Actors Who Died Making Movies When movies are made, sometimes people get hurt and even killed. I don’t know how many of you remember Vic Morrow, but he died a tragic death trying to save a child from being killed by a helicopter gone out of control. As the helicopter headed for the child, Morrow without regard for his own safety ran toward the child to protect him, unfortunately he was killed by decapitation and two children died. He was a true hero in real life. The director John Landis was charged with two counts of involuntary manslaughter but was found innocent by a jury. Tyrone Power was a very famous actor in his time and appeared as the star in many movies. During the filming of Solomon and Sheba he had to have a sword fight in one of the scenes. When the time came and he began the fight, he suffered from a massive heart attack and died on the way to the hospital. A British actor named Roy Kinnear was acting in a movie named The Return of the Musketeers. The film was being shot in Toledo, Spain. Just a little aside, Toledo is famous for its sword making over hundreds of years. One of the scenes called for Kinnear to ride a horse. He fell from the horse and broke his pelvis. They took him to a hospital in Madrid. The strain was just too much for him and the next day he died from a heart attack. A silent film star named Martha Mansfield died on the set of The Warrens of Virginia. It can only be described as a freak accident. Between scenes she decided to take a break and sit in her car. A passerby lit a cigarette and flicked the match which unintentionally went into the car and set her highly flammable costume on fire. She was wearing a Civil War era dress which went up like a torch. She died the next day in a hospital. Paul Mantz was a very famous pilot in his time who worked in films. He has several big movies to his credit. He had been in the military but was let go for performing stunts in his plane. When it came time to film the movie, The Flight of the Phoenix, a story about reconstructing a plane from a wreck, he was asked to come out of retirement to do some of the stunts. The movie took place in the desert and as he was flying low over it, he crashed into a hill killing him instantly. Mantz was not the only pilot killed while making a movie. A pilot died performing stunts in the movie Top Gun. Art Scholl was that pilot. He was told to perform the flat spin maneuver. The plane had been equipped with heavy camera equipment and when Scholl attempted to perform the stunt he couldn’t break out of the spin. It was said Bruce Lee had offended the Chinese mob and they were after him. He had passed out while making the movie The Game of Death and it was determined in the hospital his brain had swollen. Was this because the mob did something to him? Anyway, he was released after being told it was under control, but he died in his sleep two months later. His son Brandon was filming the movie The Crow. One of the scenes called for him to be shot. When the scene took place Brandon collapsed, he had really been shot. Another crew member was almost electrocuted. It is said the gun which was supposed to be a prop gun had a bullet in it. He was taken to a hospital but doctors were unsuccessful in trying to save him. On the morning of January 27, 1951, a large flash alarmed ranchers as far away as Utah, a tremendous sound like thunder followed breaking windows as far away as Arizona. In the aftermath a pink cloud formed, a cloud alive with debris carrying radioactive energy, energy that would subtly drift across military lines, geographic markers, and eventually thousands of homes. Casually the cloud made its way east until, captured by gravity and rain, it returned to earth in the form of fallout. The total amount of radiation released from fallout from the Nevada Test Site is not known. The number of medical problems that have arisen from the tests is also a mystery. The last film personally produced by Howard Hughes, The Conqueror, starred John Wayne as Genghis Kahn in a strange, oriental western that regularly makes the worst film lists. Directed by Dick Powell, it co-starred Susan Hayward and Agnes Moorehead. It was an expensive production with elaborate sets. To find locations for the Gobi Desert sequences, Powell and his assistants scoured eight states before finding the 'perfect location' near St. George in Utah. A nearby American Indian reservation provided numerous extras to act as the Mongolian hordes. However, St. George was just 137 miles from the Nevada test site, where there had been 11 atmospheric nuclear tests the year before. Most of the filming took place in Snow Canyon, which turned out to be a radioactive 'hot spot'. After filming there from June to August 1954, cast and crew returned to the studio, accompanied by 60 tons of sand from the area, to enable retakes to be completed in the studio. Between then and 1984, 91 of the cast and crew of 220 developed various carcinomas and over half of them, including Wayne, Powell, Hayward and Moorehead had died. Another of the movie's stars, Pedro Armendariz, committed suicide in 1963, at the age of 51, when he developed terminal cancer of the lymphatic system. He had survived cancer of the kidney in 1958. DR Robert C. Pendleton, Professor of Biology at the University of Utah, comments: "With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic. The connection between fallout radiation and cancer in individual cases has been practically impossible to prove conclusively. But in a group this size, you'd expect only 30 some cancers to develop...I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would hold up in a court of law." The children of John Wayne and Susan Hayward accompanied their parents on location. Michael Wayne developed skin cancer in 1975; his brother Patrick had a benign breast tumor removed in 1969. According to people magazine (10.11.80), at least one top Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA) scientist is racked by doubt over the incident. "Please, God," he said, "don't let us have killed John Wayne." The town of St. George, Utah suffered a similar fate. Uninformed of the fallout danger, and exposed in their homes for years instead of months, the residents of St. George eventually contracted cancers in staggering numbers.
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