Heath Ledger was working on a movie called :The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus" at the time of his death. The people who are making the movie have said that they’re not sure how they will deal with this in terms of finishing the movie.
It got me to thinking, have there been any other situations where an actor/actress has died while in the middle of making a movie? And how did they deal with it. Do they use a body double, or scrap the entire movie and start over. I can only think of two other cases, one of the Harry Potter movies and the other was a guy that was killed in a helicopter crash during filming. It was Vic Morrow and the movie was “Twilight Zone”. I think that the scene in which he was killed was the final necessary scene for his segment of the movie, so I don’t think it affected the movie that much, although it was tragic.
Not sure if this is the appropriate forum for this, so apologies if it’s not.
The actress who played the Oracle in the Matrix series died during the production of the third film. They just got a new actress to play the character and gave her a couple of lines about how her code had been corrupted to alter her appearance or something.
Brandon Lee was accidentally shot and killed during the filming of The Crow. With only 8 days of shooting to go, the director, with the blessings of Brandon’s fiancee and mother, finished filming with stunt-double, and friend of Brandon, Chad Stahelski playing the part. Special effects were later used to put Brandon’s face onto Chad’s body.
Great movie
Not a movie, but the actress who played Tony Soprano’s mother died during filming and they had her die in the show, but had a pieced together scene with her before her film death that looked really, really fake.
Oliver Reed died during the making of Gladiator. The director used a double, earlier outtakes, and digital magic to fill in the missing scenes Reed was supposed to be in.
The same fate befell Brandon’s dad, Bruce. He filmed the fight scenes for Game of Death, then took a break to film Enter the Dragon, and intended to return to finish the former. He died before filming could resume. The film was reshot around a new storyline of Bruce’s character being shot on set and faking his own death, and used the original fight scenes. (Also features Bruce wailing on Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - has to be seen to be believed!)
Marilyn Monroe’s death brought an end to production of the somewhat ironically titled “Something’s Gotta Give,” although if this Wikipedia article is accurate, the production may have been doomed anyway.
His character (a virulent bigot) was to be redeemed in the film and rescue two Vietnamese children (the child actors were also killed). The version that was eventually released has him being transported to a concentration camp. I saw it in it’s theatrical release and it was really creepy, and not in a good way.
ETA: I see the title of “Something’s Got_to_Give” was more grammatical than I.
Natalie Wood was in the middle of filming a movie called Brainstorm when she drowned. The final scene with her was somehow ‘constructed from scenes shot earlier’ (according to IMDB’s trivia page for this movie.)
That was Terry Gilliam’s new movie too. That guy has the worst luck. Several years ago he had another movie, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, shut down because the lead actor got sick, and was never able to complete it. There’s a fascinating documentary called Lost In La Mancha which was supposed to be your average “making of” behind-the-scenes feature, and ended up being an epic story of one man’s Job-like trials trying to get his movie made. Poor Terry.
Orson Welles also left behind an unfinished adaptation of Don Quixote that he had worked on for decades.* I’ve read that he finally gave up after (here’s where I bring it back to the OP) the deaths of two of his actors. I can’t find a cite to verify that last bit, but here’s an interesting page on many of Welles’ unfinished projects.
*Although some of the footage was posthumously cobbled together into a film called “Don Quijote de Orson Welles,” no one seems to regard this as being anything like what Welles intended.