I don’t know if this counts, but Edward G. Robinson completed his last scene in Soylent Green, where his character commits suicide, just shortly before he died of cancer. So, he knew he was dying when he did his death scene.
Not 100% on topic but a review of his Double Fantasy album in (IIRC) Rolling
Stone declared John Lennon to be dead, 2 months before he was shot. Yes the
reviewer meant in a creative sense, but when I read the review in the library of my
college 2 months after the shooting I was rather shocked, as I’m sure the reviewer
was too once he heard the news of JL’s death.
I hope it’s Ok to revive this, but I was watching Judging Amy and in one of the eps leading up to Tyne Daly and Richard Crenna tying the knot she says they’re getting married in two weeks because they’re old and forever isn’t as long as it used to be. Richard Crenna unexpectedly died IRL before the characters married.
The Sci-Fi Channel ran a “Twilight Zone” marathon on New Year’s Eve. They included something I’d never seen before from the original shows: Rod Serling doing a little bit at the end where he delivers a verbal blurb of next week’s episode – and then does a little ad for the brand of cigarette he’s smoking.
Come to think of it, the idea of an actor giving a performance that’s a presentiment of his own death could have made a good “Twilight Zone” episode.
And of course Game Of Death has a subplot featuring Bruce Lee faking his death by getting shot while filming a movie, when a blank is supposedly replaced with a real bullet.
In addition to the standin with big sunglasses that Number mentioned they used a cardboard cutout of his face at one point (I think it was strapped to a double’s face, like a cheap mask, and you see him reflected in a mirror).
Keith Moon camping it up in drag in 200 Motels as the ODing nun. “It was the pills…I took so many of them!”
The pilot episode of the ill-fated Lone Gunmen series featured a plot concerning a government conspiracy to fly a plane into the World Trade Center. The episode ran a year before 9/11.
There was a short lived sitcom in the 1980s starring, IIRC, Robert Wagner, which also starred a young girl who’d became famous for writing the head of the Soviet Union and asking him why he wanted to blow up the world and then meeting him in the USSR. The TV show’s opening had a plane crash in it (since the mother of the family was supposed to have died in a plane crash). Shortly after the show started airing the girl was killed in a plane crash. (The network didn’t think to cut it from the opening before the next episode aired.)
I remember seeing that one, and thinking how cool and exciting the special effects looked–a great debut for the Lone Gunmen series.
Now I think about it and get chills up my spine.