It's always tough to hear one of your favorite stars has died but finding out they've been
gone for a while without you knowing it can be an even weirder feeling.
Here are a few of the stars you may not have realized have unfortunately passed away.
Dino Bravo was never the biggest star in the WWF, though he was definitely one of the strongest.
After years of employment throughout the '80s, Bravo found himself on the outs with the WWF
by 1992.
With no savings and no knowledge of anything other than wrestling, Bravo turned to organized
crime through his uncle and joined a cigarette smuggling ring based in Quebec.
Less than a year later, on March 10th 1993, he was found shot to death, having been pierced
through by gunfire no fewer than 17 times.
Fellow wrestler Rick Martel later shared his belief that a cocaine smuggler blamed Bravo
for the cops showing up during a would-be exchange of contraband, resulting in violent
and fatal consequences.
Reggie Lewis was on his way to becoming an all-time NBA great when he died, and his passing
hit both the Boston community and the wider NBA particularly hard.
Lewis was only 27 when he died, but he had already earned a lifetime of achievements.
He was an All-Star, a Celtics captain, a mentor to underprivileged youth and was on his way
to becoming as beloved as any legendary Boston sports figure.
He was also the sixth player from 1988 to 1993 to score 7,500 points, 1,500 rebounds,
1,000 assists, and 500 steals.
The other five are all Hall of Famers, so Lewis was almost certainly on his way to the
top.
Sadly, he never made it.
On July 27th 1993, Lewis collapsed on the court during practice.
He had collapsed once before, during a playoff game the previous spring.
This time, however, was different, and he was pronounced dead two hours later.
His cause of death was hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, a common ailment for athletes involving the
thickening of the heart, eventually causing heart attacks and cardiac arrest.
Lewis' untimely passing left a huge, long-lasting vacancy in the history of Boston sports, with
the city and his family never getting to see how great he could have been.
Rising star Laurel Griggs lived the dream of countless stage performers: She made it
into the cast of a Broadway show.
What's even more impressive is that she accomplished that lofty goal by the age of six.
In 2013, she landed the role of Polly in a revival of the play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
starring opposite Scarlett Johansson.
From there, she bounced over to another production on the Great White Way, this time the stage
musical adaptation of the film Once, where she played the character of Ivanka for 17
months.
During Griggs' time on Broadway, she maintained a relatively normal life, regularly attending
school in the New York neighborhood where she lived with her parents.
On November 5th 2019, Griggs was working on a homework assignment when she fell ill.
Her father Andy later told the New York Post:
"She said, 'I don't think I feel so good,' which immediately set off all the alarms in
my head."
Griggs had been diagnosed with asthma at birth, and while she kept the condition under control
with medication, she had suffered one serious attack three years earlier.
Emergency personnel rushed Griggs to a hospital and administered CPR along the way.
Just four hours after the asthma attack, however, Griggs died at just 13 years old.
Three days later, Broadway dimmed its lights in remembrance of the young actress.
The late '80s cast of Saturday Night Live was among the best in the show's long and
storied history and one of the key players during this era was Jan Hooks.
Hooks had all the tools to make it as an SNL all-star, with a rotation of beloved recurring
characters as well as a knack for uncanny celebrity imitations.
The Georgia-born comic left SNL in 1991 to join the cast of the Atlanta-set sitcom Designing
Women, playing the ditzy Carlene Dobber.
She later enjoyed recurring roles on some of the most popular comedies of the next two
decades, including 3rd Rock from the Sun and 30 Rock.
After fighting a serious illness, Hooks died in October 2014, at age 57.
When boy bands ruled the music world in the late '90s and 2000s, every new group had to
differentiate themselves from the last.
For the trio LFO, short for "Lyte Funky Ones," that meant half-singing and half-rapping their
way through a series of chill, laid-back songs.
After a few hit singles, including "Every Other Time," "Girl on TV," and "Summer Girls,"
LFO split up in 2002 right around the time that the boy band bubble finally burst.
Sadly, there will never be an LFO reunion, since two of the band's three singers died
untimely deaths.
In 2010, Rich Cronin died at age 35 after suffering a stroke, following a five year
battle with a form of leukemia.
In 2018, following a diagnosis of adrenal cancer and a surgery to remove an abdominal
tumor, Devin Lima also passed away, at the age of 41.
Some acts are forever associated with Las Vegas.
There's Frank Sinatra and his "Rat Pack" of crooners in the '60s, Elvis Presley in the
'70s but in the 1990s and early 2000s, Sin City's biggest draw was Siegfried and Roy.
The German duo of Siegfried Fishbacher and Roy Horn offered an act unlike anything else,
one part elaborate stage magic, one part exotic animal show, featuring beautiful white tigers.
But their stage act came to an abrupt and shocking end in 2003, when a 400-pound tiger
named Mantacore mauled Horn in front of a packed house of 1,500 spectators.
Horn lost a lot of blood, suffered a stroke during the attack, required two surgeries
afterwards, and had to learn to walk again.
He and Fischbacher performed just one more time as a duo before Horn retired for good
in 2010.
In May 2020, Horn died at age 75, from complications associated with COVID-19.
In the mid-1980s, British dance pop collective Dead or Alive scored a string of dark but
groovy hits in the US and the UK, most notably "Lover Come Back to Me," "Brand New Love,"
and the eternally popular "You Spin me Round."
The band was a vehicle for frontman Pete Burns, a man of chameleonic fashion with a grand
and gothic singing voice.
He was also one of the few celebrities at the time to publicly disclose that wasn't
heterosexual.
According to a statement on social media from Burns' management, the Dead or Alive singer
passed away on October 23rd 2016, after suffering a "massive cardiac arrest."
He was 57.
While Thuy Trang played a lot of roles in her brief career, she'll forever be remembered
for one specific part as a cast member on one of the most popular kids' TV shows of
all time.
Trang played Trini Kwan, aka the very first Yellow Ranger, in the first season of Mighty
Morphin' Power Rangers.
She went on to land roles in Spy Hard and The Crow: City of Angels but it was a difficult
and unlikely path to Hollywood for Trang.
When she was two years old, her home city of Saigon fell to the Viet Cong, forcing Trang's
father, a member of the South Vietnamese army, to flee the country.
In 1979, six-year-old Trang and the rest of her family reunited with her father and settled
in California.
On September 3rd 2001, Trang was a passenger in a car on a California freeway when the
driver lost control of the vehicle, which hit a rock face, flipped, and rammed into
a safety barrier.
Trang survived the initial accident, but died on the way to the hospital.
She was just 27 years old.
As one of the most visible and hardest-working comics of his generation, it's surprising
that stand-up wasn't actually Greg Giraldo's first career choice.
He actually graduated from the prestigious Harvard Law School, and worked as an attorney
before giving it up to pursue comedy in 1992.
Just four years later, he had landed his own sitcom, the short-lived Common Law, and by
the 2000s, he was a staple on Comedy Central.
Not only did his stand-up appear on the channel, but he was a regular contributor to panel
shows such as Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn.
But he was most famous for being a frequent and hilariously brutal participant in the
network's televised celebrity roasts.
"That was great, Jim, I've never seen you be funny on TV before."
In 2010, after his girlfriend was unable to reach him, an employee of the hotel where
Giraldo was staying discovered the comedian in his room, having entered a coma after a
drug overdose.
Five days later, his family decided to take him off life support.
Giraldo was 44 years old.
His name may not always have been known to most viewers, but James Rebhorn had such a
familiar face and such an extensive resume that he became a frequently recognized figure
on television screens around the world.
In particular, his regular-guy looks and everyman sensibility made for a career specializing
in portraying stern, middle-aged, and stubborn authority figures.
Rebhorn had recurring role status on a whole load of law and order shows, including Boston
Legal and The Practice.
But Rebhorn was probably best known for his late-career work as Frank Mathison, father
of Claire Danes' character on Homeland.
On the big screen, he appeared in a number of '90s classics, including Basic Instinct
and Independence Day.
In 1992, Rebhorn was diagnosed with melanoma.
He kept the disease at bay for decades, however, before finally dying from it in March 2014,
at the age of 65.
Whether as an actor, director, writer, or some combination thereof, Harold Ramis had
an enormous impact on comedy films in the '80s and '90s.
After performing with the Second City improv troupe in Chicago, he moved on to National
Lampoon, where he co-wrote the brand's first feature film, the smash-hit college comedy
Animal House.
After, Ramis wrote and directed the classic golf movie Caddyshack, wrote and co-starred
in Stripes, directed National Lampoon's Vacation, and portrayed Dr. Egon Spangler in Ghostbusters,
which he also co-wrote.
After the '80s, Ramis directed and co-wrote Groundhog Day, while also taking on notable
roles in major comedies, such as Knocked Up and Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
After developing a rare condition called autoimmune inflammatory vasculitis, Ramis died in the
early morning hours of February 24th 2014.
He was 69 years old.
Not every teen TV star becomes a teen TV star by portraying a teen TV star, but that's what
young actor Lee Thompson Young did.
From 1998 to 2001, he starred on The Famous Jett Jackson, a Disney Channel original series
about a kid who balances his wacky personal life with his responsibilities as the star
of a television series called Silverstone.
In addition to Jett Jackson, he starred in the network's popular made-for-TV movie Johnny
Tsunami.
Young successfully made the jump from kid stuff to adult roles, notably playing overconfident
intern Derek on Scrubs, DC Comics hero Cyborg on the Superman-oriented series Smallville,
and Detective Barry Frost on the TNT crime drama Rizzoli & Isles.
When Young didn't report to the set one day in August 2013, police performed a wellness
check and discovered the 29-year-old actor dead in his Los Angeles home.
His manager confirmed that Young had taken his own life.
During the later seasons of The Cosby Show, Michelle Thomas portrayed Justine, the girlfriend
who made Theo Huxtable's heart go all a flutter.
After that show wrapped, she moved on to Family Matters to play Myra Monkhouse, a young lady
desperately in love with mega-nerd Steve Urkel for some reason.
"Oh my God, did I use deodorant?"
Thomas also appeared in popular '90s music videos for R&B groups Boyz II Men and Dru
Hill, and in 1998, she settled into the role of Callie Rogers on the long-running daytime
soap The Young and the Restless.
Sadly, just two months into her run, Thomas was forced to take medical leave from the
show to seek treatment for cancer.
The cancer took Thomas' life in late December 1998.
The actress was just 30 years old.
In 1995, one of the most star-studded casts in Hollywood history was assembled for...a
gentle, winsome, nostalgic movie about teenage girls growing up in the early 1970s.
Not exactly The Avengers, is it?
Now and Then paired four A-list adult actresses as lifelong best friends in the present day,
and four up-and-coming actresses as the characters' younger selves in the past.
Among the rest of the cast was Rita Wilson and Ashleigh Aston Moore, who played Chrissy,
the most naive member of the group.
Moore was the least experienced of the four teen stars, having only landed her first roles
in made-for-TV movies in 1993.
In the end, Now and Then represented the peak of her career.
After a couple more movies and a few episodic TV appearances, Moore retired from acting
in 1997.
Sadly, she died in 2007, having taken what turned out to be a fatal overdose of heroin.
She was only 26 years old.
Almost invariably, Edward Herrmann played characters with a vibe of superiority or entitlement.
The actor could be counted on to play all kinds of big shots, rich guys, barons of industry,
and politicians.
Among his most famous roles of this ilk included Richie Rich's wealthy dad, the wealthy husband
of Goldie Hawn's character in the original Overboard, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt
in the film version of the musical Annie.
Herrmann was heard as often as he was seen, as he narrated dozens of projects for the
History Channel and served as the voice of Dodge in the '90s.
But Herrmann was best known for playing the very picture of the kindly patriarch: Richard
Gilmore, the extremely civilized grandfather on all seven seasons of Gilmore Girls.
Unfortunately, he passed away in 2014, just before the show's Netflix revival.
According to his son, Herrmann died from brain cancer at the age of 71.
After a string of bit parts throughout the '90s, Michael Clarke Duncan landed his breakthrough
role: oil driller-turned-astronaut Bear in the summer of 1998 blockbuster Armageddon.
About a year later, Duncan earned acclaim for his work in The Green Mile as John Coffey,
a gifted prison inmate on death row for crimes he didn't commit.
The film was nominated for Best Picture, and Duncan earned a nod for Best Actor in a Supporting
Role.
From that point on, Duncan put his large stature and deep, distinctive voice to use, playing
tough guys and gentle giants alike in a number of celebrated Hollywood hits.
In 2012, Duncan starred on the Fox dramedy The Finder, and just months after its cancellation,
the actor passed away.
According to his publicist, Duncan suffered a heart attack in July, and complications
from the event led to his death in September.
He was 54.
Professional wrestling has always been popular on American television, but it had never had
the cultural reach it enjoyed in the '80s.
Back then, wrestlers were household names.
The good guys, or "faces," were loved and cheered, while the bad guys, or "heels," were
hated…and actually kinda loved, too.
And there was no bigger heel than "Rowdy" Roddy Piper.
Set up as the archnemesis of Hulk Hogan, the character was a hothead prone to fits of rage
and was so proud of his Scottish heritage that he wore a kilt in bouts and entered the
ring with bagpipe music.
When inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame in 2005, Ric Flair called him the most gifted
entertainer in the history of professional wrestling.
"Rowdy" Roddy Piper isn't a person, of course, being the persona of Canadian wrestler Roderick
Toombs.
As just plain Roddy Piper, however, the man was an actor out of the ring, starring in
the cult classics Hell Comes to Frogtown and They Live.
In 2006, however, Piper received a Hodgkin's lymphoma diagnosis.
Nine years later, the wrestler died in his sleep at age 61.
In the pantheon of lovable TV dads, Uncle Phil Banks, the gruff surrogate father figure
from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, ranks right up there with the best.
The tough loving, Jazz-tossing judge held his own with the charismatic Will Smith, and
his turn in the classic '90s sitcom is certainly the most famous role in the long and prolific
career of James Avery.
Nineties kids will also remember him as the voice of Shredder in the original Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles animated series, and he was widely celebrated for his multiple
roles in animation.
After Fresh Prince wrapped up, Avery's most prominent role was that of medical examiner
Dr. Crippen on the popular TNT procedural The Closer.
In November 2013, Avery underwent open-heart surgery, and complications from the procedure
led to his death the following New Year's Eve.
Avery was 68.
As time goes on, the terrible effects football and other full-contact sports can have on
the brain are becoming clearer and clearer.
Take Junior Seau, for example.
Seau played in the NFL for 20 years and was never once diagnosed with a concussion.
Many concussions go unnoticed and undiagnosed, however, and Seau clearly suffered plenty
of them.
In 2012, two years after retiring, Seau shot himself in the heart and, naturally, his ex-wife
and son wanted to know why.
"I can't imagine how severe his anguish was."
So they partnered with the National Institutes of Health, who studied his brain and concluded
he had suffered from severe chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.
As a result of being hit in the head countless times over 20 years, Seau's brain deteriorated
to the point that he could no longer think logically which may have played a part in
his tragic early death.
Subsequent research has found cases of CTE in countless other football players, and Seau's
family hopes this research might help spare future families from the same tragedy.
If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please call the National Suicide
Prevention Lifeline​ at​ 1-800-273-TALK (8255)​.