Making Sense of Celebrity Deaths From 2022
We lost quite a few beloved people this past year. What if anything can we learn from it?
I have a morbid fascination with celebrity deaths and I check the news almost every day to see if anyone has left us. As I wrote this story, in fact, Brazilian soccer legend Pelé passed away at age 82, and on the last day of the year, prolific TV journalist Barbara Walters died at 93.
Now that the year is over, I decided to take a closer back at who we lost in 2022. I wanted explore why these people have so powerfully captured our attention, and, if possible, to try to find some kind of meaning to it all.
Let me first say, however, that I have a ton of respect for these politicians, actors, comedians, athletes and musicians, so please don’t think I enjoy reading about or writing on this topic. It’s very sad and my heart goes out to the family and friends who’ve experienced the death of a loved one.
As best I can surmise, my fascination must be a coping mechanism for my own mortality, as if something valuable can be gleaned by researching the careers, lifestyles and deaths of these people.
While reading this kind of news, I of course prefer to see someone who lived a long, healthy life, who left a long-lasting, influential legacy, and who died painlessly in their nineties surrounded by family.
I do not like—but spend much more time focusing on—when someone died young, tragically, painfully, or if their careers were unexpectedly cut short. I am also especially interested if the death is attributed to a bad habit, unhealthy lifestyle, unlucky disease or other act of God that ended a life before the accepted statistics for life expectancy in the Western world.
Speaking of which, lets take a look at that before we continue.
Mortality Statistics
Life Expectancy
According to the website worlddata.info, the life expectancy in the United States for men is 74.5 and for women is 80.2.
For some global context, the country with the highest life expectancies is Hong Kong (men: 82.9, women: 88.0) followed closely by Iceland, Japan and Norway.
The country with the lowest numbers out of 124 countries listed are nations of Central Africa (men: 51.5, women: 55.9) preceded by Chad, Nigeria and Somalia.
The United States ranks #52 out of these 124 and puts up similar numbers to Ecuador, Malaysia, Croatia, Peru and Colombia.
Causes of Death
According to the CDC, these are the leading causes of death and numbers of deaths in the United States during the year 2020:
1. Heart disease: 696,962
2. Cancer: 602,350
3. COVID-19: 350,831
4. Accidents (unintentional injuries): 200,955
5. Stroke (cerebrovascular diseases): 160,264
6. Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 152,657
7. Alzheimer’s disease: 134,242
8. Diabetes: 102,188
9. Influenza and pneumonia: 53,544
10. Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 52,547
As you can see, the list includes COVID-19 deaths in the #3 position. If you’re interested in celebrity deaths from coronavirus and COVID-19 complications in the past three years, this website has an extensive list. Notables include former Secretary of State Colin Powell (died 2021), talkshow host Larry King (died 2021) and magician Roy Horn (of the team Siegfried and Roy, who died in 2020 and 2021, respectively).
Beyond that, we see the usual suspects at the top: heart disease, cancer and accidents. Though heart disease holds the #1 spot, it seems to me like more people are dying of cancer, which can be a very cruel disease. And accidents make for the most spectacular and memorable headlines (in a bad way).
Let’s take a quick look at some past examples.
Cancer
Many of the most tragic celebrity deaths that I’ve seen reported are young men and women who died early from some kind of cancer. This was the case with Dustin Diamond, actor and comedian most famous for playing Screech in the 90’s teen sitcom Saved By The Bell. Diamond died in 2021 at age 44 only a month after receiving his diagnosis.
These can also be the most shocking because sometimes famous people prefer to keep their illness private (which they have every right to do) and the public doesn’t find about it until they pass away. This was the case with beloved comedian and actor Norm Macdonald, who died in 2021 at age 61 after a decade-long battle with cancer.
Accidents
These deaths are also very shocking because they are so unexpected. Young, healthy people often at the peak of their careers can tragically die in sometimes horrifying circumstances.
Kobe Bryant, the famous basketball superstar, died at age 44 alongside his thirteen-year-old daughter and other passengers in a helicopter crash in 2020. This was quite a shock when the news broke, not just because of its high profile victims, but because of unthinkable horror of experiencing a death like this. I’m not even a basketball fan, but this one stuck with me.
And there’s Paul Walker, actor best known from the Fast & The Furious franchise, who died in 2013 at age 40 as a passenger in a car crash (and not just any car: a Porsche Carrera GT). Walker was a handsome and talented actor with many film and television credits, and an avid philanthropist, having founded a charity for natural disaster relief in 2010. There was no drugs or alcohol involved, but speeding in a supercar turned out to be dangerous enough. Even a decade later, his death still haunts me.
And finally, there’s Ryan Dunn, one of the crazy guys from Jackass who made a lucrative TV career out of doing painful, destructive and hilarious stunts. Dunn died in 2011 at age 34 after crashing his Porsche 911 GT3. Dunn had a history of drunk driving and the toxicology report taken after the crash showed that his blood alcohol level was well beyond the legal limit. Add in a brand new supercar and it became a tragic recipe for disaster. I always liked him and his crew, including Johnny Knoxville, Bam Margera and Steve-O, and was very sad for them to have lost their good friend.
My Most Notable Losses of 2022
Now it’s time to look at some of this past year’s deaths. This is by no means an exhaustive list; it’s merely a handful of celebrities whom I knew best as a thirty-eight-year-old American man and therefore whose deaths most strongly affected me.
Other notable people such as Gaylord Perry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Loretta Lynn, and Moon Landrieu have had incredible life stories with influential contributions to sports, music, politics and culture. But I’d honestly never heard of them until they passed this year, so there wasn’t the same shock and awe for other figures of pop culture that I’ve grown up with.
Still others like Queen Elizabeth II, Kirstie Alley, Coolio and Gilbert Gottfried were indeed well known to me and their work very meaningful in my lifetime, but for the sake of this article’s brevity, I chose to focus on others.
Okay, here we go . . .
Bob Saget
Age 60 (14 years short of expectancy)
While on the road for a comedy tour, Bob Saget slipped and hit his head in a hotel bathroom. Evidently he decided to sleep it off and did not seek medical help. He died in his sleep that night due to what turned out to be a serious blunt force trauma injury.
I grew up watching Bob Saget on Full House and America’s Funniest Home Videos, and though he was never quite so popular again, I loved the dirty, twisted comic he was in the later years of his career. In 2020, less than two years before his death, Saget did The Joe Rogan Experience podcast and gave a long, funny, insightful interview where he revealed a great deal about his life, work and family that was very endearing. I think he could’ve easily had another twenty years of making people laugh.
Saget’s death reminds me a bit of Jim Henson, legendary creator of the Muppets who died in 1990 at 53 years old. The story goes that Henson got sick and didn’t want to stop traveling and working, thinking it was just a bad cold and he’d recover on his own. By the time he realized it was serious and went to the hospital, it was too late.
If there’s a lesson in these kinds of deaths, I think it’s that you should take your health seriously and don’t treat sickness or injury as a minor inconvenience through which you can simply tough it out. I know I am making this mistake and probably only getting away with it because I am still young(ish). In my fifties and sixties, this damn well might kill me.
Anne Heche
Age 53 (17 years short of life expectancy)
After a brief series of minor hit-and-runs in her Mini Cooper, Anne Heche finally crashed into someone’s house in Los Angeles, setting the entire property and her vehicle ablaze. She was rescued by fire fighters and taken to the hospital in a coma, after which she died from severe injuries caused by burns and smoke inhalation. While blood tests suggested she was not high at the time, it did reveal regular use of cocaine, marijuana and fentanyl.
Heche was a very beautiful woman and a talented actress. I remember her very fondly from the 1998 film Six Days, Seven Nights, in which she starred alongside Harrison Ford and David Schwimmer. And her relationship with Ellen Degeneres was also pretty big news back in the day. I’d mostly forgotten about her until hearing about this unfortunate incident. But still, I followed every bit of news about her coma, prognosis and autopsy reports, fearing the worst while hoping for the best.
This death was pretty spectacular, to say the least. I have my own history with drugs and alcohol that has been very unhealthy at times, so it resonated with me. In some of my worst moments—especially those involving driving, fighting and excessive quantities—I escaped injury, arrest and even death by little more than sheer luck. It must have been pretty similar for Heche in her later years until that one night when her luck ran out.
If there’s a lesson here, I think it’s that if you live this way—especially in a place like LA where driving at all hours of the day and night is an integral part of life—you can’t keep rolling the dice forever. Though I have to admit: Having the disposable income, free time and connections to regularly score coke and opioids sounds pretty fun. But it’s easy to see how this can get out of control. I suppose for now I’m lucky that I’ve had neither the cash nor cache to ever make these temptations a part of my life. Should I ever find myself in that situation, though, I’ll remember this lesson for sure.
Liz Sheridan and Estelle Harris
Both age 93 (13 years beyond life expectancy)
Liz Sheridan and Estelle Harris died within two weeks of one another this year, due in both cases to natural causes, and both at the age of ninety-three.
While each of these wonderful women deserve their own attention, I wanted to write about them together because there were just so many similarities between them. They are best know for their roles in the 90’s sitcom Seinfeld, where Sheridan played Jerry’s mom and Harris played George’s mom. These characters were designed to be a source of comedic stress and frustration for the main characters of the show, and these ladies’ performances were perfectly hilarious.
Sheridan began her acting career in the 70s with film and television credits spanning the next four decades, including many TV guest spots and voice over parts. Besides Seinfeld, her next most notable recurring role was in the 80s sitcom ALF, which I very fondly remember.
Estelle Harris started out in the 80s, also with many film and television appearances. More recently, her distinct voice is recognizable in voice over parts for TV shows like Family Guy, American Dad! and Futurama, as well as her wonderful part as Mrs. Potato Head in the Toy Story film series.
What’s the lesson here? I think these long lives and long careers serve as a shining example of how one can hope to live. I especially like how the careers of both women continued blossoming into their later years, achieving peak fame at about the age of seventy. That’s awesome. We should all be so lucky to live and die this way—peacefully, in the company of friends and family, and leaving behind a legacy of great contributions to our fields.
Kirk Baily
Age 52 (16 years short of expectancy)
Six months after being diagnosed with lung cancer, screen and and voice actor Kirk Baily died from the disease.
Baily famously played camp counselor Kevin Lee—nicknamed “Ugg,” as in “ugly”—on the 1991–92 Nickelodeon show Salute Your Shorts. I can’t say I know him from anything else, but when you check his credits, you find a long list of film, television, anime and video game roles both in front of the camera and as voice overs. Among these, there are tons of things I’d heard of but never knew he was in, such as Melrose Place, Kill Bill: Volume 1, Big Hero 6 and Frozen. Though not a household name, Baily was clearly a talented and prolific performer.
When you hear lung cancer, the most obvious potential cause is that he must have been a smoker, though I wasn’t able to find any information to confirm this. According to the CDC however, 80–90% percent of lung cancer cases are related to tobacco use of some kind, so I think it’s a relatively safe assumption. So, the lesson here is perhaps an obvious one.
Baily’s death reminds me of another popular comedic actor from the nineties: Jim Varney, who you might know better by the name of his popular character, Ernest P. Worrell. Varney was an actor and stand-up comic before he created the Ernest character for a television commercial. It was such a bit hit that other brands hired him to advertise their products and his fame snowballed into feature films and television shows starring Ernest. Varney had plenty of other roles, too, including Jed Clampet in 1993’s The Beverly Hillbillies and the voice of Slinky Dog in 1995’s Toy Story.
But Varney was life-long smoker. One day he developed a bad cough, then started coughing up blood, and finally sought medical help. He was diagnosed with lung cancer and went through chemotherapy, but less than two years later, he died in the year 2000 at age 50.
If there’s a lesson here besides the obvious public service announcement against smoking, I think it might be this: A bad habit might seem like no big deal when you’re young, but it can really add up to something deadly over the course of a lifetime. Whether it’s alcohol leading to liver disease, red meat leading to heart disease, or obesity leading to diabetes, you have to take your health habits seriously and consistently make better choices before they catch up with you. Once again, I think I am getting away with this as a young(ish) man, but if I want a longer life, I’d better start consuming more vitamins and less beer.
Ray Liotta
Age 67 (7 years short of expectancy)
In May of this year, Ray Liotta died in his sleep at the age of sixty-seven, his young fiancé by his side. At the time, he was filming a movie in the Dominican Republic and by all accounts looked perfectly healthy. Rumors circulated thereafter that his death was related to COVID-19. The real cause of death has not been revealed by Liotta’s publicist or his family, except a brief statement that debunks COVID rumors.
I came to know Ray Liotta from the 1989 film Field of Dreams, and he won my childhood admiration as a sci-fi action star in 1994’s No Escape. At the time, my mom saw me watching these movies and said, “Hey! I know those piercing blue eyes from Another World,” a television soap opera that aired 1978–1981. Later on when I was old enough, I watched Goodfellas and came to love that film as well. Over the course of forty years, Liotta built a career as a leading man in film and TV, as well as adding to many talented ensemble casts. He will be missed.
Though he died some years short of life expectancy for men in United States, I think Liotta’s legacy is among the most respectable in Hollywood. By all accounts, he had no major health problems, no bad habits nor other controversial events in his personal life that might’ve contributed to an early death (aside from an inconsequential DUI in 2007). I personally hope to get ten or fifteen years more than that, but if I should meet my end as Liotta did, I don’t think I’d have anything substantial to complain about.
I don’t know if there’s anything to learn here as with other deaths in this article except that perhaps it’s an example of “a good death.” That’s a quote, by the way, from the 1995 film Legends Of The Fall. Spoiler alert: It describes how at the end of the film, Brad Pitt’s character is attacked and killed by a bear while living out his later years on the run from the law for bootlegging and murder.
So maybe instead of a blind fear of death, we should focus our energy on having a good one instead.
Gallagher
Age 76 (2 years beyond life expectancy)
The legendary comedian and creator of the iconic, watermelon-smashing Sledge-O-Matic died of “organ failure after ‘numerous heart attacks’ over the course of [his] life,” according to the New York Times. For my purposes, I’d say this falls under the number one most common cause of death from our numbers above: heart disease.
Gallagher is one of those 80s/90s icons that quietly disappeared in the new millennium. He went the way of Paul Hogan of Crocodile Dundee fame— from superstardom to obscurity in what felt like the blink of an eye (Hogan is alive at 83 years old, by the way; he’s dealt with some big tax problems and only occasionally acts since his peak).
If you spend a few minutes looking into what ever happened to Gallagher, you’ll find articles about how once his fame diminished, he went broke and fell into a miserable, down-and-out existence. This article from Huffpost.com is perhaps the best example.
Underneath the sensational headline, however, there are quotes from Gallagher’s longtime manager that despite some bad investments and other financial losses on the comedian’s part, the idea that he is broke is an exaggeration. “Trust me,” says the manager, “we’d all like to be as broke as Gallagher right now.”
There’s another story here, as well: Still at the height of his fame, Gallagher (whose real first name is Leo) gave his brother Ron the right to perform this act, including the trademark move of smashing fruit with a sledgehammer. But Ron evidently crossed the line with his brother by deceitfully impersonating him, leading promoters, venues and audience members to believe he was the real Gallagher. In the end, Leo sued his brother, and Ron was legally prohibited from performing the act.
Gallagher’s death grabbed my attention because I feel guilty for loving him so much and then completely forgetting about him for twenty-five years. I could’ve gone to see a show, bought a comedy album or supported him in some other way, but I didn’t. Like everyone else, I kept riding the never-ending wave of what’s new in pop culture and never looked back.
Furthermore, Gallagher’s life and death underscores the idea of peaking: reaching point where it’s as good as it gets, and from which things are all down hill until the end. I can’t help but wonder: Have I peaked? Is being a mediocre software engineer all that I’ll ever be? I never did create that killer app or found my own startup, things that might have earned me the notoriety, respect and wealth of my dreams. Nor have I done much of anything with my writing as yet. Will I ever get a book published by a real publisher? Will anyone ever read my words? Or is a self-published book with five measly Amazon reviews the peak of my reach?
It’s all very depressing, isn’t it?
What Does It All Mean?
In studying these people who died this year, I’m not sure that I have found any spectacular revelations about the meaning of life. But there are certainly some small lessons to be learned about how to live better and avoid common pitfalls. Mortality is a tough concept with which to contend, and an opponent who will ultimately defeat us all, no matter what.
I wish a very happy new year to anyone who reads my work, and hope that as many of our beloved celebrities as possible have a happy, healthy and productive 2023.
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