Jonathan Banks has such a reputation for biting it on-screen that his girlfriend gave him a "death reel" of his various characters' last moments over the years as a 40th birthday present. Notably defied when he voiced Commissioner Gordon in Batman: Arkham Knight, where he not only survives the entire game, but he's one of the few heroic characters in the series to earn a happy ending.
Sean Bean, who also happens to be the most well-known example.
YouTube Commenter: Kid named after Sean Bean — dies immediately. Commenter: If Sean Bean was in a horror movie with a black guy, who would die first? Commenter: Sean Bean would play the black guy.
There's a list of his on-screen deaths here as of 2009. Interestingly, it also provides a surprisingly large list of roles he survives. But still, you know it's impressive when someone can put together a 4-minute death montage and still be accused of missing a few examples.
Parodied in The Order of the Stick's take on "Jack and the Beanstalk." Bean appears in three panels and is shot dead by an orc archer in the second.
Wizard: Hrmph. I suppose I should have seen that coming.
Which makes his role in Troy almost a Casting Gag: He plays Odysseus. The only main character who doesn't die.
Ironically, there's only one character killed in National Treasure, in which Sean Bean played the villain. And it was not Bean's character.
Subverted in Pixels. Knowing his reputation, you expect his character to die when the Centipede is after him, but against all odds, he survives.
In The Martian, Bean plays the Flight Director of the Hermes Mars mission that goes awry. And he lives, although he is forced to commit career suicide after okaying an extremely risky manoeuvre to get the stranded astronaut back from Mars behind his bosses' backs. The manoeuvre works, but he still has to fall on his sword to save NASA's reputation.
There was a character named "Shawn Bawn" in Erfworld. He's been a type of undead called "Decrypted" since his introduction except in flashbacks/prequels/interquels, but in the forums, it wasn't considered a question of if he would die ("re-die"?) so much as when.
In 2019, Bean revealed in an interview that he had begun to turn down roles where he died in order to try and avert this.
Gets a Too Dumb to Live moment in The Mandalorian. His character, Lang, talks about how his employer's cause isn't one worth laying down his life for while in a showdown with the title character... only to pull an I Surrender, Suckers and try to shoot Mando with a sidearm that the latter's armor could easily No-Sell. It goes as well as you'd expect.
Ironically, Bogart's stardom is the reason he doesn't die onscreen in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Producers thought him dying would tank the film.
Clancy Brown, as he's usually a bad or very suspicious guy. And given his prolific voice actor career, he has many deaths in animation and video games too.
Steve Buscemi, when he's not either the Only Sane Man or protected by the Lunatic Loophole. It was once observed that each time he dies in a Coen brothers movie, his remains get smaller and smaller (as seen when the other characters scatter his character's ashes at the end of The Big Lebowski).
"When I get cast, I always flip to the end of the script to see if my character gets beaten up or killed. I really thought that after getting killed on The Sopranos, I should not accept scripts where I die. I mean, there's nowhere to go after getting killed by Tony Soprano. But then I got offered this great part in The Island. I didn't even make it a third of the way through the movie."
The very same The Island, it is amusing to note, also featured another death of Sean Bean.
Reportedly, he was the last actor to have died on Gunsmoke.
Laetitia Casta gets it an awful lot on-screen — she's stabbed in Gitano, shot in Rue des plaisirs, executed in the Italian miniseries Luisa Sanfelice, killed in a car crash in her first American movie Arbitrage...
Most of Chow Yun-fat's Hong Kong and Chinese roles had him dying near the end of the thing, primarily because CYF is good at playing tragic heroes.
Kim Coates dies much more often than he survives. His death reel has its own website and includes 32 deaths, but there are so many that the maker of that video is apparently contemplating doing a follow-up death reel with 20+ more deaths. Curiously, whenever he co-stars with Sean Bean, Kim always survives.
Billy Connolly has made light of this in some of his standup routines.
Billy: I'm a huge filmstar...but you have to hurry to the movies because I usually die in the first fifteen fucking minutes. I'm the only guy I know who died in a fucking Muppet movie!note Muppet Treasure Island, for the curious
Elisha Cook Jr. was known as Hollywood's "fall guy" for several years in the Golden Age of Hollywood for dying in a surprising amount of movies (usually in the role of an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain or a shady mercenary). Cook even stated in an interview that he might have died in "fifty, a hundred... at least that many."
Clea DuVall, in a career spanning over 80 roles, has died in almost a quarter of them.
"I feel like I'm always doing dramas where I'm getting killed or crying. I've been decapitated, I've been murdered by a serial killer, I've been killed by my husband, I've been disappeared by a ghost..."
Noticeably averted by Clint Eastwood, who in his six-decade career has only been killed four or fivenote possibly six, considering his character in Escape from Alcatraz most likely drowned in the attempt, though if a letter allegedly written by John Anglin is anything to go by it's just as likely he lived free under a pseudonym for 46 more years following the escape times. He dies in The Beguiled, Honkytonk Man, The Bridges of Madison County (this one, off-screen) and Gran Torino, and High Plains Drifter hints that his character may have been Dead All Along.
Being an aversion, Jodie Foster dies in feature film roles only twice, but her one on-screen death (in Elysium, where Foster's Delacourt is stabbed with a mirror shard by mercenary Kruger (Sharlto Copley)) is very graphic.
Dwight Frye's roles consisted of two things: playing weirdos who die.
Classic French actor Jean Gabin seems to die in every other movie he starred in during the '30s. These films include (but are not limited to) Pépé le Moko, Le Quai des brumes, La Bête Humaine, and Le Jour Se Lève.
Judy Garland is another aversion. Her sole death scene was in Little Nellie Kelly, one of two things for which the film is notable (the other being a scene where she sings "Singin' in the Rain" ten years before Gene Kelly made his film of the same name).
Jeff Goldblum technically has four deaths in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) (in order the first two attempts at Pod!Jack, Jack himself, and his pod person replacement). From there, other characters of his who bite the dust — usually disreputable sorts — are Calvin "Slick" Stanhope (Hoist by His Own Petard of the knife in his boot), Seth Brundle/Brundlefly (Mercy Kill shotgun blast to the head), the Pianist in The Favour, the Watch and the Very Big Fish (tried to Walk on Water and failed, though this might be suicide), David Jason (shot), Agent Fulbright (Fay Grim; car bomb), Deputy Kovacs (knife attack, and this was after his poor cat was slain), Milton Krampf (stabbed), and "Niagara" (throat ripped out). He's also played two characters who die but recover — Mister Frost's physical body dies but since he's actually Satan he can just pull a Grand Theft Me, and the plot of Hideaway kicks off when Hatch Harrison is medically brought back from the dead after drowning in a car accident. As a hoodlum in Chain of Fools, he suffers a Rasputinian Death as a Running Gag. Ironically enough, he averts this in one of his biggest roles, Ian Malcolm, who was Spared by the Adaptation (the literary Malcolm's death even gets retconned in the sequel).
Over the course of her career, Danielle Harris has played characters who have been killed off. Then again, that's what happens when you're a horror movie star.
John Hawkes has actually had to say "I don't die in every movie I appear in."
Lance Henriksen, who works a lot, and often doesn't get to the end, helped by often playing the villain. Even in an animated role, as he voices Tarzan's gorilla father in the Disney movie and is shot by the bad guy. He and Bill Paxton also hold one of the most interesting distinctions: They are the only two actors to have been killed by an Alien, a Terminator and a Predator. However, Bill was killed on-screen by all three — when Lance's character is shot in The Terminator, the camera only shows the robot.
Oscar Isaac dies an awful lot, even in cases such as Sucker Punch, where he is stabbed in the fantasy world but survives in reality. He even appears to be a Decoy Protagonist who apparently bites it in The Force Awakens before a triumphant return. Amusingly, in a case of What Could Have Been, Poe Dameron was originally supposed to die, but it was rewritten due to awareness of this trope being in effect. Moon Knight (2022) offers a case where Isaac is killed and has to escape the afterlife.
Porn star Ron Jeremy dies in pretty much every non-pornographic movie he stars in.
In 2016, Felicity Jones appeared in three movies: Inferno, Rogue One and A Monster Calls. She doesn't survive any of them (although in the third, she dies offscreen, aside from a fatal fall while appearing in a nightmare sequence).
Klaus Kinski, especially in his early movies. He was one of the actors who appeared most in the Edgar Wallace series and his characters never got to see the end of the one they appeared in.
Chiaki Kuriyama is known both for starring in low-profile horror flicks and dying dramatically in them. About the only media she does not die in are J-dramas and Japanese dubs of foreign media.
Up until recently, Olga Kurylenko's roles generally consisted of her having sex and then getting killed (rare exception: Quantum of Solace, where the other girl sleeps with James Bond and dies, while Kurylenko does neither and survives). This is taken to its logical conclusion in Seven Psychopaths, where she spends her ten minutes of screentime having sex and getting killed.
When she first started out, Queen Latifah seemed to get killed a lot; she was in three movies in quick succession (Set It Off, The Bone Collector and Sphere) where she was respectively shot, stabbed and killed by jellyfish.
The great Christopher Lee, a serious contender for the greatest amount of recorded screen deaths. A side effect of being Typecast as so many bad guys, as seen here. Even the odd heroic character of his isn't safe, as films like Night of the Big Heat and Airport 77 demonstrate. Also provides the page quote. According to his autobiography, he once caught his kids watching late-night TV and playing a guessing game called "How Will Daddy Die This Time?"
When his role is more substantial than a cameo, Meat Loaf gets killed quite a bit. In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it happens close to dinner. With an icepick.
Mads Mikkelsen made his Hollywood debut getting killed in King Arthur (2004). He's ever since amassed villains who die (including a Bond villain whose death isn't even the climax of the movie), a return to his home Denmark only to get beheaded in A Royal Affair, and a sympathetic role in Rogue One also not saving him. While the title character of Hannibal is presumably Saved by Canon, the series still ends with Mikkelsen falling down a cliff.
He manages to survive as the lead of The Salvation, but this requires 90% of the rest of the cast to be sacrificed, including fellow CKA Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
The same extends to Shailene Woodley, most of whose major roles feature her as a character whose friends and family end up dying around her. The Descendants, Divergent, The Fault in Our Stars. The Spectacular Now doesn't feature a death, but her boyfriend nearly gets into a car crash. Had the final Divergent movie been made, she finally would have gotten to die.
Kylie Minogue. Even though she hasn't starred in many roles, she dies in the majority of them. In Holy Motors, she is Driven to Suicide; in San Andreas, she is among the casualties of an earthquake; in Cut, she is slashed to death. Not to mention her role in a special Doctor Who episode, "Voyage of the Damned", where her character dies as well, and her role in the video of "Where the Wild Roses Grow", where she is killed by Nick Cave's character. Ironically, her most well-known character, Cammy White, survives the events of her movie.
David E. Paetkau is one of the horror genre's whipping boys, having been offed in several horror movies he appeared in, including, most famously, Final Destination 2.
Joe Pantoliano (probably best known as Cypher from The Matrix) gets killed in most of his major film roles and quite brutally on The Sopranos. The chronologically-reversed Christopher Nolan film Memento even starts with his character's brains blown out!
The late Bill Paxton, who essentially never played a character that's survived him appearing in anything with Michael Biehn, and holds the distinction of being killed by an Alien, a Predator, andThe Terminator (Lance Henriksen is the only other person to share the title, and his death to a Terminator was offscreen). Like Tom Cruise, he died many times during Edge of Tomorrow. Then there's Navy Seals (1990) and Tombstone (where his character Morgan Earp was Doomed by Canon). Granted, if Michael Biehn's not in the movie, his characters don't die nearly as often (one notable exception being on TV, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.). He was even shot and killed at the end of Big Love, in which he played a polygamous family man who owned a home improvement store.
Brad Pitt has at least ten deaths, a few of them esoteric (Cool World, where he dies but is revived as a cartoon; Meet Joe Black, where after death his body is taken over by The Grim Reaper; Fight Club, where he's an evil split personality who vanishes after the original shoots himself) and includes an amusing Death by Cameo in Deadpool 2.
Christopher Plummer, including two animated ones in 9 and Up. Along with action deaths such as Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, Plummer is also prone to being struck by disease — his Oscar-winning role in Beginners has him falling victim to lung cancer. His final film, Knives Out, features him as the murder victim.
The late Harve Presnell had a reputation for getting killed on camera a lot: getting shot in Fargo, beaten to death in Face/Off, a memo spike in an episodes of Monk, sky-jumped sans parachute in The Pretender, and probably many more.
Daniel Radcliffe is being slowly but surely molded into one, as seen in December Boys, The Simpsons (granted, his character did have it coming, having suckered Lisa into becoming a vampire and not letting her back out once she starts to have second thoughts), and The Woman in Black (also featuring a survival by fellow CKA Ciaran Hinds). Additionally, in the infamous Swiss Army Man he's already dead. Technically, he also died in Harry Potter, although not permanently.
Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney were quite often sentenced to death by the Hays Office, their only crime being that they were also typecast as gangsters. They generally only survived after making a Heel–Face Turn.
Eric Roberts. His Star-Making Role was as an infamous Murder-Suicide perpetrator in Star 80, and the subsequent Typecasting as a sleazy guy usually ensures he will get killed at some point. Even if he doesn't die in any given movie, his fate will probably be ambiguous, as demonstrated when Sal Maroni gets involved in a car accident and at the very least suffers further injuries in The Dark Knight. Interestingly, he once playedThe Master in Doctor Who, which is rather funny since that character has incredible Joker Immunity.
Chico Roland, a Token Minority African-American actor in many Japanese films from the 50s to the 80s, usually died horribly in most of his appearances, for example, getting his tongue telepathically ripped out by Hiroshi Fujioka in ESPY, Getting skeletonized TWICE in Warrior of Love Rainbowman, being killed in a laboratory explosion in Kamen Rider Super-1, being emasculated by Sonny Chiba in one of the most infamous scenes from The Streetfighter... about the only roles where he did not die a horrible death are as an MP in Toshio Masuda's The Imperial Japanese Empire and Prophesies of Nostradamus.
Eliza Scanlen's career has only just recently taken off, but right away she got a streak of three movies (Little Women (2019), Baby Teeth, The Devil All the Time) and a TV show where her character doesn't make it. An article on her, understandably called "Live, Die, Repeat", has Scanlen noting this. Once the trailer for her film Old appeared, Twitter was abuzz hoping she would not die in it - alas, it was not to be.
Averted by Arnold Schwarzenegger in films outside the Terminator franchise with the only non-Terminator film in which his character dies being End of Days. At most, The Running Man has the producers of the Deadly Game faking his death by pasting Arnold's face on someone else.
Andy Serkis is mostly known for playing motion-captured characters, many of whom are monsters or villains, thus ultimately subjecting him to frequent deaths. However, not even his non-motion-capture roles are safe, and if he survives one film in a franchise, he'll likely die in a later installment. In the period of 2017 to early 2018, he's had three charactersdie ina row (and the first of these three isn't a villain).
Gary Sinise has at least nine, mostly for playing the bad guy. Forrest Gump offers a variation, where Lt. Dan's ancestors who look just like him die in battle, but he himself doesn't and takes long to accept life again.
During Nazi Germany times, Swedish-German actress Kristina Söderbaum tended to play characters who'd melodramatically die at the end of their films, sometimes via suicide by drowning. She was even given the Embarrassing Nicknamedie Reichswasserleiche ("Drowned Corpse of the Reich") for it.
Averted by Sylvester Stallone (the only movie where he dies on-screen is Death Race 2000note Sly had filmed the scene where Rambo dies in First Blood, before everyone decided he was better off Spared by the Adaptation.), who even tried to change the ending of F.I.S.T. so his character Johnny Kovak wouldn't get killed — he failed, but the film freezeframes just as a gunshot is heard so Johnny technically doesn't bite it onscreen. It's telling that Joe Eszterhas, who wrote the original script (guess who shares screenplay credit) and the novelization, saw to it that Johnny had a more protracted demise in the latter.
Donald Sutherland has over 20 deaths on his resume, with many of his later roles seeing his character end up suffering a nasty case of Mentor Occupational Hazard. He's not even safe in comedy films, as appearances in movies like Beerfest and Horrible Bosses can attest.
Hilary Swank. It was once remarked, after Million Dollar Baby's release, that she seems to have made a career out of being beaten to death. Her third attempt at going after the Oscar was in Amelia, about a woman who mysteriously vanished.
Quentin Tarantino, tends to cast himself in small roles in his movies, generally as stupid and unpleasant characters who are rapidly killed off. Which makes a certain amount of sense — limiting your onscreen time by having your character die means you don't have to do two jobs for the entire shoot. The few times he's appeared as an actor in films he didn't direct have also tended to involve violent deaths. The biggest, if not only, exception is Pulp Fiction, where he aids and abets the main characters and is handsomely rewarded for it.
To be a fan of Danny Trejo is to watch a movie he's in bearing the additional burden of hoping his character doesn't die early in the film. Word of God is that Trejo, himself a reformed criminal who came close to facing the death penalty once (which convinced him to turn his life around), intentionally asks that his bad guy characters end up either dead or in prison since he wants people to get the idea that crime doesn't pay.
Conrad Veidt got cast as doomed tragic heroes or villains so often he rarely survived a movie without dying. His female fans started a "Don't Let Conrad Veidt Die On The Screen" club in 1941 and lobbied MGM to give him parts in which he wouldn't get killed at the end. It didn't help.
Bruce Willis, whose biggest box office success was playing a ghost, and has more than ten other on-screen deaths. Notable is Looper where his past self commits to suicide to kill the future version, effectively dying twice.
Anna May Wong felt doomed to have "the woman who died a thousand deaths" on her tombstone, and she wasn't very far off—institutional racism in Hollywood during her time relegated her to Madama Butterfly-type or Dragon Lady roles that inevitably ended in death. Ironically she died right before she was about to play a character who didn't - Flower Drum Song's Madam Liang. She's about to kill herself in Shanghai Express too but instead kills the villain and saves the day! Further irony is that the role she was infamously snubbed for (O-Lan in The Good Earth) dies in the course of the story, but the role she was offered and turned down (an unsympathetic concubine called Lotus) survives.
A Mook with a particularly distinctive beard and moustache appeared in several popular action films like John Wick, The Equalizer, and The Accountant (2016); they're all played by the same actor, Tait Fletcher, who's an MMA fighter and stunt man.
Ingrid Pitt often played a vampire or a villain who died horribly after The Vampire Lovers made her British horror's favorite Lesbian Vampire. Countess Dracula doesn't end with her dying, but she's in a cell for her crimes and execution is presumably going to follow.
Ulrich Tukur has played four characters who commit suicide — Kurt Gerstein in Amen (hangs himself), Henning von Tresckow in the TV film Stauffenberg (blows himself up with a grenade), Erwin Rommel in Rommel (ingests a cyanide pill) and Gérard Hutchinson in The Axe (shoots himself). Three of them were World War IIGerman officers who did something against the Nazi regime, and the fourth shoots himself with a pistol from the era (a LügerP08).
Armenian actor Vladimir Episkoposyan claims to have died on film in over 100 roles (though his filmography doesn't actually back that claim up) and titled his biography "Russia's main corpse". Playing mostly scary Caucasian henchmen in a bunch of 90's B-movies certainly helped pad his death count.
Sean Connery delved into this in his post-Bond career, with Robin Hood, King Arthur, Draco the Dragon and Allan Quartermain.
Movies:
The French film Les cent et une nuits de Simon Cinéma, directed by Agnès Varda in honour of the centenary of cinema in 1995, features a funny conversation between Michel Piccoli and Gérard Depardieu in which they discuss the many varied ways in which they died unnatural deaths with clips of their death scenes from various movies, including Piccoli eating himself to death and dying with a long loud fart in La Grande Bouffe and Depardieu being burned at the stake in The Return of Martin Guerre.
as of 2009. Interestingly, it also provides a surprisingly large list of roles he survives. But still, you know it's impressive when someone can put together a 4-minute death montage
