Basic Trope: An actor is killed in many of his roles.
- Straight: Alice Actress has died in three-quarters of the major roles she's played.
- Exaggerated: Alice only plays Red Shirts.
- Downplayed: Alice's characters survive in many of her movies, but her most famous roles die.
- Justified:
- Alice's contract with the studio says that most of her characters will die.
- Alice tends to be typecast as either villains, Doomed Moral Victors, mentors, or character types who are on the higher end of the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality.
- Inverted: Alice's characters always survive.
- Subverted: Alice plays a character who looks like she's inches from death...but then miraculously pulls through.
- Double Subverted: The character is promptly offed in the sequel.
- Parodied: Each successive movie Alice does tries to outdo the last one in terms of Alice's Dying Moment of Awesome, to hilarious levels.
- Zig Zagged: Alice has been known for dying in all her major roles. In an effort to avert this she starts playing major characters who survives. But her characters get offed in the sequels anyway...
- Averted: Alice's roles sometimes die and sometimes survive, but not to an extent that she's known for her characters always dying.
- Enforced: The studio typecasts Alice as someone who dies often.
- Lampshaded: Alice gets compared to Sean Bean, concerning how many times their characters get killed off.
- Invoked: In-universe actor Bob purposely takes roles that look like prime fodder for death.
- Exploited: Alice eventually stars in a comedy about an actress whose characters get killed off all the time. Alice's character dies in every scene, but then shows up in the next scene as if nothing happened.
- Defied: Alice starts playing characters who make it till the end.
- Discussed: "Don't be one of those actors who just die all the time, Alice."
- Conversed: "Alice Actress? Bet she'll be gone by the first third."
- Deconstructed: Bob struggles to move past the niche of 'his characters always die.' His performance suffers for it.
- Reconstructed: Bob figures that if he's going to be known for being a Chronically Killed Actor, he might as well make the most of it, so his recent death scenes are hailed as the finest of his career. This also gets him offers for roles that survive.
- Played For Laughs: Alice steps onscreen, and her character is promptly killed.
- Played For Drama: Bob feels like all his roles are overshadowed by the expectation that he'll die.
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