John Belushi lived a short but eventful life filled with both overwhelming success and
heartbreaking tragedy. This is the tragic real-life story of John Belushi.
Born January 24, 1949, John Adam Belushi was the eldest son of Albanian immigrants Adam
and Agnes Belushi. He was raised in suburban Wheaton, Illinois, 25 miles west of Chicago.
His parents' refusal to Americanize their lives left him feeling like an outsider, and
his father expected him to take over the family business. Determined to blaze his own career
path, Belushi repeatedly turned down the offer.
In high school, Belushi threw himself into the social scene. He was co-captain of the
football team, a gifted athlete nicknamed "Killer Belushi," and was elected homecoming
king his senior year. But he ended up turning down a football scholarship to pursue life
as a performer after discovering a passion for acting and comedy.
Although John Belushi may have found his destiny in improvisational theater, he still struggled
to find his way academically after high school. He bounced around from college to college,
before eventually making his way to Chicago to pursue performing.
Still chasing comedy stardom, he formed his own improvisational troupe called the West
Compass Trio. However, his enthusiasm for Second City's bits nearly landed him in hot
water with the Chicago improv group, as he also tended to copy them. Second City considered
legal action against Belushi, but they were also dazzled by his talent. So, they hired
him as a performer instead. At 22, he was the youngest performer ever admitted into
the troupe. Working alongside future comedy giants like Joe Flaherty, Brian Doyle-Murray,
and Harold Ramis, Belushi made an impression on the Second City veterans.
Once he made it to Second City, Belushi immediately established himself as a performer of surprising
depth. Ramis would later recall that Belushi's fearlessness onstage impressed even him. Belushi's
characters were larger than life, an indication of a certain degree of inner turmoil that
would plague him later, but he was also capable of surprising softness. Those who knew him
would later recall, for example, that if his cat fell asleep on his lap, Belushi was more
likely to be late for rehearsal than wake the cat up so he could leave.
While with Second City, he accepted a job alongside future Saturday Night Live castmate
Chevy Chase and comedian Christopher Guest in National Lampoon's musical revue Lemmings.
A sendup of the Woodstock music festival, Belushi's uncanny Joe Cocker impression made
him a shoo-in. However, his sensitive nature and easily bruised emotions kept him on the
outside. Belushi's widow Judith Belushi-Pisano writes in her 2005 book Belushi: A Biography
that National Lampoon was "something of a battle for him." Chase and Guest had what
Belushi's widow called a "put-down" style of humor, which made him perfect fodder for
their jokes. Belushi was an easy target, and he wasn't always willing to laugh along.
Although John Belushi is now considered virtually synonymous with Saturday Night Live's classic
era because of his roster of unforgettable characters and sketches, show creator Lorne Michaels initially rejected him.
"Here at Saturday Night Live we have a tradition that the show is always opened with the words
'Live, from New York, it's…' well, you know the rest."
According to Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, Michaels didn't want
the brash, outspoken comic despite enthusiastic recommendations from SNL cast member Chevy
Chase and writer Michael O'Donoghue. Bearded and clad in a T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers,
Belushi was a whirling dervish of strong opinions, none of which impressed Michaels. The young
comic left with no commitment from Michaels, who suggested he shave and come to the open auditions.
Feeling somewhat insulted by the prospect of auditioning, the Second City and National
Lampoon veteran relented. Performing his notorious samurai pool shark hustler routine, Belushi
blew Michaels away. Still, his position on the show wasn't guaranteed, as Michaels still
considered him too brash and too loud and feared his intimidating style would harm the
show's carefully constructed balance of performers. Narrowly beating out Bill Murray, who would
wind up joining the cast after Chevy Chase's departure, Belushi made the cut, signing his
contract a mere 15 minutes before Saturday Night Live's first episode hit the air.
The bad blood between Saturday Night Live's first-season breakout star Chevy Chase and
the rest of the "Not Ready For Prime Time Players" has become the stuff of showbiz legend.
Belushi found both Chase's success, and the resulting inflation of Chase's ego, especially
hard. Friendly rivals since their days at National Lampoon, Belushi and Chase's once
congenial relationship often degenerated from petty sniping to outright animosity following
Chase's sudden stardom. Belushi never missed the opportunity to remind Chase that Belushi's
performance was the critical hit of Lemmings, or that he had beaten Chase in his bid to
become National Lampoon Radio Hour's creative director. Chase, in turn, publicly claimed
that he had taught Belushi how to eat with a fork.
As Chase's celebrity grew, so did Belushi's contempt for him and the show. Believing Chase
to be an inferior talent, Belushi's envy and anger reached a boiling point, as he longed for the kind of stardom his co-star got.
As Saturday Night Live entered its third season in the fall of 1977, John Belushi scored his
first film role in Animal House. Directed by John Landis, who would also work with Belushi
in 1980's The Blues Brothers, Animal House is a down-and-dirty comedy about the misadventures
of a college fraternity and their endless battle against authority at the fictional
Faber College. An ensemble piece filled with broad slapstick, it was the perfect cinematic vehicle for Belushi's skills.
"I'm a zit. Get it?"
Shot on location in Eugene, Oregon, Animal House required Belushi to maintain a nearly
impossible schedule. Not willing to sacrifice his hard-fought success on Saturday Night
Live, the comedian chose to make the long flight from New York to Oregon every few days,
balancing SNL's rehearsals with film shoots. In a 2019 article in The Guardian, director
Landis described Belushi as "exhausted" but nonetheless "terrific" in the film. To keep
focused and sober, Belushi stayed in a private home away from the rest of the film's cast,
who partied nearly as hard as their onscreen Delta House counterparts.
John Belushi's next film projects didn't fare as well as his debut. After Animal House,
Belushi had a small role in the poorly received 1978 Jack Nicholson comedy-Western Goin' South.
However, his next project, the big-budget World War II comedy 1941 directed by Steven
Spielberg, would be a disappointment with both critics and audiences. A rare flop for
Spielberg, who was hot off the back-to-back successes of Jaws and Close Encounters of
the Third Kind, 1941 seemed to value spectacle over story and characterization. Critics weren't
impressed, and audiences didn't show up.
In addition to the film's poor reception, Belushi's drug habit was spiraling out of
control. Bob Gale, the co-writer of 1941, later recalled that Belushi's cocaine habit
got worse during the making of the film. Belushi could still turn his magic on when it came
time to film, but he often looked "horrible" when he arrived on set.
John Belushi's final year at Saturday Night Live marked a turn for the worse for the comedy's
star's drug use. Throughout the 1978-79 season, Belushi maintained a rigorous filming schedule.
Much as he'd done during the filming of Animal House, he flew from New York to Los Angeles
weekly to complete work on 1941 and keep his commitment to SNL. Unlike Animal House, however,
Belushi had a much larger role and relied on cocaine extensively to maintain his energy.
Despite his increasingly erratic behavior on set, SNL insiders were content to turn
a blind eye to Belushi's problem as long as he kept up the quality of his work. Even amid
the problems on SNL, Belushi kept pushing his career. His next project was The Blues
Brothers, a feature-length adaptation of the musical comedy characters he developed on
SNL with Dan Aykroyd. The film, featuring musical performances from legends like Aretha
Franklin and James Brown, was the hit Belushi longed for, but the making of it also led to even deeper drug use.
John Belushi's reliance on cocaine became an all-consuming problem on the set of 1980's
The Blues Brothers, with his addiction frequently jeopardizing the production. According to
a December 2012 Vanity Fair article chronicling the making of the film, Belushi was aware
that he had a serious problem and briefly considered entering rehab but instead chose
to continue work on the film. Belushi insisted to his wife that he was fine, and was determined
not to slow down until the movie was finished. His decision likely worsened his addiction.
Director John Landis, concerned for both his star and the fate of his film, attempted to
intervene, but his attempts were thwarted by Belushi and his enablers. A desperate Landis
once begged actress Carrie Fisher, who had her own history of addiction, to stop Belushi if she ever saw him with drugs.
Dan Aykroyd later recalled that Belushi's habit was so bad that The Blues Brothers had
an actual budget devoted to cocaine to keep its star engaged on night shoots. Imbuing
Belushi with a near-superhuman stamina, the drug's aftermath caused frequent delays, pushing
the film off schedule and over budget. Staunchly anti-drug and drink, director Landis described
The Blues Brothers as a battle to keep Belushi alive and keep him working on the movie.
Despite the success of The Blues Brothers, Belushi found his options in Hollywood rapidly
narrowing. Though he'd had some hit movies, he'd also developed a reputation for excess
that made filmmakers nervous. The comic's behavior was a known factor in driving The
Blues Brothers over its already large budget, and Belushi was rapidly becoming too great a risk for filmmakers to take.
Fearing for both his career and his life, Belushi got clean and sober, lost weight,
and dove headlong into uncharted territory as a leading man in Continental Divide.
"This is where you belong."
In the film, Belushi stars as a big-city newspaper reporter who's sent to the Rocky Mountains
to write a story about Dr. Nell Porter, portrayed by actress Blair Brown, a scientist studying
bald eagles. A romantic, fish-out-of-water story, Continental Divide is devoid of Belushi's
typical lowbrow antics, featuring a more nuanced side of his talents.
The film received some good notices but failed to find an audience.
Sadly, Belushi's next film, Neighbors, would be his last. Sadder still, it was an unmitigated
disaster that found the comedian and his Blues Brothers partner Dan Aykroyd both playing
against type with an incomprehensible mess of a script. Belushi clashed frequently with
the director, and Neighbors ultimately went down as a flop.
On February 28, 1982, an exhausted John Belushi checked into the Chateau Marmont in Hollywood
to work on the script for a project he hoped would be his next hit. Checking into his favorite
bungalow, the former SNL star was in an obvious state of physical and mental distress. Along
with his runaway cocaine use, he had also begun using heroin, ostensibly as "research"
for a project on punk rock he was developing.
Wife Judith and best friend Dan Aykroyd attempted to bring Belushi out of his deadly descent,
to no avail. On the morning of March 5, 1982, Belushi's lifeless body was discovered by
his trainer, martial artist Bill Wallace. Though the exact timeline of the night of
his death was foggy, a woman named Cathy Smith later admitted to injecting Belushi with a
combination of cocaine and heroin commonly known as a "speedball." The resulting overdose
killed the already weakened Belushi. He was only 33 years old. Smith was charged with
first-degree murder, which was later reduced to involuntary manslaughter in a plea bargain.
She ultimately served 15 months in prison for her role in Belushi's death.
If you or someone you know is struggling with addiction, please call the Substance Abuse
and Mental Health Administration's 24/7 National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP. That's 1-800-662-4357.