Actors Who Died On Set

On his classic 1970s sitcom Sanford and Son, Redd Foxx often did a memorable bit where he'd end a conversation or get his way by faking a heart attack. "This is the big one, Elizabeth," Foxx, as his character, Fred Sanford, would shout to the screaming laughter of the studio audience, calling out to his long-deceased wife that he was about to join her. 

Foxx brought the bit out of retirement when he returned to television in 1991 with a sitcom called The Royal Family. He portrayed a soon-to-retire mailman opposite Della Reese as his wife, whose quiet life gets turned upside down when their daughter and her kids move into their home. Okay, well Foxx didn't bring the "big one" routine into the show, per se; he just did something similar on the set one day during a rehearsal. According to production spokeswoman Rachel McCallister, Foxx and his co-stars were "clowning around, and Redd was sort of breaking people up when he collapsed. ... They all thought he was joking at first." 

He wasn't. Foxx didn't move, and somebody called paramedics. Four hours later, he died at age 68 of a heart attack at Queen of Angels-Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center.

While he had a successful film career with roles in movies like Sling Blade and Bad Santa, John Ritter will forever rank among our most beloved and successful TV actors. His extreme likability and physical comedy gifts helped elevate Three's Company (1977–1984) from titillating cheese to classic sitcom, and his big return to TV in 2002 as the star of 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter was one of the biggest entertainment stories of the year. Ritter played a suburban dad uneasy with his children growing up. ABC renewed it for a second season, and production was underway in September 2003 when Ritter suddenly fell ill on the set, feeling woozy and nauseated while complaining of chest pains. Ritter checked in to Burbank's Providence St. Joseph Medical Center, where doctors treated him for what they initially thought was a heart attack. But after standard treatments didn't improve Ritter's condition, further tests and examination revealed a previously undiagnosed aortic dissection. That can be a fatal issue if blood flow is interrupted to the coronary arteries or if one of those arteries rupture. And that's what happened to Ritter, who was just 54 years old.

Tommy Cooper was a British entertainer who combined corny jokes, prop comedy, and magic for an act that was beloved throughout the U.K. for decades. In April 1984, Cooper appeared on Live from Her Majesty's, a variety show originating from London's Her Majesty's Theatre which was, unfortunately, broadcast live to viewers. Cooper's performance began with the comedian doing an old chestnut: his "magic cloak skit," which involved him wearing a huge gown from which he'd produce increasingly larger objects that were passed to him through a curtain. According to Live from Her Majesty's Host Jimmy Tarbuck, the bit was supposed to conclude with Tarbuck popping out from the curtain and handing a ladder to Cooper because it was too big to go through the dress. 

It actually ended with a bit more finality. Tarbuck, and many viewers as it stands to reason, thought Cooper was improvising when after a female "lovely assistant" came onto the stage, he fell hard onto the ground. He wasn't comically overwhelmed with lust — he'd suffered a heart attack on TV. The show's director cut to a commercial, preventing the home audience from seeing Cooper's lifeless body pulled backstage. Cooper was rushed to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead at age 63. 

You've probably never heard of early film actress Martha Mansfield. She never evolved into the huge star she could very well have become...because her bizarre, premature death doomed her to lists like this one. On Thanksgiving Day 1923, 23-year-old Mansfield filmed her last scenes for The Warrens of Virginia, a Civil War-set romance about a Union soldier who falls in love with a southern woman. (Wilfred Lytell played the soldier; Mansfield the southerner.) She celebrated the end of the shoot by hanging out in a car on the set with some friends and co-workers. One member of her party lit a match, and the flame immediately found its way to the flimsy fabric of Mansfield's costume. It instantly engulfed her in fire, but Lytell jumped into action, throwing his overcoat onto Mansfield, which put out the fire (and limited the burns) on her neck and face. The coat wasn't enough to put out the fire entirely. She was rushed to a nearby hospital, but the damage was done. Mansfield died from the result of severe burns over much of her body.

Vic Morrow was all over TV in the 1950s and '60s when Westerns and action shows dominated. He appeared on shows like The Rifleman, Bonanza, and from 1962 to 1967, starred on Combat! as Sgt. Chip Saunders. It's fitting, then, that a major figure from 1960s television would star in a film based on a TV show from that decade: 1983's The Twilight Zone: The Movie. 

The film consisted of three chapters — two remakes of old Twilight Zone episodes and one original, "Time Out," written and directed by John Landis and starring Morrow. He played Bill Connor, a racist who rants about such feelings in a bar one night before stumbling into the night and facing a series of horrors. He's suddenly in Nazi Germany, where he's chased by SS officers who think he's a Jewish man, then he winds up in Jim Crow-era South, perceived as a Black man. Then his living nightmare becomes the Vietnam War, where he's a Viet Cong operative pursued by American troops. That sequence required Morrow's character to carry two children through a swamp during a helicopter bombing of their village. An accident on the set during the shoot killed child actors Renee Chen and Myca Dinh Lee, as well as Morrow; Landis and four other crew members stood trial for involuntary manslaughter, but were ultimately acquitted.

As one of the most dominant and popular comic actors of the 1980s and early 1990s, John Candy compiled an impressive resume of terrific films in a movie resume that would only last about 15 years. Candy was a big part of why Stripes, Splash, Spaceballs, Uncle Buck, Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Home Alone, and Cool Runnings connected so strongly with audiences. In 1994, Candy headed to the Durango, Mexico, area to film Wagons East, a Western comedy in which he portrayed James Harlow, a wagon master tasked with transporting a group of miserable settlers away from the wild 1860s frontier and back to their cozy homes in the eastern U.S. 

Wagons East would prove a box office bomb (a $4.4 million take) and critical failure (0 percent on Rotten Tomatoes), but far more tragic is that it was the last movie Candy would ever make. According to People, on March 4, 1994, Candy filmed his last scene for the movie; to celebrate, he cooked a late-night dinner for his assistants, then phoned his two young kids back home in Los Angeles to say goodnight. Then the actor headed to bed, and sometime during the night, he suffered a heart attack in his sleep, passing away at the age of 43.

English performer Roy Kinnear is the very definition of a character actor. A reliable and constant comic, dramatic, and voice performer, Kinnear appeared in more than 160 projects in a career that spanned more than 30 years. He's probably best known for his role as Mr. Salt, doting and beleaguered father of bratty Veruca Salt, in 1971's Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and as flunkey Planchet in the 1973 blockbuster adaptation of The Three Musketeers. Kinnear reprised the role more than 15 years later for The Return of the Musketeers, and it was on the set of that movie where he endured a startling injury that would lead to the end of his life. While shooting on location in Toledo, Spain, in September 1988, the 54-year-old actor fell off a horse. Transported to Ruber International Hospital in Madrid, Kinnear was treated for a broken pelvis, and he was still under doctors' care when he suffered a fatal heart attack the following day. Filmmakers had almost completed principal photography at the time of the accident, and The Return of the Musketeers hit movie theaters in 1989, bearing a dedication to Kinnear.