22 years at last count…
But yeah, sounds like something was definitely out of the normal tolerances with him, even considering his obesity and smoking. 44 is still ridiculously young even considering all that other stuff.
Since the initial thread I have all but given up hope Candy is ever going to get any better.
It was certainly Mickey Mantle’s philosophy. His male relatives had all died young (his father died of Hodgkins’ Disease at age 40), and as he believed he was going to die young, he saw no reason to not drink like a fish. When he didn’t die by 40 or 50, he was quoted as saying, “If I’d known I was gonna live this long, I’d have taken a lot better care of myself.”
Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead, on the other hand.
And The Dread Pirate Roberts/Westley is only mostly dead.
On the other hand, Zombie John Candy is more than ready to eat your brains.
The term, he died of a… MASSIVE… heart attack always strikes me as odd.
Who quantifies fatal heart attacks? I mean… “He died of a minor heart attack.” or “He died of an average heart attack.” How does one know the SIZE of a fatal heart attack? It seems like just knowing it’s fatal tells you all you need to know about the…size… of the attack. I’m guessing almost always, when someone keels over, stop breathing, turns blue and dies the death is listed as heart attack. (OK, I know today it’s a cardiac event)
And if they cut the victim open and check, how is the heart attack evaluated and characterized as massive? Do they count the coronary arteries that are blocked? Does 3+ blockages = massive? Maybe if the aorta has pulled loose.
Help me here on…massive.
Does a MASSIVE heart attack have it’s own zip code? A moon? Does it have its OWN heart, which, in turn, is ALSO having a MASSIVE attack? Does it have TRUMP written across it in YUUUUGE letters?
I thank you for bringing attention to one of the pressing problems of the day, and seeking an answer to something I also have long wondered about.
If I die of a heart attack, I DO want it to be of the MASSIVE variety. I don’t want folks gathered around my casket saying, “No, no, it was quite a small one, really. It seems he just didn’t have any fight in him.”
Smoking can’t be underestimated for people with a history of heart disease. I know a guy who was a four-pack a day smoker who started when he was like 12, which would have been in the 50s, and come the 80s, was tired of it, but hooked. He tried everything: SmokEnders, Hypnotism, taking a week off work at a spa to go cold turkey, really, switching brands to quit-- literally every possible solution up until then. Then in the 90s he hit the age (IIRC, something like 54 when his father, also a smoker, died of a massive heart attack), and he became desperate. At that point, I really thought there were some people who couldn’t quit. But the patch had just come out, and it was still Rx only. He didn’t have insurance, but he got it, and paid for it. He wore patches for six months to get off the nicotine, and for a full two years was never without sugarless gum or mints to satisfy his oral fix (he used to literally light one off the end of another).
But he quit. It’s now been like 25 years since he quit, and he is somewhere around 70. I truly believe he added about 20 years to his life (and counting) by quitting. Most important to him, he outlived his beloved mother. Even though he was grief-stricken when he lost her, he had some small comfort in the fact that it would have been infinitely worse for her to have outlived him. And, she lived into her 90s, which is a good, long life.
RE: John Candy. Sometimes his straight acting doesn’t get enough credit. He was wonderful in Cool Runnings, and even more to his credit, he didn’t have to be the main focus of the movie. Even though he was the BIG NAME in it, he knew when to step back and give other actors their moment. It was an ensemble movie, and one of my all-time favorites.
The featured ad on this thread, for those of you with ad blocker, is for Jimmy Dean’s Pancake and Sausage on a Stick.
I shit you not!
From Wikipedia:
I told someone 20 years older than me “I’m not a Chatty Cathy! I don’t pull my own string!” And she looked at me with amazement and said “You’re not old enough for that doll, are you?” I confessed it was from this movie I learned the reference.
I miss him a lot. 
He was a great actor.
Goodman has had massive weight loss, at least 100 pounds, since that time. Maybe more than once, which is the norm. More importantly, there are no indications he’s trying to drink himself to death.
Jimmy Dean’s Pure Pork Sausage … mmmmmmmmmmmmm! :o
The power of cinema! 
Love his work.
I wanted to add the trivia that according to the commentary on Splash!, he was genuinely hungover in the racquetball (in the UK we call that “squash”) scene with Tom Hanks. Also, when he hits the ball and it comes back and smacks him in the head - brilliant shot! - it was a complete fluke, but he was such a consummate performer he just went with it.
I adore this film. The footage on the El stop always gets to me.
(From an ex-pat Chicagoan who would move back but current spouse just can’t handle “cities.”)
This is a zombie thread, and like others have said Candy had a family history. I don’t know if I"m confusing Candy with Jim Fix, but I thought Candy also had uncles and grandfathers who died of heart disease in their 30s or 40s. So it wasn’t just his father who passed away young from it.
Candy’s obesity, smoking, heavy drinking and who knows what other lifestyle factors he had (high stress, poor sleep, undiagnosed sleep apnea?) didn’t help. However in general people do not die in their 30s or 40s from poor lifestyle unless they are genetically prone. Poor lifestyle doesn’t start killing people en masse until your late 60s.
Yeah. My mother’s side of the family is like that, people are who are NOT overweight dropping dead from heart disease in the 40’s, if you add any risk factors on top of that you can die younger. Affected women as much as the men, linked to a single bad gene. Without statins mom’s cholesterol levels were in excess of 500 and she started having angina pains in her 30’s despite never being overweight and was actually underweight for significant periods of her life. Could only imagine how much worse it might have been if she had been obese.
Very glad I didn’t inherit that one.