Composer Jean-Baptiste Lully died of an infected wound incurred when he struck his own foot with the staff he was using to beat time during a performance.
Not sure what you’re asking, but he literally skied into a tree, hit his head and died. Happened not far from me at Heavenly Ski Resort.
Actress Brittany Murphy passed away in her home, the cause of death was pneumonia, and then it was reported that drug abuse was the underlying factor, along with anemia. Which I remember seemed very sad, that she suffered from addiction, because I really liked her.
Then, her husband died six months later, in their home, of pneumonia, and apparently also anemia. And then that just seemed weird. Murphy’s parents have since claimed there was some deadly environmental issue with the house, like toxic mold. The parents seem … a little volatile, so it’s hard to figure out (from my periodic google searches on this). Every character in this story is a bit of an odd duck, so who knows what was really going on.
That was Queen Sunandha Kumariratana, wife of King Chulalongkorn (Rama V), who had been the little boy of The King and I fame: “The queen and her daughter drowned when the royal boat capsized while on the way to the Bang Pa-In Royal Palace (Summer palace). Despite the presence of many onlookers, they were forbidden on pain of death to touch the queen – not even to save her life. The grief-stricken Chulalongkorn later erected a memorial to her and his unborn child at the Bang Pa-In Palace.”
A pleasant place to visit, Bang Pa-in Palace is in Ayutthaya’s Bang Pa-in district in central Thailand.
And speaking of Thailand, don’t forget David Carradine’s weird death by kinky auto-asphyxiation in the Nai Lert Park Hotel in Bangkok.
But that wasn’t even the weirdest death there. That hotel used to be the Hilton. I recall about 20 years ago, a prostitute went missing on her way to meet a client in the hotel. They found the body in a water-storage tank on top of the hotel several days after she went missing. Yes, the water that was pumped into the rooms and kitchens. Lovely. It eventually transpired that a security guard had killed her in the parking garage. She’d asked him for directions to the client’s room, he made some smart-ass remark to her about being a prostitute, she ripped him a new asshole mouthing off to him, so he killed her. Dumped the body in the water tank and took off for his village in the Northeast without so much as a by your leave. Since he disappeared about the same time the girl was last seen alive, the police put two and two together and tracked him down in his village.
French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully stabbed himself with his staff while conducting. The wound became infected, leading to the gangrene which killed him.
Helmut Köllen, bassist and vocalist for the German prog-rock band Triumvirat, died of carbon monoxide poisoning while he was listening to tapes of some studio tracks on his car stereo, in a closed garage with the engine running.
Comedian/actor Dick Shawn died of a massive heart attack while performing his act on stage. No one did anything for five minutes, thinking it was part of the act. A stagehand finally went on stage and discovered he was dead. The audience remained in the theater until the paramedics arrived, still thinking it was an act.
Didn’t the same thing happen to Redd Foxx? They thought he was just doing his “Elizabeth, here I come” shtick again.
Ooh, similar … Irene Ryan (the grandma on Beverly Hillbillies), had a stroke while performing in the stage musical Pippin, just as the curtain was coming down after her big number. She never recovered, and passed away a few weeks later.
Sorta. To his castmates’ credit (it happened during rehearsal for The Royal Family), they figured out he was having a real heart attack and called for help fairly quickly, but the delay, brief as it was, probably didn’t help his survival.
He was injured so badly that virtually nothing could have saved him. One of his colleagues, who was in the crash with him, even believed that a blood transfusion might have killed him sooner.
See also UK comedy magician Tommy Cooper. “On 15 April 1984 Cooper collapsed from a heart attack in front of millions of television viewers, midway through his act.”
The great American baritone Leonard Warren was performing in Verdi’s Don Carlo, and had just sung an aria that began “Morir, tremenda cosa” (to die, a momentous thing) when he suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and died onstage.
Health nut Jerome Rodale died on Dick Cavett show shortly after saying he had never felt better in his life. The Dick Cavett Show "Jerome Rodale Death" Episode (1971 Unreleased Talkshow Episode) | Lost Media Archive | Fandom
Bobby Fuller died in a car under mysterious circumstances and was found to have gasoline in his stomach.
Bob Crane of Hogan’s Heros was violently beaten to death with a camera tripod. The main suspect was none other than John Carpenter. Years later he was officially charged but the charges were ultimately dismissed.
Natasha Richardson also died from what had appeared to be a minor skiing accident.
Tennessee Williams was trying to open a bottle of eye drops. He was having difficulty getting the cap off so he pried it off with his teeth. He accidentally swallowed the cap and choked to death.
That’s not John Carpenter who made Halloween and The Thing, it’s some other guy no one ever would have heard of he wasn’t associated with Bob Crane’s death.
Detroit Tigers pitcher Mark “The Bird” Fidrych was found dead beneath his ten-wheel dump truck. Apparently got out to work on something under the truck, and his shirt got entangled on a spinning power takeoff shaft and he suffocated.