It's almost a blessing to do as the old saying goes and die doing what
you love. Here are some famous folks who literally worked until the end,
shocking their audiences by dying on stage or in live performances.
Comedian Dick Shawn put together a full evening of entertainment for the audience
of 500 or so people that paid to see him perform at UC San Diego in April 1987.
First, he did a sketch where he played a disembodied head on a dinner table,
then he comically danced out of time to some music. Next, Shawn launched into a routine
about the end of the world, during which he lay down on the stage and stayed completely still.
The audience thought it was part of the bit, that Shawn was pretending to be dead.
"That's a joke. It's not the truth, that's a joke."
After five minutes of Shawn not moving, the heckles and laughter stopped. A doctor rushed onto
the stage, tried to find a pulse, and then flipped Shawn onto his back. The audience was ordered out
while Shawn received CPR. An ambulance arrived in short order and took Shawn to the closest
hospital. Less than two hours after Shawn first took the stage, he was pronounced dead at age 57.
Remember when Britney Spears danced with a giant snake draped around her neck during the 2001
MTV Video Music Awards? An Indonesian singer named Irma Bule similarly used snakes in her
performances, but one show had tragic results. While performing in Karawang, Indonesia, in 2016,
the 29-year-old was handling a live cobra she'd used for years as a stage prop.
During just her second song, the snake bit Bule on the thigh.
Assuming that someone had defanged or de-venomed the cobra, she continued performing.
But no one had. Around 45 minutes later, Bule was still doing her show when she
vomited and began seizing. She was pronounced dead at a local hospital.
In March 2015, two of the biggest stars of the AAA, the Mexican wrestling federation equivalent
to the WWE, met in the ring: Hijo del Perro Aguayo, or Pedro Aguayo Ramirez vs. Rey Mysterio
Jr, or Oscar Gutiérrez. During the match, the legendary Mysterio delivered a powerful flying
kick that sent Aguayo careening into the ropes. The wrestler's head hit the ropes, and he appeared
to have suffered a snapped vertebrae. After he lay in the ring unresponsive, Mysterio and the referee
sensed something had gone very wrong and summoned help. The on-call doctor took an agonizingly long
80 seconds to reach and treat Aguayo, but it was all too late. The cause of death was a
heart attack, triggered by a cervical stroke, which occurred when the wrestler's neck broke.
Aguayo was arguably the most well-known rudo, or villain, in the AAA. He was 35 years old.
There are all kinds of potential dangers on stage. Chief among them is the electricity used to power
all the electric guitars and amps used in a performance. That's what killed Les Harvey,
guitarist for the up-and-coming Scottish blues-rock band Stone the Crows. Prior
to the start of a concert in Swansea, Wales, on May 3, 1972, Harvey was tuning up his instrument
in front of about 1,200 fans and made the fatal mistake of grabbing a microphone. It hadn't been
properly grounded, and a volatile, fatal jolt of electricity shot through his body. He died at the
hospital, and, like so many other tragically lost stars, Harvey was just 27 years old.
In 1827, Sam Patch became one of the first famous daredevils, regularly jumping off a
ledge over Passaic Falls in New Jersey into the water below. As time went on, his jumps became
ever more ambitious. In 1829, Patch and his team announced the entertainer's last jump, which was
supposed to be his final jump of the season. On Friday, November 13th, he would hurl himself 125
feet off a platform overlooking the High Falls of the Genesee River in Rochester, New York.
According to a report of the jump from the New York Evening Post, in mid-descent,
Patch's body, quote, "began to droop, his arms were extended, and his legs separated."
Patch hit the water wrong, and he never emerged. Four months later and 6 miles downriver,
Patch's body finally surfaced in a block of ice. An autopsy concluded that Patch had
suffered a ruptured blood vessel mid-fall due to the sudden shock of the cold November air.
Jane Little was a double-bass player who joined the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra in
1945 at the age of 16 and stayed with the group for more than seven decades. In February 2016,
Guinness World Records recognized Little for a big achievement — 71 years with the ASO,
a record for orchestral musicians. Just a few months later, in May 2016, Little
was playing in a symphony pops concert called "Broadway's Golden Age," a collection of show
tunes. According to the Washington Post, near the end of "There's No Business Like Show Business,"
Little, 87, collapsed while playing her bass. She was carried backstage and passed away.
Back in the '50s and '60s, Onie Wheeler was one of the great country music sidemen,
back when they still called it "country and Western music." While he recorded lots of
solo material, the guitarist and harmonica player backed Johnny Cash and George Jones,
among others, and the legendary Lefty Frizzell had a huge hit with a song Wheeler wrote called
"Run 'Em Off." In the '70s and '80s, Wheeler lived in Nashville and performed regularly at
the city's iconic Grand Ole Opry. There's probably no better way for a true-blue country music lifer
to go out than while performing at the Opry, which is what Wheeler did. While recording the Reverend
Jimmie Snow's radio show Grand Ole Gospel Time in 1984, Wheeler suffered a fatal heart attack.
Mike Scaccia
Mike Scaccia and his guitar stood at the forefront of two innovative sub-genres of
hard rock that exploded in the 1980s: thrash metal and industrial metal. As far as the former goes,
he founded the band Rigor Mortis in 1983, and for the latter, he joined Ministry in 1989,
invited by band leader Al Jourgensen after the band moved from synth-pop to a hard-charging,
guitar-heavy electronic-influenced style.
"His visual was bringing my heavy guitar into his synth-pop sound and combining it with samples."
As Ministry's main guitarist, he appeared on the band's best-selling album, Psalm 69: The Way to
Succeed and the Way to Suck Eggs and its two best known songs: "Jesus Built My Hotrod" and "N.W.O."
Scaccia never forgot Rigor Mortis, however, and on December 22, 2012, he played at the Rail Club
in Fort Worth, Texas, as part of a 50th birthday party for the band's singer, Bruce Corbitt. While
Scaccia was performing, he suddenly collapsed. According to a medical examiner's report,
the 47-year-old guitarist died of a sudden heart attack triggered by heart disease.
Morphine was one of the most unique alternative rock bands of the '90s,
which is to say their music was challenging and unsettling. That's due in large part to singer and
bass player Mark Sandman, who pioneered a slow, droning playing style, which added a spooky and
unnerving element to Morphine's tunes. Morphine was performing at a music festival outside Rome in
1999 when the 46-year-old suddenly stopped playing and fell to the ground. A few minutes later while
in an ambulance en route to a hospital, he was pronounced dead. He had suffered a heart attack.
In the early 20th century, Louis Vierne held the most prestigious job possible for a professional
church organist: resident organist at the legendary Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.
Despite drawing crowds that wanted to hear Vierne's otherworldly organ work, particularly on
his own compositions, the Catholic Church clergy that ran Notre-Dame decided in 1937 to discontinue
all organ recitals. They at least let Vierne play for the people one final time, on June 2, 1937.
About 3,000 people amassed for Vierne's last concert at Notre-Dame,
which turned out to be his last concert ever. After playing an original piece,
he said to his assistant standing nearby, quote, "I'm going to be ill."
He then played one low, continuous note and didn't stop. He'd died of a heart attack.
Operas are full of sad, dramatic, even tragic moments. Baritone Leonard Warren,
one of the most famous American opera singers of all time,
added to opera's inherent darkness, not to mention its lore, by dying on stage. In March 1960,
Warren was singing the role of Don Carlo in the opera La Forza del Destino by the Italian
composer Giuseppe Verdi . At about 10 p.m., Warren's voice and body gave out. He fell to
the stage floor of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City immediately after finishing the aria
"Urna fatale del mio destino," which translates appropriately to "fatal urn of my destiny."
Less than half an hour later, the singer was pronounced dead. He was initially thought to
have died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage, but it was later found to be a heart attack.
Alan Marshal, a theatrically trained actor from Australia, put together a solid career in the
1930s and '40s as a character actor and supporting player. He specialized in playing villains,
soldiers, and the not-quite-right-for-her-guy that the main female character is with
at the beginning of the movie before leaving him to be with her true love.
"Let's sneak out.”
“Why?”
“Nora Hunter.”
“Nora Hunter?"
Marshal stayed true to his theatrical roots, performing in plays throughout
his career. In fact, his final role would be on stage. Marshal co-starred in Sextette,
a sexy farce written by and starring silver screen star Mae West. The 52-year-old actor
was delighting an audience in Chicago up when he collapsed from a heart attack.
In 1951, famed pianist Simon Barere
sat in front of his instrument before a massive audience at Carnegie Hall.
Barere was a featured musician performing for the first time with the Philadelphia Orchestra.
His playing was masterful, as usual, for the first two minutes and change of the concerto. That's
when audience members noticed Barere's tempo growing inconsistent, which is to say nothing
of the sour notes. Barere's missteps subsided when he stopped playing entirely and slumped forward,
rolled off the bench and hit the floor. A doctor ran up and helped carry Barere backstage. After
half an hour of resuscitation attempts, Barere, 54, was pronounced dead, evidently from a stroke.
While they recorded a slew of well-received albums on major labels, the Beat Farmers were
regarded as one of the best bar bands in the world, performing at whatever intimate venue
would take them. They were a definitive band of the 1980s "cowpunk" scene, combining countrified
roots rock with a punk attitude. Country Dick Montana, who usually sat behind the drum kit,
formed the band in 1983 after playing with some other bands and running a San Diego record store.
Country Dick was an imposing presence in a cowboy hat and a duster, and he'd usually take the mic
for at least one song per show — often a quirky novelty song about the delights of drinking.
On November 8, 1995, Montana and the Beat Farmers played in front of a packed house
at the Longhorn Saloon in Whistler, British Columbia. At the end of the song "The Girl
I Almost Married," Montana collapsed onto the drums. Road manager Tom Ames ran onto
the stage and helped Montana to the ground. By the time paramedics arrived a few minutes later,
40-year-old Country Dick was dead from what was later ruled to be an acute aneurysm.
Johnny Watson was so skilled at playing his instrument — and in so many different ways — that
his nickname was literally "Guitar." After testing out the blues scene as a teenage piano player in
Houston, he switched to guitar in the 1950s and started grinding out influential electric blues
classics and climbed the R&B charts with hits like "Those Lonely, Lonely Nights,"
"Mercy, Mercy, Mercy," and "Cuttin' In." Watson reinvented himself in the 1970s as
one of the best and earliest purveyors of the genre of music that would be known as funk.
Also a '70s style icon, with his wide-brimmed hats, flashy jewelry, and giant sunglasses,
Watson brought funk to the masses with groovy, soulful, guitar-powered tunes
like "Superman Lover," "A Real Mother for Ya," and "Love Jones." Always an innovator,
Watson's 1980 single "Telephone Bill" is among the first-ever rap songs.
Watson, who'd slowed down his career pace since the early '80s,
toured in 1996, and on May 17 of that year, he played a gig in Yokohama,
Japan. Shortly after taking the stage and delivering some stage chatter in Japanese,
Watson collapsed and died from what was later determined to be a heart attack. He was 61.