I just watched a scene from The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer (1947) and that lead me down a rabbit hole… I thought at first the all the cast was deceased, but looking at IMDB, it appears that Ian Bernard (Ian Bernard - IMDb) is still with us.
That got me wondering about which movie would be the most recent film with no living cast members?
And conversely, which would be the oldest film that still has living cast members?
Olivia de Havilland is still alive, and her first film was A Mid Summer Night’s Dream (1935). Are there any living actors with an earlier film?
12 Angry Men (1957) may be the answer to your other question.
All of the credited cast members are dead (Jack Klugman was the last to die in 2012).
But in additional to the twelve credited cast members (who played the jurors) there were six other uncredited actors who appeared on screen. Four of them are also known to be dead.
But the status of John Savoca (who played the defendant) and James Kelly (who played the bailiff) are unknown. This was Savoca’s only appearance in a film. Kelly had a few credits on TV shows but he hasn’t worked since 1959.
Kelly was already an older man in 1957 so it’s unlikely he’s still alive. But Savoca would only be 79 so his survival is possible.
I thought it might be, “My Dinner With Andre” (1981), but amazingly, Andre Gregory is still alive and kicking at 85. So is Wallace Shawn. (No idea why I thought he was dead.) There’s only four cast members, and the other two are deceased though.
Older than Olivia at 104, Norman Lloyd (“Dr Auschlander” on St Elsewhere) is still around, though IMDb lists his first work as a live TV production (!) of ***The Streets of New York *** in 1939. His first movie was apparently the short The Forgotten Man in 1941, followed by Alfred Hitchcock’s ***Saboteur ***(in which he played a Nazi spy) in 1942.
All the credited cast members of The Conqueror (1956) are dead. That’s the John Wayne movie they filmed downwind of a nuclear test site, and everyone got cancer.
Some of the minor players seem to be still alive though.
The Misfits from 1961 may be a contender. All the credited cast - Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift, Thelma Ritter, Eli Wallach, James Barton, Kevin McCarthy and Estelle Winwood are dead. However some of the uncredited cast are not confirmed dead. They include Dennis Shaw who played a “Young Boy In Bar,” so maybe he still ives.
Sleuth from 1972 has only one remaining cast member alive, Michael Caine, now 86. It’s been a contender ever since 1989 when the only other living cast member, Laurence Olivier passed away. None of the other cast members were alive when the film was released.
This is a great nomination, and lead me to look up silent film actors. I found Don Marion Davis, born 1917 and apparently still alive, who appeared in Back To The Kitchen (1919). Back to the Kitchen (Short 1919) - IMDb
I’ve read that The Duke found the script lying around the RKO office one day and insisted the movie be made with him as its star. He reportedly said “This is the role I was born to play.”
Uhhh … okay. Sure, why not? Let’s give it a shot! :rolleyes:
There are plenty of recent films (mostly animated shorts) that have no cast members at all, so any of these, strictly speaking, would meet your criteria. (That is, no cast members at all means that no cast members are living.) Pixar’s Lifted from 2006 comes to mind, but I’ll bet there are similarly castless films from 2019.
If you restrict yourself to films that have a cast, then I bet the answer is still going to be something extremely recent, like in the last few years. It’s not unusual for films, especially low-budget shorts, to feature just one or two actors. No doubt some of these films featured actors who died accidentally or of old age since the film’s release. There may even be films that restrict themselves to archival footage or voice recordings from actors who died long before the film was even produced.
There are probably also a lot of documentaries where the only “cast member” is the narrator. Well, and possibly some animals, if you count them, but most of them will have very short life expectancies.
Sure, lots of those as well. I think the only credited cast member of 1977’s Powers of Ten was the narrator, physicist Philip Morrison, who died in 2005. But there must be scads of more recent documentaries featuring only a now-dead narrator.
The 1968 WWII drama Hell in the Pacific had two cast members: Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune. Marvin died in 1987 and Mifune in 1997. So this has qualified for the category for over 20 years.
Gray’s last one man show was Gray’s Anatomy from 1996. The depression that omened what happened later is deep in this one.
Altman’s Images from 1972 is one Rene Auberjonois away from qualifying. He’s almost 80.
Norman Lloyd
Olivia de Havilland
Kirk Douglas
Marsha Hunt
[Del] Carol Channing[/Del]
Betty White
Carl Reiner
[Del]Doris Day[/Del]
Eva Marie Saint
Dick van Dyke
June Lockhart
Angela Lansbury
Mel Brooks
Alternates:
Sidney Poitier
Joe Turkel
Conrad Janis
I haven’t checked all of them, but Marsha Hunt, b. 10/17/1917, was in a film called The Virginia Judge in 1935, at age 18. I haven’t checked every cast member, but I’ll wager she’s the last survivor in that film, and it is very likely the answer to your question.