The greatest posthumous movie performances of all time

Rudolph Valentino was an Italian-born actor with a full name so long that it takes up two lines on Wikipedia. He was also a prolific star of American silent films, earning 37 credits between 1914 and 1926. His lead turn as the title character of 1921’s The Sheik made him an early Hollywood heartthrob, and he doubled down on his dashing ways in the sequel, The Son Of The Sheik.

Here, Valentino not only reprised his prior role, but also played the character’s lovelorn progeny. His performances were the soul of what the Encyclopedia Britannica has since dubbed “one of the first high-profile film sequels” in history. The actor died of peritonitis at 31, just weeks before Son Of The Sheik’s premiere. His funeral was reportedly attended by upward of 80,000 fans.

Ernst Lubitsch, arguably the greatest comedy director of early Hollywood, helmed this story of stage actors using their talent for disguise to escape Nazi-occupied Warsaw. The film was, understandably, insanely controversial upon release. The father of star Jack Benny was reportedly so dismayed over seeing his son in a Gestapo uniform that he walked out of the cinema. However, To Be Or Not To Be is today rightfully hailed as a masterpiece.

Carole Lombard played Maria Tura, the loyal but unappreciated wife and co-star of Benny’s Joseph Tura. The role would go on to be her most endearing. Tragically though, the actress died in a plane crash weeks before To Be Or Not To Be was released in February 1942. She was survived by her husband, movie icon Clark Gable.

In the span of two years, teen heartthrob turned counter-culture legend James Dean starred in three movie masterpieces: East Of Eden, Rebel Without A Cause, and Giant. Heartbreakingly though, he was only alive to see the release of one of them.

Dean died in a car crash in September 1955, just a month before Rebel was released. In his first posthumous performance, he embodied the budding youth disenfranchisement of the mid-1950s and gave angst a sexy, mainstream face. Then, in Giant, he was the central presence in this sweeping epic—no mean feat, considering his co-stars were big-screen heavyweights Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor. They’ve since become known as two magnetic epitaphs to a career and life cut all too short.

By the 1950s, Bela Lugosi had been made immortal by his portrayal of Count Dracula, yet typecasting and a drug addiction were butchering his career. It was around the same time that the man whose performances launched the Universal monster-verse entered into a bizarre professional relationship with one of the most divisive filmmakers to ever disgrace the screen, Ed Wood.

The results of this collaboration included the mediocre Glen Or Glenda? in 1953 and Bride Of The Monster in 1955. Lugosi’s final and most (in)famous run-in with Wood, though, was Plan 9 From Outer Space, screened as a preview in 1957 with a general release in 1959. In footage filmed before his 1956 death, the horror icon simply wanders about aimlessly, and is frequently filled in by a stand-in holding a cape in front of his face. Shameless stuff … but also (unintentionally) hilarious.

The Misfits is a film swimming in sadness. On a literal level, this Arthur Miller-penned Western follows an ensemble suffering through existential throes, from divorce to the ethics of animal slaughter. Moreover, behind the scenes, it was troubled by Miller’s failing marriage to lead actress Marilyn Monroe, and it faced production woes due to script rewrites and the desert heat of the production’s Nevada location.

Ultimately, this would be Monroe’s final role before she died of a drug overdose in 1962, while her co-star Clark Gable suffered a fatal heart attack just two days after shooting wrapped. Both left behind a powerful drama as their last movie, with its legacy and stature having only grown since the 1960s.

A prolific star of both Hollywood and Mexican cinema throughout the ’40s and ’50s, Pedro Armendáriz’s life ended in June 1963, when he died by suicide while battling terminal neck cancer. It’s widely speculated that the disease dated back to when he was filming The Conqueror near U.S. nuclear testing sites in Utah and Nevada.

Reportedly, Armendáriz was in great pain while filming the second James Bond movie, From Russia With Love, and only took the role to secure his family’s financial future. However, he remained a stern and charismatic presence on screen. Any hints of the suffering he was facing are not present in this blockbuster, making it arguably the most herculean performance of his (or most other actors’) entire career.

Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner is home to a hodgepodge of rom-com tropes that audiences have seen both before and since, but it’s not its narrative that makes it groundbreaking. Sidney Poitier and Katharine Houghton star as an interracial couple in a United States that was barely post-segregation, while Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn play the latter’s concerned parents. However, the pair don’t object due to race; instead, it’s the potential of the country’s still-prejudiced state making their lives hell.

Tracy, in his ninth and final role opposite his not-so-secret real-life partner Hepburn, offered a refreshingly three-dimensional take on the trope of the disapproving dad. The performance grows more impressive when you realize how ill the actor was; he died just 17 days after shooting wrapped in the summer of 1967.

If you’ve ever done an impression of a hard-boiled black-and-white movie gangster, you’ve done an impression of Edward G. Robinson, whether you know it or not. The diminutive stature and high-pitched voice of this crime film mainstay have transcended pop culture. Yet his final role placed him in the world of dystopian sci-fi.

In the perennially underrated Soylent Green, Robinson played Sol Roth, a librarian who discovers the truth behind the movie’s eponymous, seemingly miraculous foodstuff, and is so tormented by the knowledge that he takes his own life. Robinson’s tortured performance added so much weight to the drama of Soylent Green’s central mystery. Little did audiences at the time know, but Robinson was dying of bladder cancer while filming and would pass away two weeks after he finished shooting.

Without hyperbole, Enter The Dragon is the apex of martial arts moviemaking. The Hong Kong/U.S. co-production grossed more than $400 million at the box office, exposing countless Westerners to Asia’s physical approach to action cinema. And at its core was Bruce Lee, a lanky yet indomitable fighter who ripped the Hollywood action hero rulebook to shreds.

Lee was only 32 years old when he finished making what would become martial arts’ finest cinematic achievement, and it should have ignited his career on this side of the Atlantic. However, a month before Enter The Dragon’s American premiere, the actor passed away in his sleep as the result of a brain swelling. Chillingly, his only son, Brandon, would also die young, 20 years later.

Despite being an obscure character actor, John Cazale could well be, movie for movie, the most consistently successful performer in Hollywood history. He only appeared in five films, yet all of them were nominated for, or won, the Academy Award for Best Picture: The Godfather, The Conversation, The Godfather Part II, Dog Day Afternoon, and, finally, Michael Cimino’s devastating 1978 Vietnam drama, The Deer Hunter. Oh, and his girlfriend was Meryl Streep.

Sadly though, in 1977, Cazale was diagnosed with lung cancer. On March 13 the following year, he died at the age of 42, with Streep at his side. What he left behind was an all-too-brief yet flawless run in a string of blockbuster masterpieces.

After starring in the original Miracle On 34th Street at just eight years old, Natalie Wood reinvented herself as a young adult icon by appearing opposite James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause. Her success continued through the ’60s but plateaued in the ’70s, when she took time off to have children.

Wood wanted Brainstorm, a sci-fi drama about a device that can record and play back sensory experiences—including death—to be her comeback role. However, she drowned under mysterious circumstances while on vacation towards the end of filming in November 1981. What she left behind was a fascinating role in a film that’s filled with unanswerable ethical questions on what should and shouldn’t stay in the past.

Between The Monster Club and Cat’s Eye, the early ’80s had a brief obsession with anthology horror movies, and Twilight Zone: The Movie was that movement’s most profitable output. The John Landis- and Steven Spielberg-produced collection featured four short stories, three of which remade classic TV series episodes. The other was directed by Landis and starred Vic Morrow as a racist who’s thrust into the place of Jews in World War II and Black people in the ’50s American South to learn his lesson.

In fewer than 20 minutes, Morrow ran the gamut from horrifically casual prejudice to confusion and terror in a dynamic performance. Yet, the role would prove fatal for the former Combat! star. He, along with two child actors, died when a helicopter crashed during filming.

Marketed with the tagline “The year of the movie. The movie of the year,” 1984 brought George Orwell’s quintessential dystopian text to theaters in, well, 1984. John Hurt starred as the persecuted and tortured free thinker Winston Smith, who believes that Richard Burton’s O’Brien hates the dictatorial party as much as he does, only for him to be revealed as a spy for the Thought Police.

Burton essentially played a double role, first as a sympathetic comrade and then a ruthless interrogator, yet retained a deep-voiced gravitas throughout. The renowned thespian died as the result of a hemorrhage in August 1984, after filming his scenes but two months before his final film premiered.

Ask most people about Orson Welles’ crowning achievement and they’ll point you towards Citizen Kane: a diss track against William Randolph Hearst committed to celluloid and elevated to acclaim by its witty dialogue and ingenious cinematography. Ask a Millennial about Orson Welles’ crowning achievement, though, and they’ll point you towards Transformers: The Movie.

The endlessly influential auteur’s final film saw him lend a booming baritone to the planet-eating monstrosity Unicron, who threatens to destroy the benevolent Autobots, evil Decepticons and their home world, Cybertron, alike. Alongside a rich cast of voice actors that included Peter Cullen, Judd Nelson, and Frank Welker, Welles introduced a prestige that the Transformers didn’t necessarily need to make bank, but made the movie a generation-defining piece of childhood nostalgia. The copious amounts of mechanical violence also added to the awesomeness.

It’s one of the most infamous on-set horror stories: towards the end of filming what should have been his star-affirming movie, The Crow, Brandon Lee was shot and killed by an improperly prepared prop gun. He was just 28 years old, and his death hauntingly echoed the early passing of his dad, Bruce, 20 years beforehand.

Brandon never got to see himself in this starring role, yet his final project became the greatest superhero film of the 1990s. At a time when the genre was box office poison, his performance as a black-hearted avenger helped make The Crow a subversive hit. Equally anguished and gentle, and with a magnetic rock star persona, he’s infinitely rewatchable in this three-decade-old but ever-popular cult classic.

Tupac Shakur ascended to hip-hop godhood during the 1990s. However, a concurrent jab at film stardom repeatedly stalled thanks to his series of legal issues. Although he got to share the screen with Janet Jackson in 1993’s Poetic Justice, his masterpiece didn’t see the light of day until four months after he was murdered.

In Gridlock’d, Shakur co-starred with Tim Roth, the pair playing heroin-addicted bandmates desperate to get clean, yet whose attempts to enter rehab are constantly thwarted by an apathetic system. Auteur Vondie Curtis-Hall has called the movie an autobiographical story, and the power of the writing and direction certainly communicates that personal significance. This was easily Shakur’s greatest on-screen moment as a result (and it’s one of Roth’s as well).

In Gladiator, the mentor of Maximus Decimus Meridius, Antonius Proximo, dies in an attempt to help the protagonist escape from Rome and his life in chains. However, the character was originally meant to survive the events of the film. His onscreen death was sadly necessitated by Reed’s own passing, the result of a heart attack during production.

Gladiator was dedicated to Reed when it was released in May 2000, and proved a powerful epitaph to an actor playing masterfully against type as a nurturing hero. After all, his other most famous role was as the demented Bill Sikes in Oliver! Rightfully, Reed received a BAFTA nomination for best supporting actor in 2000 in recognition of his work.

You knew he’d be here. In 2006, Heath Ledger, hot off his Oscar-nominated and homophobe-aggravating role in Brokeback Mountain, was announced as the next live-action Joker and the internet shat itself. Comic book purists just couldn’t imagine this romantic pretty boy playing the deranged Clown Prince Of Crime … then he became the new measuring stick for the role.

In his penultimate film, Ledger epitomized the anarchy and humor of the Joker at his best (or worst, if you happen to be a caped crusader). He subsequently became hailed as a cornerstone of the greatest superhero movie ever made. However, the actor never got to relish in the adulation, which included him receiving a posthumous Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, as he died due to a medication overdose six months before The Dark Knight’s premiere.

You know James Gandolfini as the star of The Sopranos, the HBO drama that was key in ushering in the era of prestige television and completely reinventing the medium. However, in his penultimate film appearance and first posthumous performance, the actor went intriguingly against type. He played Albert, a relentlessly lovable divorcee smitten with a masseuse that, unbeknownst to him, is best friends with his ex-wife.

Nicole Holofcener’s writing and directing elevated Enough Said among so many of its rom-com peers, making the movie feel tender yet real, and never saccharine. It’s an artful balance absolutely helped by Gandolfini’s hypnotically human acting. Its brilliance is only exacerbated the tragedy of the star dying due to a heart attack at 51 years old.

On May 26, 2022—while filming the upcoming thriller film Dangerous Waters—Ray Liotta shockingly passed away at the age of 67. The cause of death remains undisclosed. However, fans will get to see the Goodfellas star when Elizabeth Banks’ batshit-looking Cocaine Bear comes out.

In the film, Liotta plays Dentwood: the leader of an unorganized crime gang that lost millions of dollars’ worth of the white stuff in the woods of Tennessee. Then a bear finds it and swallows it, and shit goes absolutely buckwild from that point on. From the second its title was announced, Cocaine Bear was at the center of a hurricane of hype, and we’re more than curious to see if it lives up.