When Rutger Hauer spoke his famous last words, “time to die,” in the original Blade Runner movie, he might well have added … “again?!” Hauer was to die in character 46 times across his 50-year career. This makes him the 19th most killable screen actor, despite dying only half as often as the all-time number one Danny Trejo — as Bored Panda’s new research reveals.

The Actors Who Have Died the Most in Their Careers

The 20 actors who have died the most on-screen have three things in common: they’re mostly character actors (or play eccentric leading roles), they mostly appear in genre movies and they’re all men.

Out in front by 11 fictional corpses is Danny Trejo, whose characters have died 93 times. Trejo faced down death for real before he ever appeared on-screen: locked up for a “gas-chamber offence” in 1968, his could’ve-been last words were, “God, if you’re there, everything will turn out the way it’s supposed to. If you’re not, I’m fucked.” The charges were dropped.

Years later, he was recognized for doing off-screen work on a film set by Eddie Bunker — the ex-con and writer best known as Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs — who knew him from jail. Bunker hired Trejo to teach the film’s lead actor to box, and he also got his first (non-fatal) acting role in the movie. Trejo has since been ‘killed’ by such stars as Robert de Niro, Chow Yun-Fat and Mickey Rourke, and several times by exposure to sunlight.

Hollywood is a small town. That actor that Trejo taught to box was Eric Roberts, who would go on to become the fifth most dead person in cinema history. He first died by his own hand as real-life suicide-murderer Paul Snider in Star 80 (1983) and would later play identical twins, with one Eric shooting the other Eric. Roberts has also been burned to death with acid by a Dilophosaurus.

Trejo and Roberts are so killable that they actually killed each other in the shootout of Death on the Border (2023). It was, perhaps, inevitable.

Narrowing down the search to movie deaths only (below), a few more new contenders enter the ring of doom: Hideo Murota, Boris Karloff, Fui-On Shing and Klaus Kinski are among the actors who make it to the top 20 by big-screen appearances alone.

Hideo Murota broke into Japanese cinema during a golden age of genre gangster movies. Along with some imaginatively convoluted yakuza deaths, he also managed some weird supernatural stuff. In A Haunted Turkish Bathhouse (1975), for example, he died after “having his eyes gauged out by a ghost, he burns alive when the building he is in burns down and causes the ceiling to fall on him” — a bad day whatever genre you’re in. Hong Kong character actor Shing Fui-On also makes the grade, thanks to Hong Kong’s shoot-em-up boom of the 1980s and ‘90s.

The Female Actors Who Have Died the Most in Their Careers

Look at it as an encouraging survival rate or lack of chances for female actors to express their full range on screen: no actresses make it to our top 20 dead actors (above). Partly, this is due to men having more roles than women. In 2023, 77% of the top films had more male than female characters in speaking roles. There are more chances for a male actor to die, especially when their characters tend to be more violent.

In fact, the female actor who has died most often on screen — the legendary Shelley Winters — died in character just 25 times, barely half the 46 deaths of the actors at the bottom of the actors’ top 20 (Tom Sizemore, Rutger Hauer and David Carradine). Winters died in adaptations of some of the 20th century’s literary masterpieces, including The Great Gatsby (1949), Lolita (1962) and — uh — The Poseidon Adventure (1972). She also played the Aunt Roo who got slew in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971).

The female actors on our list are more conventionally ‘respectable’ than the actors who dominated our first list, who tended towards genre work. Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep and Vanessa Redgrave are among several female Oscar winners, while none of the men listed above have an Academy Award for acting.

Vanessa Redgrave is something of a neck-death specialist, dying from a broken neck or various forms of decapitation across multiple films. However, she has also died more respectably from old age or illness across others, such as Howards End (1992).

The Modern Actors Who Have Died the Most in Their Careers

A long life in the movies offers the opportunity to die many times. Our top 20 actors and female actors above are mostly of older generations, active across the latter half of the 20th century. To better diagnose life and death on the screen today, we narrowed our analysis to the 400 current most trending actors on IMDb.

Bruce Willis is the modern actor who has died the most on screen: some 38 times, starting with an episode of Miami Vice — a show in which dozens of stars-to-be learned to die. Naturally, gunfire is Willis’ greatest allergy, but his death by box-cutter at the hands of his real-life wife, Demi Moore, in Mortal Thoughts (1991) is also of note.

Only one female actor is among the 20 modern actors with the most screen deaths. Jennifer Jason Leigh’s range as an actress of death is to be admired: torn in half, buried alive, executed by lethal injection (twice), death by food poisoning, and “disintegrated due to a supernatural force” — and she’s not finished yet.

The Actors Who Have Died the Most in Television Roles

Voiceover legend Clancy Brown has the most TV deaths, courtesy of having such a killably villainous voice. Brown has met his end in animated shows from Jonny Quest and Superman, Star Wars to Transformers and SpongeBob to Scooby-Doo (where he died alongside the 19th most dead TV actor, Udo Kier). You can also kill him in the video game Fallout, where he plays Rhombus.

British actor Steve Pemberton is among TV’s most killed characters, thanks mostly to just one show. Inside No. 9 is a horror anthology series in which writer-actor Pemberton played a different character every time; Cinemorgue links 19 of his 21 screen deaths to this show, in which he often died along with, or at the hands of, fellow writer Reece Shearsmith.

Another Brit, Terry Jones, challenges Pemberton’s record by dying 18 times in the same show. In this case, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. His first screen death, in 1969, occurred in a military testing field when he laughed himself to death after reading the world’s funniest joke.

The Actor with the Most Deaths Each Decade

Finally, here is a timeline of the actors with the most deaths over the past century of cinema. They tell a tale of evolving genres, from Bela Lugosi’s horror movies of the 1930s and ‘40s through Lee Van Cleef’s cowboy deaths of the 1950s to actor/stuntman Thomas Rosales Jr.’s many action movie deaths in the ‘90s and Ron Perlman’s doomed characters across the science-fiction resurgence of the 2000s.

Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi dominated over the 1930s and ‘40s with a string of ghoulish performances in genre-forming pictures for Universal Studios. He most famously played Dracula, but also died as a malign voodoo master in the first zombie movie, White Zombie (1931), and as various evil scientists.

In Lugosi’s final film, Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959), he would be killed twice — the film mostly being shot after he had died in real life.

Die Another Day

Movie actors have the luxury of dying again and again, trying to achieve the perfect death — aesthetically perfect, at least — be it the slow-motion bullet ballet or the dignified fade to black. But just because they are so resilient doesn’t mean we should take them for granted.

After all, if veteran death jockey Sean Bean can refuse to die — “I just had to cut that out and start surviving, otherwise it was all a bit predictable,” says Bean — so might Danny Trejo, Rose MacGowan and idealistic fresh meat like Robert Pattinson. This could lead more actors to challenge Keanu Reeves, Alex Winter and Max von Sydow for their record of “actors who’ve fought the Grim Reaper the most in their careers.”

Methodology

We ranked 45,324 actors on the number of times they have died in their roles in film, television, video games and music videos.

All figures were obtained from cinemorgue.fandom.com and are equivalent to 132,708 actor deaths. We removed voice actors from the final rankings and separated actors based on their number of career deaths overall, per decade and for film and television in isolation.

Lastly, we isolated the top 20 actors from the current top 400 trending actors on IMDb who have died the most in their career roles across film, TV, video games and music videos combined.

The data was collected in April 2024 and considers actor deaths in roles between 1890 and March 2024.

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