Some people live for their work, but others prefer to die for it. Just look at Saoirse Ronan. The actor has been forced to endure a litany of painful deaths for our viewing pleasure. Without giving away any spoilers, she has died from heatstroke, been poisoned, turned into a vampire and been murdered in an unspecified manner. She was also beheaded, and she died of Prussian Gripe, a disease so rare it hasn’t been invented yet. And we haven’t even counted her deaths on the small screen. The Carlow woman is only 30 so who knows how many more painful endings are in store for her?
I bring you these statistics courtesy of the Cinemorgue wiki page, which keeps a useful tally on the number of deaths endured by actors on the big and small screen.
The page also helpfully breaks down the cause of death – impalement, electrocution, strangulation and so on. It provides some famous last words and as you might imagine, there are many “No, no, no, nos” and an occasional, “I am invincible” before the character realises that he is not, in fact invincible.
While Saoirse Ronan has racked up an impressive death tally, she’s not the top of the table when it comes to Irish actors shuffling off this mortal coil. If Cinemorgue is correct, that honour would go to Liam Neeson who was tapped on the shoulder by the Grim Reaper 31 times. He has been impaled, shot in the head, stabbed in the stomach, killed by a wolf and vaporised by a high-powered plasma gun. So while he may be famous for having a very particular set of skills, they don’t always come in useful.
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But no Irish thespian comes close to the actor who has died more than any other, Danny Trejo. The legendary tough guy has been killed in a whopping 80 movies. He has been blown up by a bomb in a wine bottle, had his neck snapped, been stabbed by a pool cue and decapitated by a zombie. Breaking Bad fans are still scarred by the role a tortoise played in his traumatic demise but his television deaths aren’t even included in this tally.
When it comes to the deaths, or near-deaths, of fictional characters, JR Ewing of Dallas fame must surely be one of the most memorable. The episode depicting his shooting was broadcast in March 1980, but it wasn’t until late November that the shooter was revealed. For eight months, the western world was delirious with curiosity wondering who had done it. When the episode revealing the shooter was aired in the US, the audience was 83 million – almost four million more people than had voted in the presidential election earlier that month.
The shooting of the Texas oil baron was even raised in the Seanad when Senator Rory Kiely noted that a school survey in Cork found that one child thought JR was the taoiseach, and not CJ Haughey.
Cork songwriter Rocky Stone may have had something to do with the Irish fascination with JR’s shooter. It took him less than two hours to write Who Shot JR Ewing? and, 40 years later, the lyrics sound like they could have been written today. “Now the burning topic of the day right across the nation is not the presidential race or galloping inflation,” he wrote with great prescience. “Who cares about the weather, what Russia might be doing. What everybody wants to know is who shot JR Ewing”.
Another man with an acronym – TR Dallas – took on the song and it shot to number one. Rocky Stone’s lyrics became the soundtrack of that Irish summer but he never really got the fame he deserved for it. Some 34 years after he wrote it, he was looking at YouTube when he discovered the song had been a hit for Swedish country music star Mats Rådberg. It turned out that the Scandinavians were also agog, wondering who had shot old JR down.
Rocky wrote for Brendan Grace and the Dixies and did what any self-respecting Cork man must do and informed the world about the greatness of Cork. He did this by writing three local histories under his real name, David McCarthy.
As for JR Ewing, he survived that shooting but went on to be shot dead when the series was revived. The man who played him, Larry Hagman, may have been famous for being shot, but he only died in six movies – the same number as Saoirse Ronan.
If she keeps dying at the rate she’s going, she’ll surely beat that old son of a Texas gun.
