most recognised in the US as Mr Salt in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory.
I think one was a pre-recorded voice. The other was a Star Wars fan film that seems to have been filmed while ROtJ was being produced.
Return of the Musketeers was not released for years, and even then it was as a TV movie. The movie has the look of being finished by the bonding company and not the original production crew. One (actually a few, but this one is very obvious) scene uses an obvious body double for Kinnear and the actors look very, very unhappy to be in the scene (nobody likes an unpaid callback for a movie crew that killed cast members). Technical errors plague the movie: A scene with a blacksmith has him hitting the metal, but with no foley to match.
That’s why it stuck out in my memory so much after hearing them talk about it on the commentary track, then seeing your post here. But Nelson Shin, the director, was rather firm in his assertion that all the Unicron dialogue was 100% Orson Welles.
The 20th Anniversary DVD is well worth picking up for anyone who recalls seeing that film as a kid with any sense of nostalgia at all.
I don’t know if we’re counting stunt men, but stunt man A. J. Bakunas died jumping from a tall building (as a double for George Kennedy) during filming of the movie Steel. According to IMDb, he did the jump properly, but the airbag split open when he landed and he died.
And there was the Eiffel Birdman. Well, he wasn’t technically an actor, but in 1911 he was making a film about his new flying device, which would enable him to jump safely from the Eiffel Tower. It didn’t work. There’s video (not gory, but still kinda disturbing) at that link.
Something I don’t think anyone has ever commented on: This occurred not long after Howard Hunter tried to commit suicide in the same manner on Hill Street Blues. Howard, of course, “survived” with only “powder burns.” I can’t help but wonder if this contributed to Hexum’s attempt at “humor” on the set: “Hey! Let’s see if there’s one in here for me!”*
*This is actually what he was reported as saying, just before he pulled the trigger.
Heath Ledger died during the filming of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. They couldn’t just work around it because he was playing a main character and less than half his scenes had been filmed. Normally, they would have had to scrap his footage and refilm with it with a new actor. But this was a fantasy film, so they rewrote the script and said that his character was a shape-shifter and cast Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law in the role with all four of them delivering part of the performance.
Al Mulock, Once Upon a Time in the West
A Canadian actor who committed suicide by jumping out the window of the hotel where the crew was staying. His most prominent role was as a member of the trio that tried to kill Tuco at the beginning of The Good the Bad and the Ugly — the first face you see and the one who shows up later with his arm shot off.
If animated films count, Chris Farley was originally cast to do the voice of Shrek and completed recording 80-90% of his lines before his death in 1997.
