Films with entirely dead casts

[Spade_Cooley 9,519]

The official Thurl Ravenscroft fansite is quite something.

[Handrejka 1,903]

14 hours ago, Bentrovato said:

Plays as films:

 

"Give 'em Hell Harry". 1975. Sole cast member listed as James Whitmore who passed in 2009.

 

"Sleuth" has only Michael Caine to go. But "Deathtrap" has himself and Dyan Cannon (born 1937).

 

Or indeed Blithe Spirit which I mentioned earlier. 

 

Forgot to mention, but Rope (1948) can be ticked off too.

[DemBones 36]

11 hours ago, Spade_Cooley said:

Here's one: Lady and the Tramp, 1955. Now, you'd assume skimming the cast list that, with the death of Stan Freberg in 2015, the cast is all gone. However, the "dogs at the pound" were played by the vocal group The Mellomen, who featured, among others, Thurl "Tony the Tiger" Ravenscroft.

 

Now assuming the Mellomen line-up in the film was the 1955 line-up, we know Max Smith died in 1999 and Ravenscroft in 2005. But Bob Hamlin vanishes after he left the Mellomen, and even the Disney fansites don't have a clue. Anyone got a lead?

 

Side note: The Mellomen were also the first act to release R&B records under the Columbia imprint, despite former Deathlist favourite Mitch Miller attempting to sabotage the project.

Don't know anything about Bob Hamlin's status, but he's also the only unknown for Alice in Wonderland, too, where the Mellomen played the cards that were painting the roses red. Kathryn Beaumont (Alice) is still alive and turning 80 this year, but she's the last confirmed survivor; Hamlin's a question mark, and everyone else is gone.

 

On the topic of Disney movies, Fantasia is an interesting one. None of the six vocal performers from the original 1940 version are still alive (the last one was Julietta Novis, the 'Ave Maria' singer, who died in 1994). But the master tape of Deems Taylor's original voiceover narration has deterioriated so badly that they can't use it anymore, so the narration has been re-recorded by three other actors since then, most recently by Corey Burton in 2010 - and all three of those actors are still alive. So I don't know if you want to count that one or not.

 

Disney's Swiss Family Robinson (1960) only has one surviving cast member: Tommy Kirk, who turns 77 this year.

 

Outside Disney, I also looked up the three Topper movies, which I thought might be good candidates: Topper (1937), Topper Takes a Trip (1938), and Topper Returns (1941).

 

Topper Returns yielded a hit - in fact, the last two cast members of that movie (Patsy Kelly and William H. O'Brien) both died way back in 1981.

 

The other two movies each have one unknown gumming up the works, with everyone else confirmed deceased. In the original Topper the mystery actress is Donna Dax, who played a minor role. Her name also pops up in several other famous movies from the late 30's and 40's, most notably Citizen Kane, so she's someone who could end up haunting this thread if no one can find any information on her. Topper Takes a Trip has the more familiar problem of a total unknown named Jimmy Colman, who played a waiter in his only film role.

[Death Impends 7,964]

1 hour ago, DemBones said:

Outside Disney, I also looked up the three Topper movies, which I thought might be good candidates: Topper (1937), Topper Takes a Trip (1938), and Topper Returns (1941).

 

Topper Returns yielded a hit - in fact, the last two cast members of that movie (Patsy Kelly and William H. O'Brien) both died way back in 1981.

 

And the producer for the Topper series was Hal Roach, who died aged 100 in 1992, so you've got a behind-the-scenes name who outlasted the entire cast for Returns.

[YoungWillz 21,037]

Oh so close. The entire cast and supporting cast of Mickey Rooney's 1950 He's A Cockeyed Wonder are dead apart from co-star Terry Moore, who is 89 and alive and a DDP pick.

 

Notably there is a credit for Jimmy The Crow. Yes, it was a bird and appeared in several movies. No date of death, but definitely dead sometime after its last appearance in 1954.

 

Anyway, when Terry goes, this will be an all-dead film.

[YoungWillz 21,037]

The 1945 film adaptation of a certain Agatha Christie novel and aptly named for this thread are all dead.

 

Name of the film? And Then There Were None.

 

There are only three survivors from the 1965 remake, Ten Little Indians - Shirley Eaton, Fabian and Mario Adorf.

[Bibliogryphon 9,573]

6 hours ago, YoungWillz said:

The 1945 film adaptation of a certain Agatha Christie novel and aptly named for this thread are all dead.

 

Name of the film? And Then There Were None.

 

There are only three survivors from the 1965 remake, Ten Little Indians - Shirley Eaton, Fabian and Mario Adorf.

There are only four survivors from the 1974 remake: Charles Aznavour, Stephanie Audran, Elke Sommer & Maria Rohm

[Toast 16,137]

6 hours ago, YoungWillz said:

The 1945 film adaptation of a certain Agatha Christie novel and aptly named for this thread are all dead.

 

Name of the film? And Then There Were None.

 

There are only three survivors from the 1965 remake, Ten Little Indians - Shirley Eaton, Fabian and Mario Adorf.

Historical note:  I read that book when I was about 11, under its original title of Ten Little N-iggers.

Amusing that the politically correct title that replaced it was later itself deemed politically incorrect.

[msc 18,439]

Christie herself suggested And Then There Were None as a suitable title, becoming uncomfortable with the Ten Little N's title very early on. (Especially as it takes away from the fact the one actual admitted racist in the book is portrayed as a monster.)

[Toast 16,137]

Whose idea was it to call it Ten Little Indians then?  Or was that just a US title? 

<wanders off to Wikipedia>

 

Well, that was interesting.

[msc 18,439]

It was the title of the play in the US iirc?

 

Anyhow, bloody good book. One of her best.

 

And do you know what's annoying, as a fan? In her autobiography, she notes how it was one of her trickiest novels to plot out. Guess what one of her few novels for which none of her prep notes still exist is!

[Bentrovato 1,087]

A Society Sensation. 1918. Rodolpho De Valentina in his first listed role outside of extra/dancer. No one left. 

 

The Son of the Sheik. 1926. The renamed Rudolph Valentino in his last role. No one left. 

[time 8,599]

Of the cast of The Magnificent Seven, only three remain, 82 year old Rosenda Monteros, who played Petra, and two child actors,  both identified as 'Boy with O'Reilly', namely Danny Bravo, now aged 70 and Mario Navarro, 68-69.

 

I'd imagine Monteros will get extensive coverage when she goes, not so much the other two, though they do have Wikipedia entries, so we should at least find out eventually!

 

 

[DemBones 36]

A few more casts that are gone or nearly gone.

 

No survivors:

All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

The Maltese Falcon (1941)

Hell in the Pacific (1968) (this movie had a cast of two, Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune)

 

One survivor:

Anne of Green Gables (1934) - June Preston (b. 1928)

 

Two survivors:

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) - Julie Adams (b. 1926) and Ricou Browning, one of the two actors who played the Creature (b. 1930)

 

Uncertain, but possibly one or less:

Hamlet (1948 Laurence Olivier version) - Patricia Davidson (b. 1926) and possibly Tony Tarver (unknown)

Our Town (1940) - Dix Davis (b. 1926) doesn't have a year of death listed in IMDB, but a Google search says that he died in 1989. Douglas Gardner is an unknown, but played one of the younger characters, so he could still be alive somewhere.

Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) - the one confirmed living cast member is Robert Blake (yes, that Robert Blake), but there are three Mexican actors who played small roles that we have no information about, so this one will unfortunately probably never be verified.

 

One other movie of interest, it turns out that The Black Hole (1979) actually had quite a small cast with only ten performers, five of whom are still alive. The youngest, Joseph Bottoms, is only 63 though, so it probably won't join the list anytime soon.

[Bibliogryphon 9,573]

George Cole was the last survivor of Olivier's Henry V

[themaninblack 2,112]

Surely The Conqueror is worth a shout? 

Or is that cheating as it was filmed in a radioactive zone?

 

According to Wikipedia, only Patrick Wayne from the main cast is still alive...

[msc 18,439]

There was also a Russian film by Tarkovsky, Stalker, filmed in Estonia nearly a malfunctioning chemical factory. The director, the camera man, several others of the production team, and several of the lead actors all died of cancer within the next 20 years.

 

Then there's The Messenger, which wound up cancelled entirely, as a sudden landslide (which some claimed was caused by the productions pyro) wiped away the village Sergei Bodrov and his entire crew were staying in, killing over 50 of them, including the star director/actor.

 

 

 

[Mad Hatter2 85]

The first three Wallace and Gromit shorts are worth a mention.

[Death Impends 7,964]

12 minutes ago, Mad Hatter2 said:

The first three Wallace and Gromit shorts are worth a mention.

 

The third short had a non-Peter Sallis VA, Anne Reid, who is still living.

[msc 18,439]

1 minute ago, Death Impends said:

 

The third short had a non-Peter Sallis VA, Anne Reid, who is still living.

 

She has two curiously linked roles in Doctor Who. In the first, she is killed by vampires. In the second, she IS a vampire. The roles are entirely unconnected (as the latter is a casting gag due to the former).

 

She were also BAFTA nominated few years back, but lost to Sheridan Smith...

[bladan 293]

Night of the living dead? They were already dead when the film was new

[YorkshireBanker 168]

Once Margaret Barton dies the entire cast of Brief Encounter will be dead

[Spade_Cooley 9,519]

We can, unsurprisingly, cross off the oldest surviving movie, 1888's Roundhay Garden Scene, although we can't do the same for the backstage crew as its director, Louis Le Prince, went missing two years later and his body has never been found. 

 

EDIT: Absolute fucking state of this run-on sentence, for which I apologise.

[drol 11,944]

5 minutes ago, Spade_Cooley said:

We can, unsurprisingly, cross off the oldest surviving movie, 1888's Roundhay Garden Scene, although we can't do the same for the backstage crew as its director, Louis Le Prince, went missing two years later and his body has never been found. 

He probably reincarnated as 12 Angry Men James A. Kelly, only to disappear again after that.

[DemBones 36]

On 2/10/2018 at 04:57, bladan said:

Night of the living dead? They were already dead when the film was new

 

An interesting quirk with that film - out of the actors who played the seven people trapped in the farmhouse, the three men are all dead (two of them died relatively young), and the four women are all still alive (the oldest, Marilyn Eastman, is 84, and the youngest is 60).

 

On the subject of zombie movies, the cult favorite Zombies of Mora Tau (1957) is down to two living cast members, both quite old: Autumn Russell (b. 1930) and actor/stuntman Chuck Hicks (b. 1927).