It's hard to move on from an unexpected death when you have no idea how it happened — especially in Hollywood. These late actors passed away under rather mysterious circumstances.
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00:00It's hard to move on from an unexpected death when you have no idea how it happened,
00:04especially in Hollywood. These late actors passed away under rather mysterious circumstances.
00:10A standout at just 8 years old for 1947's Miracle on 34th Street,
00:14an Academy Award-nominated teen idol after 1955's Rebel Without a Cause,
00:18and a major movie star for West Side Story, Natalie Wood had an impressive and illustrious career.
00:23Sadly, it came to an abrupt end with the posthumously released 1983 sci-fi film Brainstorm.
00:28Wood's husband, actor Robert Wagner, took his wife and her Brainstorm co-star Christopher
00:32Walken out on his boat for a cruise off the Southern California coast one evening in November
00:361981. During the night, Wagner reportedly became very intoxicated, and he fought with his wife,
00:41whom he suspected of flirting with Walken. Frustrated over the argument, Wood disappeared.
00:46Wagner later said that at the time, he figured she'd grabbed a dinghy and found her way to shore,
00:50failing to call authorities to report Wood missing for several hours.
00:53Early the next morning, Wood's body washed up near Catalina Island,
00:57victim of seemingly accidental drowning. Wood was 43.
01:01Nobody knows how she drowned or what happened except her.
01:08In 2012, that accidental designation was officially excised from Wood's death certificate,
01:13following a new investigation into the death by the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department
01:17after unnamed individuals came forward with new details pertinent to the case.
01:21Six years later, the case was officially reopened, with police considering Wagner
01:25a person of interest in his wife's death. In 2022, however, the Los Angeles County
01:29Sheriff's Department told Page Six that Wagner had been cleared as a suspect.
01:33A member of the Blackfeet Nation, Misty Upham became a favorite performer among
01:36Native American filmmakers looking to portray indigenous experiences. In addition to her parts
01:41in Skins, Skinwalkers, and Dreamkeeper, Upham enjoyed particular praise for her role in 2008's
01:46Frozen River, including an Independent Spirit Award nomination for Best Supporting Female.
01:50Throughout her lifetime, Upham dealt with mental health and substance abuse issues.
01:54She treated extreme anxiety with prescription drugs and alcohol,
01:57and was forcibly hospitalized at mental health facilities on four occasions.
02:01Upham disappeared on October 5, 2014, but police didn't issue a press release
02:06announcing Upham's case until she'd been missing for eight days. During that time,
02:10Upham's frustrated relatives organized a search themselves, which yielded the finding that
02:14everyone dreaded. The decomposed remains of the 32-year-old actor were located in a ravine,
02:18found 11 days after she was first reported missing. According to the King County Medical
02:23Examiner, Upham died from blows to the head and torso, which matched with a fall from a high ridge.
02:27The fact that she was found under one of these ridges supported that claim,
02:31and toxicology reports indicated a high blood alcohol level. However, nothing about the scene
02:35or the evidence could determine whether Upham fell on her own or was pushed by someone else.
02:40David Lynch has always preferred to work with the same actors across multiple projects,
02:44and Jack Nance was a member of the acclaimed director's ensemble from the very beginning.
02:48Nance is most commonly remembered for playing Henry, the lead character in Lynch's debut
02:51feature Eraserhead. But he also appeared in Blue Velvet, Dune, Wild at Heart, Lost Highway,
02:56and, of course, Twin Peaks.
02:58Don't drink that coffee. You'd never guess there was a fish in the percolator.
03:07At around 5 a.m. on the morning of December 29, 1996, Nance left his apartment in South
03:13Pasadena, California, bound for the Winchell's Donut House down the block.
03:16He'd later tell friends that in the parking lot, he encountered two young men and asked them,
03:20"'Why don't you two change out of those baggy clothes and go get a job?'
03:23The two men then allegedly attacked Nance, leaving him roughed up and with a black eye.
03:28As he told actor Catherine Case, who he met with later that day,
03:31"'I told off some kid. I guess I got what I deserved.'"
03:34A day later, Case's fiancée, writer Leo Bulgarini, visited Nance at his apartment
03:38and found him dead on the floor of his bathroom. Suspecting a traumatic head injury such as the
03:43one sustained in his earlier fight as the cause of death, police launched a murder investigation.
03:48However, there was no security camera footage or eyewitness accounts of the altercation.
03:52The death was determined to be a homicide,
03:54but the manner and perpetrator of the death were never fully determined.
03:58With more than 100 credits stretching back to the mid-1990s, Nance Reddick was one of
04:02Hollywood's most prolific character actors. He's most commonly recognized as undercover
04:06detective Johnny Basil on Oz, police commissioner Cedric Daniels on The Wire,
04:10federal agent Philip Broyles on Fringe, and continental clerk Sharon in four John Wick movies.
04:15Reddick died abruptly in March 2023. Just 60 years old,
04:19Reddick apparently suffered from two undiagnosed cardiovascular issues.
04:23His death certificate cited the cause as ischemic heart disease and arthrosclerotic
04:27coronary artery disease, stating that a heart attack was triggered by an abundance of plaque
04:31and confined arteries. However, a day after that information was publicly released,
04:35Reddick's family and lawyer released a statement contesting it.
04:38Their argument was that those health problems didn't mesh with the actor's objectively healthy
04:42eating and exercise habits, and that the post-mortem investigation lacked legitimacy.
04:46Attorney James E. Hornstein told the Los Angeles Times,
04:49No medical examination of Nance during his lifetime ever indicated such conditions.
04:53The information appearing on the death certificates is wholly inconsistent with his lifestyle.
04:57Moreover, Hornstein and Reddick's relatives affirm that the Los Angeles County Medical
05:01Examiner's Office failed to even perform an autopsy before declaring a cause of death.
05:06The sudden death in December 2009 of 32-year-old Clueless, 8 Mile,
05:10and King of the Hill star Brittany Murphy left a lot of loose threads in its wake.
05:14Murphy's husband, Simon Monjack, found the actor dead in her bathroom,
05:17but the Los Angeles County coroner only announced the cause of death months later.
05:21According to coroner assistant chief Ed Winter, she was really sick with pneumonia,
05:25very anemic, and she was taking medication. The illness was notably exacerbated by the
05:29toxic effects of several drugs taken together, both prescribed and non-prescribed.
05:34Nearly 90 empty prescription containers were removed from the scene of the death,
05:38all under Monjack's name or one of his known pseudonyms.
05:41Murphy reportedly had wanted to seek medical attention but died before she could,
05:44prevented in part by Monjack's reluctance to do so. He told People magazine,
05:49I took very good care of my wife. She was on an antibiotic and she was taking
05:53cough medicine and doing all the right things. Dissatisfied with the coroner's report,
05:57Murphy's father lobbied for a test of hair samples,
05:59which detected high amounts of 10-toxic metals such as barium.
06:03I feel she was poisoned, there's no question about that, and I feel she was murdered.
06:08Authorities never reopened an investigation, but just five months after Murphy's death,
06:12Monjack died at age 40 in the same house. His cause of death was the same as Murphy's,
06:16pneumonia worsened by anemia. LAPD commander Andrew Smith stated,
06:21It was just a tragic set of circumstances.
06:23After his six-year run on Hogan's Heroes ended in 1971, star Bob Crane spent much of the 1970s
06:29performing in dinner theater productions. In June of 1978, Crane moved to Scottsdale,
06:34Arizona for a long production run, where the body of the 49-year-old actor was discovered
06:38in an apartment with an electrical cord tied around his neck. The Maricopa County Medical
06:42Examiner's report showed that Crane died from repeated strikes to the head delivered by a
06:46heavy object. A murder investigation got underway, which made public Crane's private proclivities.
06:52The actor, presented publicly as a happily married father of several children,
06:55engaged in many extramarital trysts, which were documented extensively with Polaroid photographs
07:00and videotape. For years, he'd been aided by John Henry Carpenter, a video equipment salesman.
07:05But by June 1978, Crane planned to end the working relationship. Crane's son, Robert,
07:10told Entertainment Weekly of a phone call he had with his father two days before his death,
07:14recalling,
07:14He says,
07:15I am making changes. He wanted to lose people like John Carpenter, who had become a pain in the butt.
07:20Authorities were unable to conclusively solve the mystery of Crane's murder despite three
07:24separate investigations. In 1992, prosecutors decided to charge Carpenter, building the case
07:29on how a tripod could have been a murder weapon. Carpenter was acquitted due to a lack of solid
07:34evidence.
07:35John Ritter made appearances on both the big and small screens, but television was where he would
07:39find the most success. He played accident-prone chef and Lothario jack-tripper on Three's Company
07:44from 1977 to 1984, before trying his hand at theatrical releases like Problem Child and
07:49Slingblade in the 90s. Ritter returned to TV in 2002 with Eight Simple Rules for Dating My
07:55Teenage Daughter, playing stressed-out dad Paul Hennessy.
07:59Trick or treat! I'm an angel!
08:02Sure, you're an angel now, but in a few years you'll be killing your father.
08:05Daddy!
08:06In September 2003, Ritter was on the set of Eight Simple Rules, taping a Season 2 episode when he
08:11was overwhelmed by weakness, nausea, and chest pain. He immediately left to check himself into
08:16the nearby Providence St. Joseph Medical Center. Tests indicated that Ritter was in the midst of a
08:20heart attack, but when doctors began an emergency operation on the actor, they diagnosed the problem
08:25as an aortic dissection — a rip inside of the heart. Had they known about the aortic dissection
08:30earlier, they would have treated it in a different manner and could have saved Ritter's life.
08:34Instead, since time was of the essence, they went ahead with surgery to address the heart attack.
08:38A simple X-ray would have spotted the dissection, and one was ordered early in Ritter's stay,
08:43but never completed. The actor died in the operating room aged 54. Ritter's wife,
08:48Amy Yazbeck, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Providence St. Joseph Medical Center,
08:52but didn't end up winning the case.
08:54No single individual has had more of an influence on martial arts filmmaking than Bruce Lee,
08:59whose appearances in films like Fist of Fury and Enter the Dragon changed the landscape of the
09:03genre forever. He would further be written into legend as a one-of-a-kind icon upon his premature
09:08death at the age of 32. An autopsy determined that Lee died of brain inflammation, a cerebral
09:13edema, which Lee had been diagnosed with two months before his death. But as Lee's posthumous
09:17popularity grew over time, so too did the theories about how he died. One posited that he was killed
09:23by a criminal syndicate, while another suggested he was done in by heat stroke.
09:27In 2022, a group of doctors published the results of their speculative Lee autopsy
09:31in Clinical Kidney Journal. The team analyzed available data and determined that Lee's
09:35cerebral edema could have been caused by hyponatremia. That means that Lee's sodium
09:39levels would have fallen to a fatally low point, causing his kidneys to fail to function due to
09:44overhydration. According to the study, Lee drank too much water because of tremendous thirst,
09:49possibly caused in part by marijuana use. His kidneys couldn't function properly because of
09:53the combination of prescription and non-prescription medications that he took on a daily basis.
09:58Without any way to examine Lee's body, though, this idea remains an untested theory.
10:02Best known for portraying Shaolin monk Kane on the 1970s TV series Kung Fu,
10:07mass driver Frankenstein in Death Race 2000, and crime lord Bill in the Kill Bill movies,
10:12David Carradine specialized in characters shrouded in mystery. That applied to the
10:16actor himself when authorities investigated his untimely death and came up strangely short.
10:20In June 2009, in the middle of filming the movie Stretch, Carradine's body was discovered by a
10:25housekeeper in the actor's room at the Park Nai Lert Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. The presence
10:30and placement of a rope on the actor, who was found in a closet, indicated death by suicide,
10:35but an official declaration was pending until after an autopsy could be performed.
10:39After officials in Thailand speculated that Carradine's death may have been the accidental
10:42result of sexual misadventure, the actor's family hired a medical examiner in the U.S.
10:47to execute an autopsy. Dr. Michael Bodden dismissed death by suicide as a possibility,
10:52as Carradine's body wasn't tied in a way consistent with that manner of death.
10:55While he couldn't fully determine if murder or a sexual accident incited Carradine's death,
10:59Dr. Bodden did declare that the actor died from asphyxiation.