Oh, yeah, Steve Irwin (his daughter was so young; I was very sad for her); John Denver (I was a big fan); Heath Ledger, he just had so much potential. He was beautiful in A Knight’s Tale and pure brilliance in The Dark Knight, I think he could have gone on to do just about anything; Billy Mays’ death made me much sadder than I would have expected it to.
Johnny Carson cause I grew up watching him and he kind of reminded me of my dad.
Brittany Murphy for some reason. I only saw a few movies with her and didn’t consider her an exceptional actress but something about her really appealed to me.
Stevie Ray Vaughn because I was a big fan and had just seen him live shortly before he died.
Jim Henson was shocking and sad, but I didn’t feel like crying for some reason. I was just sad, cause I love Rowlf and knew he would never be the same.
Phil Hartman was tough, I’d lose a third of my conversation if I didn’t have the Simpsons to quote. I was in an office working with people who either didn’t know who he was or knew him from ‘that movie with Sinbad’
Freddie Prinze, I was home for some reason that day and saw it on the Today show with my parents. They would never understand why I was upset, so I left so they wouldn’t see me cry. Also my first suicide, I had no idea that someone would do that. I knew what it was, but the idea that someone I liked would do it, not some historical, abstract person was incomprehensible to me.
Roald Dahl, Major influence on me. I wished at the time that there was someone I could commiserate with on this one.
I’ll go ahead and mention James Dean, even though he was already dead before I even knew anything about him. I had heard about “some actor” being killed in a wreck maybe a few months before I saw Rebel Without A Cause for the first time. But that movie affected me (and most kids in my age group) for decades. I can look at it now without any of the fascination I had with it until I was in my 30’s, but it remained in my Top 50 movies until it began dropping out of IMDb’s Top 250.
It was probably a year later when Giant came out, and somewhere between those times I saw East of Eden for my first time. Of the three, I believe Eden is a more substantial movie for the ages, but all three of them depend on the 50’s zeitgeist for full appreciation. I gather that anybody younger than 40 sees Rebel as corny and overwrought. Much the same way I saw things from the 30’s and earlier until much later in my life.
But James Dean must be mentioned.
The girl that played Buffy in Family Affair.
Gene Roddenberry, then Phil Hartman.
I was surprised when Lennon died only because I thought he’d overdosed years ago. As for Michael Jackson and Princess Diana, some evil part of me deep down was glad to see the end of them.
Robert Heinlein. I was on my home from work, and when I heard the news on the radio I almost swerved into a UPS semi.
Phil Hartman, especially after hearing the story behind it. John Lovitz couldn’t stand working with Andy Dick on *News Radio *because Dick sold Hartman’s wife cocaine the day she shot him. The deaths of John Belushi and Chris Farley were also tragic, but not surprising.
Johnny Cash and John Ritter dying on the same day got me down.
So yes, world leaders and history makers can die and I’m OK with it, but not so with entertainers. I blame society for making me so shallow.
Most of the deaths that affected me either occurred before I was born or when I was too young to remember, the exception being Norman Borlaug’s. The others are Isaac Asimov’s, Richard Feynman’s and Carl Sagan’s. I strongly suspect that this is because I look up to them, and perhaps could have met them if they had been alive for a few more years. Judging from his age, the next death would probably be Marvin Minsky’s.
I guess you were so broken up by her death that you forgot her name.
Why would you wish ill on Diana?
May I ask if you were surprised by Heinlein’s death?
I remember thinking, when reading To Sail Beyond the Sunset, that it was clearly, consciously, and deliberately his last novel. It was obvious that he was putting his literary affairs in order.
Freddie Prinze was one of the first celebrity deaths I remember vividly. He was a young star, and to 10-year-old me, such people are supposed to be invulnerable.
Then there was Thurmon Munson. I’m not a baseball fan but for some reason my sister and I had made up a silly little song about him and Reggie Jackson (we’d sing “Therm and Jackson” to the tune of “Love and Marriage”) and so when he died, it shocked me. Plus it enhanced my terror of planes.
John Lennon, obviously. I wasn’t even hugely into the Beatles back then, but I knew how important he was. And he was so connected with peace and unworldly things that having him die by violence was particularly horrifying.
Here’s another I haven’t seen mentioned: Leonard Bernstein. West Side Story is beloved to me and my family, as are his other works such as Candide and Chichester Psalms. I also associate him with my parents’ generation and background, particularly my mom, who’d died just a few years before he did. At the time, I was working at the New York Philharmonic, which meant I was able to attend the memorial at Carnegie Hall. I cannot adequately describe the emotional impact of the opening of the memorial concert: an all-star orchestra was on stage, with an empty conductor’s stand. All of us were waiting for the conductor to walk out – as is usual for classical concerts. But instead, the orchestra launched into Bernstein’s brilliant Overture to Candide … leaving the conductor’s place, Bernstein’s place, empty. Gut-wrenching.
Graham Chapman. My second favorite Python. I watch Monty Python constantly and so they’re always young, healthy and at the top of their forms. Douglas Adams in a similar vein – I reread his work all the time. How could he die? Wasn’t I keeping him alive by reading?
Phil Hartman I mourn to this day, and I just cannot fathom that he’s not around. Major News Radio and Simpsons fan. But especially News Radio. So much talent, cruelly taken from us. And more importantly, taken from his kids. Fucking Brynn Hartman.
Princess Diana and John F. Kennedy Jr. both knocked me for a loop. I wasn’t a fangirl of either of them, but I admired a lot that they did, and of course their deaths were particularly shocking due to the misadventures that led to them. And for a similar reason, Michael Jackson. His music was the soundtrack to my junior/high school years.
Carl Sagan. “For Carl” in Contact breaks me up every fucking time.
Actually, no. He sold her cocaine several months prior to the shooting. He’s become the boogeyman because the story goes Brynn was off drugs until Andy sold her the coke that supposedly got her hooked again.
Not that I defend what he did (or his general asshattery). But let’s not place him actually in Dealey Plaza!
Why you have to go and bring up Mr. Rogers. Now my allergies are acting up.
I’m not surprised that I’m the only one to mention Dimebag Darrel, the lead guitarist of Pantera and Damageplan. Some nutjob came onstage and shot him to death and killed a few other people as well.
I heard about it the following morning on the radio and was devastated. My students could tell something was wrong so I explained what had happened. Only one of my students knew who he was and he was devastated as well.
I left out John Candy.
Donny Hathaway. Not because I was a fan of his, but because he and I were born on exactly the same day . . . yet he took his own life in 1979. I sometimes think of him, and think that if i had given up in 1979, all the things since then that I would have missed out on. Definitely the best years of my life were since then, not before.
You are a sad little human being with no worldly knowledge. Go away. Now.
Jim Henson.
Alistair Cooke. After Masterpiece Theater, I listened to his Letter From America commentary on shortwave for a number of years. He finally gave them up due to poor health and died less than a month later. It was as if Letter was the only thing keeping him going.
Charles Schulz. Like Cooke, he retired because of illness and died just short of two months after that.
Jim Henson. I was pretty young when he died but I LIVED for the Muppets and knew his death pretty much meant the end of that enterprise. I was in a grocery line with my parents and the cover of Life magazine that week had a very solemn picture of Kermit the Frog sitting in Henson’s director’s chair, head in his hands. I had to hide my tears from my parents.
Princess Di, because I thought of her boys and what it meant to lose their mother.
John Denver, it’s hard to explain why but to know that the voice behind his lovely songs was silenced forever was difficult for me.
For people in the DC area, it was about 20 years ago but Glenn Brenner. I remember Frank Herzog breaking down on the evening news trying to talk about it.
John Lennon and Princess Diana for me too.
Two performers who gave a lot and had much much more to give…
Jeff Buckley - I walked around like a zombie while he was missing and was in shock when they found his body. To this day I can’t listen to his music or watch his videos because it just hurts too much.
Kirsty MacColl - a death so unnecessary, but I don’t consider it an accident. She was murdered, and the killer has never been brought to justice. (Wow, I just realized that I’m standing right next to Kirsty in that Wikipedia picture, cropped out, of course)
Heath Ledger’s death affected me deeply, even though I hadn’t seen that many of his movies. It just hit me so hard, most likely because he was Ennis in Brokeback Mountain.
Doug Adams was a huge shock.
Like Driver8, I now feel very sad about Stieg Larsson, even though he died in 2004, and I had never heard of him until a couple of months ago.