Is it really possible to know when you're going to die? Did these actors genuinely
have some inclination that their demise was imminent? Keep watching and decide for yourself.
Beloved actress Carrie Fisher is of course best known as Princess Leia in the Star Wars saga.
She was also highly admired for her no-nonsense stance on life in Hollywood, drug use,
and mental illness. In the early 2000s, she became friends with English singer James Blunt,
of "You're Beautiful" fame. They were so close that he actually moved in with her
for several months while he recorded an album at a studio near her house.
"And she said, 'You know what? You're gonna live with me.'"
"Seriously?"
"Absolutely."
On December 27, 2016, Fisher passed away at the age of 60. She'd been in intensive
care for several days after suffering a medical emergency on a flight from London to Los Angeles.
Fans worldwide were devastated, but a few months after her passing,
Blunt had a very interesting story to tell.
When Blunt was staying in Fisher's house, she displayed some of her trademark dark humor by
putting a cardboard cutout of herself as Princess Leia outside of his bedroom with
her date of birth and a seemingly random date of death written on the cutout's forehead.
Blunt couldn't remember the exact date she'd written there, though he did recall
it ended up being very close to her actual death date. As he told The Sunday Times,
"I remember thinking it was too soon."
Oliver Reed was a legendary British actor who's probably best known to modern audiences for his
final role in 2000's Gladiator. He actually died during the production of that film on May 2,
1999. But let's go back several years. The British documentary series Without Walls had a few special
episodes called "The Obituary Show," which would memorialize famous living people as if they'd
passed away. These episodes would feature the "dead" person saying how they died,
as if they were recounting their own death from the afterlife and reading a
eulogy at their own funeral. There was a 1993 episode about Reed, in which he describes his
own imaginary death of a heart attack in a bar while participating in a "cabbage competition."
"And I was very confident that for once I was going to win this vegetable competition."
It's unclear just what a cabbage competition is, but six years later, Reed did indeed die
in a bar in Malta of a heart attack during a competition. It was an Irish drinking contest
with no cabbage in sight, but it was still eerily similar to what he'd predicted six years earlier.
Martial arts master and action film superstar Bruce Lee died unexpectedly
at the age of 32 on July 20, 1973, of a cerebral edema, which shocked the world.
His son Brandon, only eight years old at the time, was deeply affected by his father's death,
so much so that he apparently believed that his family was cursed.
According to the book Celebrity Ghosts and Notorious Hauntings by Marie D. Jones, Brandon
believed that his grandfather, Bruce's father, had been cursed after a business deal went bad,
and that meant that his descendants were destined to live short lives. The curse
came calling for his father, and Brandon believed he was next. According to his former girlfriend
Shannon Bradley-Colleary, he once told her that he thought he'd die even younger than his father.
This came true on March 31, 1993, when Brandon was killed in an on-set accident while filming
the movie The Crow. He was accidentally shot by a dummy bullet that was lodged in the barrel of
a prop gun. He was only 28. While this is creepy enough on its own, it gets even weirder when you
consider that his father's final film, Game of Death, had to be changed after Bruce died.
To explain his character being taken over by another actor, his character fakes his
own death after an assassin swaps out a fake bullet for a real one on a movie set.
On November 30, 2013, Paul Walker and his friend Roger Rodas were driving through Valencia,
California. Rodas was at the wheel going approximately 94 miles per hour in a
45-mile-per-hour zone when he lost control of the car on a curve and crashed into a concrete lamp
post. The car caught on fire, and a combination of the impact and severe burns killed both men.
Walker hadn't yet finished filming Furious 7, and production was briefly put on hold.
The movie eventually continued with some special effects and Walker's
two brothers used as stand-ins to complete the rest of his scenes.
A scene from the film leaked around the same time as Walker's accident.
The series' main crew has come together in the wake of a major character's death, when one of
them asks that they have "no more funerals." Brian O'Conner, Walker's character, then says:
"Just one more."
The scene leaked on YouTube just three days before Walker's own death.
The line is meant to be a threat to the film's primary antagonist,
but it becomes downright chilling when you consider the timing.
Legendary comedian John Candy appeared in just about every funny movie you can think of from
the '80s and '90s. Spaceballs, Uncle Buck, and Cool Runnings are just a few of the films that he
shined in. To say that he was a comedy icon would fall far short of fully capturing how good he was
at what he did. But like many comedians, Candy also fought battles with addiction.
He smoked heavily, drank, and consumed drugs. Nevertheless, audiences loved him,
and his colleagues did as well. One of his closest friends was fellow Canadian comedy
legend Catherine O'Hara, who was witness to what may have been a strange prediction.
Before Candy traveled to Mexico for location filming on what would end
up being his final film, Wagons East, he reportedly called O'Hara up and mentioned
that he felt like something bad was going to happen to him in Mexico.
Unfortunately, that turned out to be accurate. During the early hours of March 4, 1994,
Candy suffered a heart attack in his sleep, passing away at the age of 43.
While he probably knew that he wasn't exactly the picture of health, there's no way to know if he
truly anticipated his own death or if he actually meant something else with his bad feeling.
"Oh, this happens. Those things happens, you know."
Prince was best known as an iconic musician, but he also had an unforgettable acting career
in the likes of Under the Cherry Moon, and of course, Purple Rain. Making his mark on
not one, but two branches of the entertainment industry, it was all the more tragic when he
suddenly died at the age of 57 on April 21, 2016. It turned out that Prince had
been taking opioids, which he'd reportedly been self-administering due to chronic pain,
and some of those pills had been counterfeits laced with fentanyl.
It's unknown just how long he'd been taking the painkillers,
but in the days and months before his death, he'd been telling everyone that he was doing fine.
Everyone except for his sister, Tyka Nelson. According to Nelson, she’d heard from her
brother in a cryptic phone call three years before his death. He reportedly told her,
"I think I've done everything I've come to do."
Nelson immediately knew that her brother was talking about his own death,
even though he should've had many years left. This call ultimately
gave her extra time to prepare herself for his death when it inevitably arrived.
James Dean was Hollywood's original bad boy. His hobbies included acting and driving cars
very fast. Naturally, it was the latter that ultimately killed him. On September 30, 1955,
he was driving his Porsche 550 Spyder from Los Angeles to Salinas, California,
when a man named Donald Turnupseed turned left out of an intersection.
Going way too fast, Dean was unable to stop in time and crashed into Turnupseed's vehicle.
Turnupseed and Dean's passenger both survived with minor injuries, but Dean was killed by the impact.
There's a famous Hollywood story about this crash. Sir Alec Guinness, best known as Obi-Wan Kenobi,
said that he encountered Dean outside of a restaurant in Hollywood. When he showed his
new car off to Guinness, he took one look at it and told Dean that he'd be dead within a week
if he drove that car. This encounter occurred on September 23, one week earlier to the day.
But what's less known is that Dean also predicted his death himself. In an interview filmed earlier
that same year, he talked about his drag racing hobby and was asked about driving too fast on
highways. He claimed that he had "no urge" to speed on the highway and mentioned that it was
too dangerous because you didn't know what other drivers might do. His final line was,
"Take it easy driving. The life you might save might be mine."
Legendary rapper and actor Tupac Shakur died at age 25 in 1996 in Las Vegas.
He was leaving a Mike Tyson boxing match when he was shot by unknown assailants, and he died
days later in the hospital. It was a tragic end for a promising young career. Tupac had actually
envisioned his own death many times. His songs frequently featured morbid lyrics about death
and gun violence, and he included a lot of the same imagery in his album art and music videos.
It might be an exaggeration to call these predictions, though. Tupac knew that he lived a
dangerous lifestyle, and gun violence is a common way for people involved with gangs to go out.
But there's an especially eerie example in the case of his final music video,
"I Ain't Mad At Cha," which was filmed a month before his death.
The clip features him being shot numerous times outside of an event and then dying in
an ambulance on the way to the hospital. The video was released three days after his real-life death.
Just like Tupac, Aaliyah was a young and promising musician branching out into acting who died
tragically young. In 2001, at the age of 22, she and several members of her crew were leaving the
Bahamas to return to Miami after filming a music video for her single "Rock the Boat."
They packed into a small Cessna aircraft that crashed after takeoff, killing everyone on board.
Things get pretty weird when looking at it all in retrospect. Aaliyah's friends say
that she was afraid of flying, especially in a small aircraft. The music video production
company actually offered to charter a private jet because she wasn't happy about the small plane,
but she ended up declining because it would've taken her longer to get home.
The strangest part of all this is the interview she gave to a German
newspaper a month before she died, in which she described a recurring dream
where it's pitch black and someone is following her. She's scared,
but suddenly she flies up into the air and begins to feel at peace. As she put it,
"How do I feel? As if I am swimming in the air.
Free. Nobody can reach me. Nobody can touch me. It's a wonderful feeling."
Pro wrestling legend The Ultimate Warrior, born James Hellwig, was extremely popular in the 1980s,
when huge names like Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, and "Macho Man" Randy Savage
reinvigorated wrestling after it saw a decline the previous decade. This era of wrestling,
known as the "Golden Age," introduced the sport to a whole new generation of people
and catapulted the World Wrestling Federation into widespread popularity. You could find Warrior
and his cohorts on TV every week as well as on lunchboxes and in the form of action figures.
Each of the league's combatants was an icon to fans all over the world.
On April 5, 2014, The Ultimate Warrior was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame,
which was followed by a final appearance on WWE Raw
two days later. He gave a pointed speech about death and legacies, even saying,
"Every man's heart one day beats its final beat."
He also used the words "blood," "pulse," and "bleed" during the promo. The day after the
video aired, he died of a heart attack, rendering his speech all the spookier.
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