Actor Deaths That Don't Make Sense

There's never a lack of tragic celebrity deaths. Death is always weird and scary, and it's a particular kind of odd when a famous actor dies, especially when we can't quite reconcile their public image with the manner and circumstances of how they died. Often, the trajectory of the response to an actor's death includes tributes and obituaries, and then the collective fervor and grief dies down after a few days. But that's only when it's relatively straightforward and there are answers, and it's a finite story — the actor was old, and they died of natural causes or after a long illness, for example. 

When a well-known performer dies under strange circumstances it creates a mass fascination that can last decades, particularly if that death is never solved. Many very famous and popular actors have died in such a manner, where the details about their deaths don't add up or raise red flags, be it from contradictory or confusing information in an autopsy, bizarre evidence at a crime scene, or mishaps in the investigation. Here are the actors whose deaths, many years later, still just don't make sense.

A standout at age 8 for 1947's "Miracle on 34th Street," an Academy Award-nominated teen idol after 1955's "Rebel Without a Cause," and a major movie star for "West Side Story," Natalie Wood's illustrious career came to an abrupt end with the posthumously released 1983 sci-fi film "Brainstorm." She's just one former child star who died in a bizarre way.

Wood's husband, actor Robert Wagner, took his wife and her "Brainstorm" costar Christopher Walken out on his boat for a cruise off the Southern California coast one evening in November 1981. During the night, Wagner reportedly became very intoxicated, and he fought with his wife whom he suspected of flirting with Walken. Frustrated over the argument, Wood disappeared; Wagner later said that at the time he figured she'd grabbed a dinghy and found her way to the shore; he didn't call authorities to report Wood missing for several hours. Early the next morning, Wood's body washed up near Catalina Island. A victim of accidental drowning, Wood was 43.

In 2012, that "accidental" designation was officially excised from Wood's death certificate, following a new investigation into the death by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department after unnamed individuals came forward with new details pertinent to the case. Six years later, the case was officially reopened. Nearly 40 years after the fact, police now considered Wagner a "person of interest" in his wife's death.

A member of the Blackfeet Nation, Misty Upham became a favorite performer among Native American filmmakers who made films about Native American experiences. In addition to appearing in "Skins," "Skinwalkers," and "DreamKeeper," Upham enjoyed particular praise for her role in 2008's "Frozen River," including an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Supporting Female.

Throughout her lifetime, Upham dealt with mental health and substance abuse issues. She treated extreme anxiety with prescription drugs and alcohol, and between 2012 and 2014, police in Auburn, Washington, forcibly hospitalized Upham at mental health facilities on four occasions. In August 2014, her father called emergency services regarding a near death by suicide. Upham disappeared on October 5, 2014; police didn't issue a press release announcing Upham's case until she'd been missing for eight days. During that time, Upham's frustrated relatives organized a search, and a friend found the decomposed remains of the 32-year-old actor in a ravine, 11 days after she was first reported missing.

According to the King County Medical Examiner, Upham died from blows to the head and torso, which matched with a fall from a high ridge, such as above where the body was found. Toxicology reports indicated a high blood alcohol level. But nothing about the scene or the evidence could determine if Upham's fall — if she did fall — was an accident, a murder, or death by suicide.

One unusual fact about David Lynch is that the envelope-pushing filmmaker likes to frequently work with the same actors. Among his stable of performers was Jack Nance, who featured prominently in Lynch's "Blue Velvet," "Twin Peaks," "Wild at Heart," and, most famously, as the main character in 1977's cult classic "Eraserhead."

At around 5 a.m. on the morning of December 29, 1996, Nance left his apartment in South Pasadena, California, bound for the Winchell's Donut House down the block. He'd later tell friends that in the parking lot, he encountered two young men and told them, according to Premiere (via Lynchnet), "Why don't you two change out of those baggy clothes and go get a job?" The two men then allegedly attacked Nance, leaving him quite roughed up and with a black eye. "I told off some kid," he told actor Catherine Case, who he met with later that day, according to People. "I guess I got what I deserved." A day later, Case's fiancé, writer Leo Bulgarini, visited Nance at his apartment and found him dead on the floor of his bathroom. 

Suspecting a traumatic head injury — such as one sustained in his earlier fight — as the cause of death, and considering his assault the previous day, police launched a murder investigation. But there was no security camera footage or donut shop eyewitness accounts of the altercation. The death was determined to be a homicide, but the manner and perpetrator of the death were never fully determined.

With more than 100 credits stretching back to the mid-1990s, Lance Reddick was one of Hollywood's most prolific character actors. Reddick is probably best known for his work as an undercover detective on "Oz," a police commissioner on "The Wire," a federal agent on "Fringe," and sidekick Charon in four "John Wick" movies. Reddick died abruptly in March 2023. Just 60 years old, Reddick died from two undiagnosed cardiovascular issues. His death certificate cited the cause as ischemic heart disease and atherosclerotic coronary artery disease, and that a heart attack was triggered by an abundance of plaque in confined arteries.

However, a day after that information was publicly released, Reddick's family and lawyer released a statement contesting it. Their argument was that those health problems didn't mesh with the actor's objectively healthy eating and exercise habits, and that the postmortem investigation lacked legitimacy. "No medical examination of Lance during his lifetime ever indicated such conditions," attorney James E. Hornstein told the Los Angeles Times. "The information appearing on the death certificate is wholly inconsistent with his lifestyle." Moreover, Hornstein and Reddick's relatives affirmed that the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's Office failed to even perform an autopsy before declaring a cause of death.

The sudden death in December 2009 of 32-year-old "Clueless," "8 Mile," and "King of the Hill" star Brittany Murphy left a lot of loose threads in its wake. Murphy's husband, Simon Monjack, found the actor dead in her bathroom, and months later, the Los Angeles County Coroner announced the cause of death. "She was really sick with pneumonia, very anemic, and she was taking medication," Coroner Assistant Chief Ed Winter reported to People. 

The illness was notably exacerbated by the toxic effects of several drugs taken together, both prescribed and non-prescribed. Nearly 90 empty prescription containers were removed from the scene of the death, all under Monjack's name or one of his known pseudonyms. Murphy reportedly had wanted to seek medical attention but died before she could, prevented in part by Monjack's reluctance to do so. "I took very good care of my wife, she was on an antibiotic and she was taking cough medicine and doing all the right things," he told People.

Dissatisfied with the coroner's report, Murphy's father lobbied for a test of hair samples, which detected high amounts of 10 toxic metals, including the rat poison ingredient barium. Authorities never re-opened an investigation; Murphy's case remains a closed one. However, just five months after Murphy's death, Monjack died at age 40 in the same house. His cause of death was the same as Murphy's — pneumonia worsened by anemia. "It was just a tragic set of circumstances," LAPD Commander Andrew Smith said.

After his six-year run on "Hogan's Heroes" ended in 1971, star Bob Crane spent much of the 1970s performing in dinner theater productions. In June 1978, Crane moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, for a long production run, where the body of the 49-year-old actor was discovered in an apartment with an electrical cord tied around his neck. The Maricopa County Medical Examiner's report showed that Crane died from repeated strikes to the head delivered by a heavy object.

A murder investigation got underway, which made public Crane's private proclivities. The actor, presented publicly as a happily married father of several children, engaged in many extramarital trysts, documented extensively with Polaroid photographs and videotape. For years, he'd been aided in his quest to record his encounters by John Carpenter, a video equipment salesperson. By June 1978, Crane had planned to end the working relationship. "He says, I am making changes,'" Crane's son, Robert, told Entertainment Weekly of a phone call he had with his father two days before his death. "He wanted to lose people like John Carpenter, who had become a pain in the butt."

Authorities were unable to conclusively solve the mystery of Crane's murder despite three separate investigations. In 1992, prosecutors decided to charge Carpenter, building a case on how a tripod could have been the murder weapon. Carpenter was acquitted, due to a lack of solid evidence.

John Ritter would forever be closely associated with television. In the 1970s and 1980s, he played accident-prone chef and lothario Jack Tripper on "Three's Company," a ribald show that seriously crossed the line. Following some major roles in well-received movies like "Sling Blade" and "Bad Santa," Ritter returned to TV in 2002 with "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter," playing a stressed-out dad. In September 2003, Ritter was on the set of "8 Simple Rules," taping the fourth episode of Season 2 of the sitcom when he was overwhelmed by weakness, nausea, and chest pain. He immediately left to check himself into nearby Providence St. Joseph Medical Center.

Tests indicated that Ritter was in the midst of a heart attack, but when doctors began an emergency operation on the actor, they diagnosed the problem as an aortic dissection – a rip inside of the heart. Had they known about the aortic dissection earlier, they would have treated it in a different manner and could have saved Ritter's life. Instead, and when time was important, they went ahead with surgery to address the heart attack. A simple X-ray would have spotted the dissection, and one was ordered early in Ritter's stay but never completed. The actor died in the operating room, aged 54. Ritter's wife, Amy Yasbeck, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Providence St. Joseph Medical Center, but didn't win the case.

While he'd popularize and define martial arts cinema and become one of history's greatest action movie heroes, Bruce Lee made a few forgotten failures along with TV's "The Green Hornet" and the films "Fist of Fury," "The Way of the Dragon," and "Enter the Dragon" before his sudden and strange death in Hong Kong in 1973 at age 32. An autopsy determined that Lee died of brain inflammation, or cerebral edema, which Lee had been diagnosed with two months before his death. But as Lee's legend grew over time, so too did the theories about how he died. One theory posited that he was killed by a criminal syndicate, while another suggested that he was done in by heatstroke.

In 2022, a group of doctors published the results of their speculative Lee autopsy in "Clinical Kidney Journal." The team analyzed available data and determined that Lee's cerebral edema could have been caused by hyponatraemia — his sodium level fell to a fatally low point, and his kidneys failed to function, chiefly because he consumed too much water. According to the study, Lee drank too much water because of tremendous thirst, possibly caused in part by marijuana misuse, and his kidneys couldn't function properly because of the combination of prescription and non-prescription medications taken by the actor. Without any way to examine Lee's body, this idea remains an untested theory.

Best known for portraying traveling Shaolin monk Caine on the 1970s TV series "Kung Fu" and as crime lord Bill in the "Kill Bill" movies, David Carradine specialized in characters shrouded in mystery. As one of a few actors who died in bizarre ways, his death is even more enigmatic. Various authorities were never quite able to figure out exactly how Carradine died.

In June 2009, in the middle of filming the movie "Stretch," Carradine's body was discovered by a housekeeper in the actor's room at the Park Nai Lert Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. The presence and placement of a rope on the actor, found in a closet, indicated death by suicide, but an official declaration was pending until after an autopsy could be performed. After officials in Thailand speculated that Carradine's death may have been the accidental result of sexual misadventure, the actor's family hired a medical examiner in the U.S. to execute an autopsy. Dr. Michael Baden dismissed death by suicide as a possibility, as Carradine's body wasn't tied in a way consistent with that manner of death. While he couldn't fully determine if murder or a sexual accident incited Carradine's death, Dr. Baden did declare that the actor died from asphyxiation.

A reliable presence on British television throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Barry Evans starred on the medical sitcoms "Doctor in the House" and "Doctor at Large," and then played a teacher on "Mind Your Language." Following that sitcom's end in 1986, Evans appeared in just one more film years later, 1993's "The Mystery of Edwin Drood," and four years after that, he died. 

On February 10, 1997, police discovered the actor's body at his home in Leicestershire, with Evans likely having died the day before. Authorities had come to the home on an unrelated matter, to let Evans know that his recently reported stolen car had been located. A coroner's report found that Evans had an extremely high blood alcohol level at the time of his death, and the office couldn't conclusively determine if such consumption constituted death by suicide. Police also recovered near Evans an opened bottle of decades-old aspirin, but the actor hadn't ingested any pills.

With the now-suspicious disappearance of Evans' car and subsequently his credit cards, authorities launched a murder investigation, acting on a detail of the coroner's report that theorized that the actor died from a violently delivered blunt force trauma. One person, an 18-year-old man, was arrested and charged with murder. After a staunch denial and a lack of evidence connecting him to the crime, he was let go. The case remains unsolved.

Johnny Hardwick only ever had one major role in his career: For 13 years, and across 258 episodes, he voiced exterminator and conspiracy theorist Dale Gribble on the animated sitcom "King of the Hill. Following the end of the series in 2010, Hardwick continued performing on a self-run YouTube channel, singing songs and performing solo bits.

Hardwick lived quietly in Austin, Texas, and on August 8, 2023, police were called by an associate of the actor to perform a wellness check. That's where they found the remains of the actor, and immediately pronounced him dead. While nothing at the scene indicated that a murder had taken place, investigators remained baffled as to how, why, and when Hardwick actually died. The actor's body was found in a bathtub, with his head facing the ceiling. He didn't drown, and death by suicide was ruled out. But the exposure to water after death, for however long of a period it was, led to such substantial and rapid decomposition of the undisturbed body that authorities were left with very little biological material to test. The circumstances surrounding the death of Hardwick at age 64 remain a mystery.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues or with mental health, or is struggling or in crisis, contact the relevant resources below:

• The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).

• The Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741, call the National Alliance on Mental Illness helpline at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264), or visit the National Institute of Mental Health website.

• Call or text 988 or chat 988lifeline.org