From clever quips to renouncements of faith, we count the incredible dying words of sixty
people!
60 Sir Winston Churchill was a celebrated writer
and politician who twice served as the UK’s Prime Minister.
He died in 1965, with his health deteriorating after a stroke.
Seems he was ready to go, though; his last words were: ‘I’m bored with it all.’
59 Pancho Villa was a Mexican political–military
leader and viva la revolutionist!
In 1923, he was gunned down in his vehicle during a banking trip to Parral.
His dying words were: ‘Don't let it end like this.
Tell them I said something.’
58 Emily Dickinson was a celebrated American
poet who lived a life of seclusion.
She died in 1886 after being bedridden for months.
Her last words were: ‘I must go in, for the fog is rising.’
Her many cats purred in acknowledgement.
57 Carl Panzram was an American serial killer,
rapist, arsonist and burglar who was sentenced to execution in 1930.
With his final words, Panzram chose to mock his executioner: ‘Hurry it up, you Hoosier
bastard!
I could hang a dozen men while you're screwing around.’
56 Bessie Smith was a popular American blues
singer.
During her run, she influenced many jazz vocalists and earned the nickname The Empress of the
Blues.
Bessie died affirming her devotion to the big man upstairs.
‘I’m going,’ she said, ‘but I’m going in the name of the Lord.’
55 Joan Crawford was an Oscar-winning American
film and television actress.
Apparently she was not on speaking terms with her maker, as she reportedly died in 1977
while yelling at her praying housekeeper.
Her final words were: ‘Damn it!
Don’t you dare ask God to help me!’
54 Wilson Mizner was a famous raconteur, entrepreneur,
and a successful playwright.
He died in 1933.
While Mizner was on his deathbed, an attending priest said, ‘I’m sure you want to talk
to me.’
To which Mizner replied: ‘Why should I talk to you?
I’ve just been talking to your boss.’
53 Oscar Odd McIntyre was a famed American newspaper
columnist who died in 1938, aged fifty-three.
His last words were said to his wife, Maybelle: ‘Snooks, will you please turn this way?
I like to look at your face.’
52 Ethan Allen was an American Revolutionary
War patriot and politician.
He died in 1789, hours after suffering an apoplectic fit during a routine business trip.
An attending physician attempted to comfort him, saying: ‘General, I fear the angels
are waiting for you.’
‘Waiting are they?’
Allen replied.
‘Well, let ’em wait.’
51 Charlie Chaplin was a legendary comic actor
and silent film star, who died in bed in 1977.
An attending priest said ‘May the Lord have mercy on your soul.’
To which he replied: ‘Why not?
After all, it belongs to him.’
50 Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Eugene O’Neill
was born in the Broadway Hotel.
He died at age sixty-five in a Boston hotel, and acknowledged this peculiarity with the
following dying words: ‘I knew it!
I knew it!
Born in a hotel room and, goddamn it, dying in a hotel room.’
49 Johnny Ace was an American R&B singer who
released a string of hit singles in the 1950s.
He died in 1954 of a self-inflicted gun wound during one of his concerts.
His last words were: ‘I’ll show you that it won’t shoot.’
48 Louise-Marie-Thérèse de Saint Maurice Comtesse
de Vercellis’s dying wish was to be free of the confines of being a lady.
She let one rip while dying, then said: ‘Good.
A woman who can fart is not dead.’
47 Jimmy L. Glass was a convicted murderer who
was sentenced to die by electrocution on June 12, 1987 in Louisiana.
After a failed escape attempt, Glass uttered these smart-allecky last words while seated
on an electric chair: ‘I’d rather be fishing.’
46 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian communist
revolutionary, politician and political theorist.
It’s thought the cause of Lenin’s death was syphilis.
His last words were: ‘Good dog,’ which he said to a dog that had brought him a dead
bird.
45 Leonardo da Vinci was a hugely influential
fifteenth-century artist who died in 1519.
Despite painting the legendary Mona Lisa, Da Vinci did not think too highly of his own
abilities.
His dying words were: ‘I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach
the quality it should have.’
44 Jessica Dubroff was a seven-year-old pilot
whose final words – ‘Do you hear the rain?
Do you hear the rain?’ – were uttered over the phone to her mother as she ran her
own single-engine propeller aircraft somewhere in Cheyenne, USA.
The plane had suffered an engine breakdown seconds after takeoff.
On that fateful morning in 1996, the young pilot, her father and her instructor died
on board.
43 Mary Elizabeth Jenkins Surratt was the first
woman to be executed by the military tribunal of the federal government of the United States.
She was found to be involved in an assassination conspiracy against the late US president Abraham
Lincoln and uttered these last words during her 1865 public execution: ‘Please don’t
let me fall.’
42 Jane Dornacker was an American actress and
rock musician.
In 1986, she was giving a live traffic report for a national radio station when her helicopter
plunged into the Hudson River.
Her listeners heard her say ‘hit the water, hit the water, hit the water!’
before a loud crash signalled the celebrity’s instantaneous death.
41 Belinda Emmett was an Australian actress and
singer, and the first wife of popular TV presenter Rove McManus.
She was a breast cancer sufferer and had her last conversation with her sister while suffering
severe stroke-like symptoms.
Seeing that her sister was weeping beside her, Emmett asked ‘Are you all right?’
40 Joan Crawford enjoyed a career as a highly
regarded movie actress until being diagnosed with cancer in her seventies.
She had been bedridden for years and had refused to seek medical care for herself.
On May 1977, the nurses who took care of her realised she was already dying and offered
a soft prayer.
The movie star saw them praying and said these dying words: ‘Don’t you dare ask God to
help me.’
39 Richard B. Mellon was the multimillionaire
President of Alcoa.
He and his brother had an interesting family ritual: they’d been playing Tag for seven
decades.
When Richard was on his deathbed, he called his brother over and whispered: ‘Last tag.’
Andrew remained ‘It’ for four years, until he also died.
38 Julian was a Roman emperor and Constantine
descendant who died during the Battle of Samarra in Maranga while trying to quash the original
endorsement to Christianity of the Roman Empire.
His dying words, said during the heat of battle, were: ‘You have won, O Galilean.’
37 Donald O’Connor was a singer, dancer, and
actor, and hosted the Academy Awards in 1954.
He died at age seventy-eight, with his family gathered around him.
Before passing, he joked: ‘I’d like to thank the Academy for my lifetime achievement
award that I will eventually get.’
He still hasn’t gotten one.
36 At the peak of the French Revolution, Queen
Marie Antoinette was convicted of treason and sentenced to die by guillotine with her
husband, King Louis XVI of France.
Riding a cart, she was taken through the streets of Paris and mocked until she and King Louis
XVI were finally brought to the guillotine site.
While she was already on the scaffold seconds before her death, she unintentionally stepped
on the foot of her executioner and decorously uttered these words of pardon: ‘Pardon me,
Sir, I did not do it on purpose.’
35 Humphrey Bogart was a distinguished Hollywood
actor whose health deteriorated when he was diagnosed with a malignancy in his esophageus
sometime in 1956.
On his deathbed, he called his wife and children in to bid them goodbye and uttered these witty
last words: ‘I should have never switched from Scotch to Martinis’.
34 Louisa May Alcott was an American novelist
who suffered from an unknown illness.
On her deathbed, she uttered: ‘Is it not meningitis?’
believing this to be the cause of her illness.
When she died, the cause of death was discovered to be mercury poisoning, which she acquired
years earlier while being treated for typhoid fever.
33 Eric Arthur Blair – better known by his
penname George Orwell – was the famed English writer of 1984 and Animal Farm.
He died of a burst artery in 1950.
While his last spoken words are unknown, his last written words were: ‘At fifty, everyone
has the face he deserves.’
32 Aleister Crowley was an English writer, occultist
and ceremonial magician.
He founded the religion and philosophy Thelema, and was the group’s self-identified and
totally legitimate prophet.
In 1947, he died in the throes of a heroin addiction, proclaiming these drug-induced
final words: ‘I am perplexed!
Satan, get out!’
31 Major John Andre was a British Army officer
who was hanged as a spy by the Continental Army during the American Revolution.
Moments before he was hanged, Andre pronounced these last words: ‘I pray you to bear me
witness that I meet my fate like a brave man’.
30 Thomas J. Grasso was convicted of murdering
two elderly citizens.
His eventual sentence was death by lethal injection, and his dying words were spent
complaining about his last meal.
‘I did not get my Spaghetti-O’s,’ he said.
‘I got spaghetti.
I want the press to know this.’
29 Sir James Matthew Barrie was the famed Scottish
author of Peter Pan.
He died of pneumonia in 1937, on the top floor of London’s Adephi Terrace House.
His final, tragic words were: ‘I can’t sleep.’
28 Ernest Hemingway was a hard-drinking, influential
American writer.
He was diagnosed in 1961 with the genetic disease hemochromatosis, which caused mental
and physical deterioration, ultimately leading him to commit suicide that same year.
His final words were spoken to his wife, Mary.
They were: ‘Goodnight, my kitten.’
27 John F. Kennedy was the much-loved 35th President
of the United States.
He was murdered in 1963 in one of history’s most contentious assassination plots.
JFK’s last words were: ‘No, you certainly can’t’, which he said in response to a
remark made by the wife of then-Governor John Connelly: ‘You certainly cannot say that
the people of Dallas haven’t given you a nice welcome, Mr. President.’
26 Charles Gussman was a writer and TV announcer.
He wrote a number of successful radio serials and the pilot episode of Days of Our Lives.
He died of failing at age eighty-seven.
In his final moments, his daughter reminded him of his wish to depart with memorable last
words.
Gussman gently removed his oxygen mask and whispered: ‘And now for a final word from
our sponsor …’
25 Thomas B. Moran was a pickpocket known by
the nickname ‘Butterfingers’ because he could ‘slide in and out of a pocket like
pure butter’.
In his lifetime, Moran reportedly stole as many as 50,000 wallets.
He died in Miami in 1971.
His last words were: ‘I’ve never forgiven that smart-alecky reporter who named me Butterfingers.
To me, it’s not funny.’
24 Alfred Hitchcock was one of the most influential
filmmakers of all time.
He died of renal failure at age eighty in his Bel Air home.
Hitchcock rejected the offer for a priest.
His dying words were: ‘One never knows the ending.
One has to die to know exactly what happens after death, although Catholics have their
hopes.’
23 Jack Soo was an actor on the TV series Barney
Miller.
The series featured a running gag where Soo’s character made crappy coffee.
Soo himself went on to develop cancer of the oesophagus.
When he was wheeled into an operating room, he joked to a co-star that: ‘It must have
been the coffee.’
In a tribute episode, cast members raised their coffee cups in Soo’s memory.
22 Elvis Presley was a film star and rock music
icon.
He was plagued with health problems in his later life which, coupled with a punishing
tour schedule and addiction to prescription medication, led to his premature death in
1977 at age forty-two.
During a sleepless night, Presley told his wife that he was ‘going to the bathroom
to read.’
It’s possible he meant the big bathroom in the sky.
21 One of the greatest warriors of all time,
Alexander the Great was asked moments before his death who he thought should succeed him
as commander of his empire.
It was an appropriate question, as Alexander the Great had no heir.
With his barely audible voice, the great fighter uttered these final words: ‘To the strongest’.