Six of the Best... Actors Who Died Too Young

Highlander, Dorian Gray, Interview with a Vampire… There are plenty of movies that feature themes of eternal youth or everlasting life but unfortunately they’re fantasy. People are born, they live and then they die. Although we can extend the middle part of that previous sentence through medicine, we can’t remove the final part altogether. While many of us will live to reach a ripe old age,  grumpily hating the world that has left us behind, sadly some people die in their prime. In this week’s Six of the Best I’m looking at six of the best actors who died too young. Although these actors died in their heyday or at the peak of their careers, their death has in many cases bought them an almost everlasting, close to immortal status which their names may have lacked had they lived to grow old, thus granting eternal youth. So here are Six of the Best… Actors Who Died Too Young. Let me know who you would have included.

1. Rudolph Vantentino. (Died in 1926 – aged 31)

The world has largely forgotten cinema’s first male sex symbol. The Italian born actor appeared in close to forty films between 1914 and 1926 including The Sheik and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in 1921. His death at the age of thirty-one caused mass hysteria among his female fans to whom he was affectionately known as the ‘Latin Lover’. Valentino’s life has been the subject of several films but his popularity has been overshadowed by those whose careers continued on into the late 20s and early sound era.

The Conversation

In between making two of the most heralded films of all time in 1972 and 1974, writer/director Francis Ford Coppola made another film. That film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for three Academy Awards including Best Picture. That film was The Conversation. A taught psychological thriller, The Conversation isn’t as grand in scale or as epic in scope at The Godfather movies by which it is sandwiched but it’s a deeply intriguing look inside the world of audio espionage and the consequences of it. Gene Hackman leads a terrific cast as Harry Caul, a surveillance expert who has second thoughts about handing in his latest recordings for fear that those he has recorded will be killed, a repeat of a previous job which still haunts him years later.

The film opens onto a magnificent scene which forms the basis of the whole movie. Initially shot from high up on a rooftop the camera details a large plaza in which hundreds of people are milling about, talking and eating lunch, people watching or simply passing through. The shot is alive with detail and beautifully constructed but as the camera slowly zooms in you begin to focus your attention on a mime. Eventually the mime starts to copy a man drinking a cup of coffee. That man is Harry Caul (Hackman). Caul is in the plaza spying a young couple who are slowly circling, deep in conversation. Once at ground level the camera cuts to several other angles, showing the other members of Caul’s team hard at work, attempting to record the conversation. I have seen few better opening sequences than the one detailed above. It’s slow to build, intriguing, interesting and opens up several possibilities for how to proceed.

Dog Day Afternoon

I watched Dog Day Afternoon for the first time about eight years ago when I discovered the films of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino concurrently through the likes of The Godfather. Since that first watch I’ve seen the movie about once every eighteen months or so and it has become one of my favourite films. For me Dog Day Afternoon has everything I could possibly want. It shows New York at its grimy and dirty height, it’s brilliantly funny and tense and features one of Pacino’s greatest roles. If they could digitally add Scarlett Johansson as one of the bank tellers, I’d watch the film daily.

The movie is based on a true story. Sonny Wortzik (Pacino) and Sal Naturile (John Cazale) walk into a Brooklyn bank on a summer’s day with the idea of robbing it. It isn’t long before things start to go wrong and the robbery turns into a farce. Soon the cops have the bank surrounded and Sonny and Sal are left inside with eight hostages and nowhere to go. The hours roll on and the scene attracts the media and onlookers alike, all of whom want a glimpse of the action. Sonny becomes an anti-hero to the gathering crowd after evoking the memory of the Attica prison riots. As the night draws in Sonny decides his best way out is to arrange for a jet to take him and Sal out of the country, a request which the police begin to arrange.