"I could die for you in every way known to man, and in a few ways known only to scriptwriters. I could see now that provided I remained fit, the future held many more deaths yet. I could only hope that they would serve some purpose and that perhaps a reputation might come in the same way as a coral formation, which is made up of a deposit of countless tiny corpses."
This actor's character always dies. Almost inevitable if the actor is confined to villainous roles or ill-fated mentors...which explains the high number of British actors on this page.
See also Vasquez Always Dies, when actresses that play Action Girls meet this fate; Black Dude Dies First, when it's a black character that gets offed; and They Killed Kenny Again, where the repeated deaths happen to a character rather than an actor. See also Dead Star Walking, and contrast Contractual Immortality.
Websites such as Cinemorgue
help put together which actors are bound to this.
As of December 2016, the official count can be found here.
As this is a Death Trope, expect unmarked spoilers.
Example subpages:
Other examples:
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Anime & Manga
- While she does have plenty of roles that avert this, Houko Kuwashima has a mild reputation with how she has a 'Star of Death' following her, which causes a lot of her characters to die messily. This is most prevalent in the Gundam franchise where she starred in the SEED Duology, both of her characters (Fllay and Stellar) had incredibly tragic deaths.
- Her reputation must have been quite known amongst anime fandom that when Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War is announced to have a voice dubbing via Fire Emblem Heroes, and that's the game with highest mortality count for its protagonists, they picked her to do Tailtiu; the Genki Girl who's considered to have the most heartwrenching unavoidable death amongst the death tolls of the game.
- Mamoru Miyano is a mild example if Death Note, High School Of The Dead, Black Butler and Tekken: Blood Vengeance are anything to go by.
- Soma Saito died in both of his big breakout roles (with one even being a Death by Adaptation!), and has since been reliably typecast as the "best friend character who dies." If he's in a show where Anyone Can Die, he's probably playing one of the bodies.
- Micah Solusod is famous for this; over half his roles have died. Though he's come out of it with roles like Soul and Touma, it's still a Running Gag with his fans.
- Brett Weaver is also made famous because of his roles as Roy Fokker, Gai Daigoji and Toji Suzuhara, all of which die, even if he's occasionally got roles where he didn't die (although played with when he's playing Goh Saruwatari, the guy isn't dead, but he came really close to it, cocooned by the Insania Virus and all). Up to the point that he was nearly chosen to play Kamina until it was announced that Kyle Hebert got the role.
- A lot of anime series love casting Yoshino Takamori when they need an attractive mom type who gets killed off, Trisha Elric and Carla Yeager being the biggest examples.
- Michael Sinterniklaas has a knack for voicing several characters who often end up meeting violent ends, both with anime roles Priest Mahad, Yuichi Kannagi, Dagger, Utakata and any of his Bleach characters, plus game ones such as Curtis, Godot Vilfort, and Oscar Dragonia. Even his Western Animation roles aren't completely immune to this, such as Leonardo (see "Same As It Never Was") or Dean Venture (see "Return to Spider Skull Island" and especially "Powerless in the Face of Death"). And then he was cast as Jyushimatsu in the English dub of Osomatsu-san, who has enough deaths to rival Dean. In other words, don't expect this status to go away any time soon.
- Satomi Koorogi has a few of her usual Token Mini-Moe roles exist solely for them to tragically die by the end, inluding Nina Tucker, Cal Devens, and Ushio Okazaki - Nina and Ushio in particular get ranked for many's saddest anime deaths. That said, the latter two's demises can either be prevented or undone.
Live-Action TV
Actors:
- British actor Jamie Bamber has had so many of his characters get killed off (eleven at last count) that they're apparently running out of ways to do it. Six have been shot—Tom from Ghost Rig, Tony Dewhurst from The Scarlet Pimpernel note , Mitchell Hoban from Outcasts, Vincent Plowman from The Messengers, Archie Kennedy from Horatio Hornblower, and Matt Devlin from Law & Order: UK. The final two even died in an eerily similar manner—Blood from the Mouth and Heroic Sacrifice, prompting a commentator in one of LOUK's forums to snark, "Jamie looks pretty good dying onscreen. As well he should, he's done it so many times already." And the other five? Two of them (on Cold Case and Ghost Whisperer) were already dead when the show started, the third (on Star Trek Continues) was outright made a Red Shirt (prompting their commentators to wonder if the producers were poking fun at this trend), the fourth, the titular John Doe: Vigilante, died after taking a Cyanide Pill, and the fifth, in the film The Car: Road to Revenge, was an Amoral Attorney murdered by criminals. His appearances on House and Rizzoli & Isles just barely subverted this, having his character become very ill on the first show and fall from a bridge in the second, only to recover/be rescued in the next episode.
- Noah Bean has died on four well-known shows already: a Victim of the Week on Cold Case, as Ellen's fiancè David Damages, Fletcher on Nikita and Regina's lost love Daniel on Once Upon a Time.
- Speaking of Sean Bean, the poster boy of this:
- Watching his star-making performance in Sharpe while aware of this reputation can get pretty surreal. Scenes where the original audience would have been confident in our hero's Plot Armor — such as his (faked) execution in Sharpe's Honour — can become surprising nail-biters today.
- A popular meme lampshading this trope is Richard Sharpe: So badass being played by Sean Bean couldn't kill him.
- Michael Biehn and Sean Bean appear on Curfew. Bean's character dies at the end of the third episode while Biehn's dies within ten minutes of his introduction.
- He gets killed off in the TV Mini Series Scarlett also.
- He also dies as Robert Aske (the leader of the Pilgrimage of Grace executed for it) in the 2003 Henry VIII miniseries.
- His death as Ned Stark in the first season of Game of Thrones was surprisingly shocking to fans of the show (less so to fans of the then 15-year-old book).
Lary Williams: (sputters in disbelief) How is it that...the character that you portray as the central main character...as the protagonist of this fucking series...not to mention, Sean Bean is probably the highest...is probably among the highest if not THE highest paid actor on your payroll... He's on all the advertisements. Your press photos. He's on the goddamn cover of the FUCKING BOOK! And he doesn't make it past season one?
- Also "Red Wedding" related, this quote from Honest Trailers:
Honest Trailers: Ride along on an adventure where any lead character can die, whether you're Sean Bean, Sean Bean's wife, Sean Bean's best friend, Sean Bean's son, Sean Bean's daughter-in-law, Sean Bean's family dogs, or Sean Bean's unborn grandkid. All men must die...who are in any way close to Sean Bean!note - Medici has him as the Big Bad Wannabe of its Season 2, Jacopo de Pazzi. Like Robert Aske above, he was historically executed for his crimes.
- Even the advertising of some of his recent projects has gotten into this: TNT's advertisements for their TV series Legends featured the hashtag #DontKillSeanBean.
- Actually defied in Snowpiercer at the end of season 3. Bean, as the villainous Mr. Wilford at the mercy of the protagonists, is deliberately put in suspended animation rather than killed for fear of making a martyr out of him.
- One of his early roles was in Inspector Morse, where he played a prisoner who was accidently poisoned. Despite what you are now thinking, he actually survived that and somehow made it all the way to the closing credits.
- Kristen Bell has died in Heroes, Deadwood, and her 2 appearances in Robot Chicken have earned her brutal fatalities. Even video games aren't exempt since her character gets Killed Off for Real in Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. Anna in Frozen even comes very close to getting killed, by freezing into an ice statue. The Good Place goes a bit further with Bell's character dying before the show takes place.
- Michael Coleman is a go-to for walk-on deaths in Canadian productions including Supernatural and Eureka.
- Rick Cosnett has died in, so far, all three of his regular/recurring roles on American TV; killed as Wes Maxfield on The Vampire Diaries, suicide on both The Flash (2014) as Detective Edward 'Eddie' Thawne and Quantico as Elias Harper.
- Alan Dale has now died of a heart attack on three different shows (Neighbours, The O.C. and Ugly Betty), and, oddly enough, each show had his character in a relationship with a gold-digger and in a strained relationship with his adult children at the time. He's also shot dead on Lost. On Dynasty (2017) meanwhile, his character is killed in a car crash. (Averted on 24 of all things.)
- Despite having a relatively small number of tv and film credits to his name, Colin Donnell is developing a reputation for this trope; most notably, his characters on Arrow and The Affair were both series regulars whose death had a significant impact on the show. He's died in at least one other guest star role (Unforgettable) as well.
- Christopher Eccleston almost always ends up dying in whatever movie or TV series he's starring in, so much so that this isn't really considered a spoiler anymore (from a certain point of view, even including the end of his tenure as the Doctor). If the story is dark enough to feature character deaths, the question isn't if his character will die, just how. One could easily list at least 16 death scenes of varying brutality or (rarer) characters that die off-screen. His mini-series Blackout is probably an intentional subversion in this regard. His character ends up deciding not to commit suicide at the very last second.
- Actress Jasmine Guy doesn't necessarily die chronically, but several films/series immediately preceding or following A Different World have killed her characters off. Namely, "Dominic La Rue" in Harlem Nights, "Roxie" in Dead Like Me, and "Grams" in The Vampire Diaries. In the latter two series, her character continues to exist after being killed, however.
- Keeley Hawes very rarely survives to the end credits in her TV roles.
- Jacob Kogan, at least in some of his television roles.
- In the Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Blood Brothers", Tripp Raines is killed with a rock to the head by his half-brother Arturo.
- In the final episode of Delocated, David is choked to death by his father.
- It remains to be seen whether his character Luca Jameson will live or die in The Tomorrow People.
- Law Lok-lam is probably the Trope Codifier in Hong Kong that he 'died' five times in different dramas in a 24-hour period only by coincidence...Though this can be justified by the fact that he has played a lot of roles for many years, and the company he works for has a shortage of elderly actors at that time period.
- Jaime Murray has died in Warehouse 13 (ok she gets better but still), Spartacus: Gods of the Arena, Dexter and Fright Night 2: New Blood. Several jokes were made when Hustle finished that she had actually survived the show's run.
- Pedro Pascal lampshades this in a WIRED interview that he usually dies in his TV roles such as Game of Thrones and Law & Order and its two spin-offs (Law & Order: Criminal Intent and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit). He's not even safe in some of his movie roles such as Kingsman: The Golden Circle and The Equalizer 2. His Triple Frontier co-star, Oscar Isaac, jokingly mentions that Pedro made a career of dying spectacularly.
- Michael Shanks is this for TV roles - Stargate SG-1, Smallville, Stargate SG-1, Burn Notice, Stargate SG-1, Andromeda, Stargate SG-1, Sanctuary, plus that Little Red Riding Hood remake. Seriously not kidding about SG-1. (It's said that Dr. Daniel Jackson doesn't have a medical history, he has a medical encyclopedia.)
- Kevin Tighe. With the exception of Emergency! and Roy Desoto, Kevin seems to die in the majority of the roles he plays. He often chooses villain roles, probably to distance himself from Roy, and that is partly the reason.
- Indira Varma has racked up a few. Among her most notable performances she’s died in include Game of Thrones, Rome, Torchwood and Obi-Wan Kenobi. Extra credit for the last one, having died twice.
- Jared Harris has died multiple times across multiple series and films, and apparently earned the nickname "Kenny". His most famous deaths have been suicide by hanging (twice!), being thrown over a waterfall by Sherlock Holmes, and lung cancer triggered by smoking and unexpectedly having to be king during World War II, but he's been killed at least a dozen times by his count:
"So far I've been shot 6 times, (by a Gatling gun, & by a U-Boat), eaten by sharks, hurled over the Reichenbach Falls, bludgeon with a chair leg, roasted by Mt. Vesuvius, hung twice, & died in my sleep. But my personal favourite — being split in half by the space-time continuum."
Series:
- Denis O'Hare has died onscreen in three of his five American Horror Story roles. (Granted, he came back as a ghost in two of those.) In the other two seasons, his characters may have survived, though one had an inoperable brain tumour and the other had been heavily mutilated.
- Geoffrey Palmer has appeared as three different characters in three different Doctor Who stories and each time been killed off early onnote . By the third time it was a Running Gag.
- An in-universe example in Monk: In the 100th episode, Randy shows up with an actress girlfriend whose specialty is getting killed in TV shows. It becomes a Brick Joke at the end of the episode when Stottlemeyer and the culprit of the week are wrestling with a gun; it goes off randomly and she certainly looks like she's been shot by accident. But then she recovers and admits, embarrassed, that she acted like she'd been shot on reflex.
Music
- Many of Ice Nine Kills' music videos star frontman Spencer Charnas' girlfriend Nadia Teichmann, often playing somebody who gets killed. This actually becomes a plot point in the music videos for their album Welcome to Horrorwood, which have a Story Arc where Spencer is charged with her murder. The cops are trying to figure out exactly which video actually depicts the crime, and needless to say, they get fed up real fast.
Theatre
- It would probably not surprise anyone that Sean Bean's debut acting role after graduating from RADA in 1983 is Tybalt from Romeo and Juliet. He would later follow up as Romeo himself in 1986 and as Macbeth in 2002.
- In-Universe, Mortimer from The Fantasticks. He specializes in death scenes and is known as "the man who dies."
- Lea Salonga always lands roles in Broadway where her character dies, whether she's Fantine or Eponine on Les Misérables or Kim in Miss Saigon.
- Samantha Barks has played Eponine and also Nancy from Oliver!. Of her role on Amélie The Musical, she remarks happily that she doesn't die for once.
Video Games
- As you would have it, Sean Bean's foray into video game roles has followed him here too:
- The reaction to Sean Bean being cast as the English dub voice of the father of the protagonist from Final Fantasy XV in the prequel movie Kingsglaive was that Square Enix basically spoiled his fate in the game proper in advance. Sure enough, he dies at the end of the film which occurs concurrently with the first chapter of the game.
- That's not the only video game in which Sean Bean dies. Back in 2006, Sean Bean voiced Emperor Martin Septim in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Septim performs a Heroic Sacrifice at the end of the main quest.
- Played straight in Civilization VI, of all things. He's the Narrator, but he also voices a character in the intro movie. Said character dies.
- He plays the first Elusive Target in Hitman 2, so he may or may not die depending on the player's skills. Ironically enough, his character is a rogue spy infamous for constantly cheating death.
Other
- An odd case is Joe Buckley, a fan of Baen Books, who is frequently featured as a cameo within the books only to be killed off in short order.
- Italian actor Giuseppe "Beppe" Fiorello, brother of far-more-known showman Rosario Fiorello, is infamous for this, so much that he dedicated - with his brother - a stand-up sketch to parody and lampshade this trope when Rosario's holding a dying Beppe in his arms. And they milk death being overly dramatic for all it's worth.
Beppe: You... you know, the moment my share reaches its top is whenever I die.
- David Bowie could qualify as this if you just considered his musical output. The protagonist in "We Are Hungry Men" is eaten by those men, Ziggy Stardust dies at the hands of his own fans, Major Tom is heavily implied to die of asphyxiation or thirst in space, his businessman in the "Jump They Say" video is Driven to Suicide, and one of his Loads and Loads of Roles in his Rock Opera 1. Outside is a murder victim. One of his first film roles was as a painting come to life — not for long — in the 1969 short The Image. From there his character dies in all of the following films and TV productions: Just a Gigolo, Baal, The Hunger (both the film and the TV anthology inspired by it, as two different characters!), Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Gunslinger's Revenge, and Mr. Rice's Secret. His one major stage role was the title character in the stage version of The Elephant Man — he perishes at the end. Amazingly, his two best-known film roles, Thomas in The Man Who Fell to Earth and Jareth in Labyrinth, do survive, but then again, neither of them has anything to live for anymore.
- Jim Troken, who appears in the That Guy with the Glasses Massive Multiplayer Crossover films Suburban Knights and To Boldly Flee has played characters that die pretty early on in gory fashion.
- In early Vocaloid songs and PVs, Len Kagamine was often famous in the fandom for playing characters that died; to quote the Urban Dictionary, "He has yellow hair and dies periodically." Although it may not be true that Len dies the most, many of the songs that he died in are some of his most well known songs, and he seems to get more violent deaths than other Vocaloids.
- In Sean Bean Saves Westeros, the "real life" Sean Bean is transported into the land of Westeros of A Song of Ice and Fire. Now living as Ned Stark, not just playing him on TV, Sean Bean lampshades this more than once! He goes out of his way to keep himself alive as the "resurrected" Lord Eddard Stark.
- Sean Bean again. This time in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, when Martin Septim summons the avatar of Akatosh to defeat Mehrunes Dagon.
- In this, he still outlasts his father Uriel Septim (Patrick Stewart), who doesn't make it past the prologue.
- Once more, with suspense: Kholat features Sean Bean as the narrator, who is already dead.
- If Robin Atkin Downes is doing motion-capture for a Naughty Dog video game, you can expect him to be killed off. To date, only one character he's portrayed has made it to the end credits.
- In Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, his character, Hector Alcázar, was Dead All Along and may not have even been involved in the backstory at all.
- Also enforced in Team Fortress 2. After all, Robins' the voice actor for the Medic.
- Deconstructed with the optional Sean Bean Quest hack for Goblin Quest, which portrays Sean Bean as some kind of mentally-linked interdimensional hive mind that leads many lives and keeps getting killed, longing for death on his own terms.
- The Russian speculative literature as a whole has a Chronically Killed Publisher: Yuri Semetsky, a prominent figure in the Russian science-fiction and fantasy fandom, whose namesakes and lookalikes keep popping up in various sci-fi authors' books as secondary characters, only to be killed before the story's end. Sergey Lukyanenko is credited with starting the trend in his early books, and in the early '00s, there was even a joke award for "The Best Literary Murder of Yuri Semetsky" at the Interprescon conventions.
- Vladimir Vasilyev actually wrote in the preface of one novel that not one Yuri Semetsky was harmed during the writing.
- The Dorkly article, “These Eight Characters are Definitely Going to Die”, includes in the list both Michelle Rodriguez and Sean Bean.
Why (for Michelle Rodriguez): Because she gets so much shit done, there’s nothing left for the protagonist to do.Why (for Sean Bean): Because Sean Bean.
- The filk song "Soldier A"note is about a voice actor who only plays mooks with few lines beyond death screams.
- Peter Cullen probably qualifies by virtue of just how often he's voiced Optimus Prime, who dies so often TFWiki.net has a special page for it.
