Heath Ledger
The 'Brokeback Mountain' and The Dark Knight actor passed away after an accidental drug overdose on January 22, 2008, when he was 28 years old. Heath Ledger was playing Tony in the film The Imaginary of Doctor Parnassus, but he was not halfway through the project when his body was found dead in his New York apartment. Just months before his death, Ledger had finished filming his penultimate role, as the Joker in "The Dark Knight," for which he won a posthumous Oscar.
To finish the film, director Terry Gilliam contacted three big Hollywood stars.
Gilliam, one of the founders of the British comedy group Monty Python, said sometime later at the San Sebastian Festival. "His tragedy of him, horrible as it sounds, ended up making the movie better." At first, he thought "of giving it all up", but finally the technical team convinced him. "It was difficult to find the solution because he wanted to escape from digital manipulation," said the scriptwriter, but he began to assemble the images and thought that the best thing to do was to replace him with different actors. The result is that when Ledger's character jumps into the world of imagination through the magic mirror, he is replaced by Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law, three friends of the actor who agreed to be part of the project and completed the scenes in which he appeared. Ledger's character. The actors donated their winnings to Matilda, Heath's daughter with Michelle Williams.
Paul Walker
Paul Walker died on November 30, 2013, in a car accident in California when he was in the middle of filming Fast and Furious 7, which would become his posthumous film. The actor was 40 years old when the Porsche Carrera GT that his friend Roger Rodas was driving collided with a light pole at about 151 km / h on a highway. The car, which was speeding, caught fire within a few minutes. Walker and Rodas died instantly.
The rest of the cast and the public wondered what would happen to the character of Brian O'Conner, played by Walker.
When the actor died, he was in the post-production of the seventh installment of the famous action saga, and the actor still had to complete a third of his scenes. Vin Diesel, the film's co-star and close friend of Walker, decided to "revive" him and make the film a tribute and farewell to his longtime partner.
Director James Wan and Universal Studios combined different techniques to get Walker to be present in the film. Cody and Caleb, the brothers of the deceased interpreter, lent his body for some of the scenes. The actor's face was digitally cloned and placed on their bodies through the use of CGI technology.
They also took scenes from previous films in the series that Walker appeared in that had never been used, adapting the film's script to fit. Shooting delays, coupled with the use of CGI, which is still a very expensive technology, caused the film's budget to increase by $50 million to $250 million.
Massimo Troisi
Massimo Troisi, born on February 19, 1953, into a modest family in Naples, would have loved to see the success of “Il Postino” (The Postman) throughout the world. With Frenchman Philippe Noiret as Chilean writer Pablo Neruda, and noble postman Mario Ruoppolo (Troisi), the son of a southern Italian fisherman, who slowly gains the poet's trust and, better yet, helps him woo Beatrice Russo (Maria Grazia Cucinotta) the village waitress. “Il Postino” had been a very important project for the Italian actor. In fact, he had been one of the authors of the script and co-directed the film with Michael Radford, who in the final stretch of shooting was in charge alone.
Unfortunately, he failed to appreciate the fruits of his labor and the impact the film made. On June 4, 1994, barely 12 hours after shooting the last scene, Massimo Troisi died in Ostia (Rome) while he was sleeping, the victim of a heart condition that he had suffered for some time. At the age of 41, his death found him in the house of his sister Annamaria, where he had sought refuge after the exhaustion of a demanding job that he should not have faced.
For his work in this acclaimed film, Troisi was posthumously nominated for the Best Actor Oscar.
Brandon Lee
On May 11, 1994, The Raven was released, a feature film that came to the big screen in full mourning because during filming its protagonist, Brandon Lee, had lost his life at age 28, on March 31, 1993, in a strange episode when I was shooting the Alex Proyas film. A bullet that should have been a blank turned out to be real and went through his abdomen. With just three days of shooting to go, Lee was shot dead by himself and his co-star Michael Massee, who never imagined he would become an unwitting executioner. The investigation concluded that one of the real bullet casings got stuck in the gun's barrel, and two weeks later, Massee was holding that same gun, and no one checked to see if it was empty.
The bullet that killed Brandon Lee - the son of martial arts star Bruce Lee, who also died in the middle of filming the 1973 movie Game of Death - had not been handled well. It was thought of canceling the production, but they finally decided to go ahead avoiding close-ups; recycling unused images of Lee; and digitally adding Brandon's face onto the body of his double, Chad Stahelski. Thus they were able to finish the four scenes that allowed him to give a definitive closure to the film.
Massee was severely traumatized and for a year was unable to work. Lee's mother, Linda Lee Caldwell, sued Massee for manslaughter, an unsuccessful case. In 2005, in an interview for the Extra program, the actor acknowledged: "I think you never recover from a situation like this." In 2016 he died from stomach cancer. In life, and tormented by what happened, he was never able to see The Raven.
Carrie Fisher
Carrie Fisher will always be remembered as Princess Leia from the Star Wars saga. On December 27, 2016, the American actress she died four days after she suffered a heart attack on a plane from London to Los Angeles and was rushed to a hospital. Fisher was shooting Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi. Fortunately, the scenes that Carrie had filmed were enough to culminate her participation. Her mother, also an actress Debbie Reynolds, died a day after Carrie. The Episode IX release date is scheduled for December of this year, and thanks to advances in technology, Fisher will appear in the latest installment of the Skywalker saga.
Oliver Reed
Legendary British actor Oliver Reed died suddenly of a heart attack on May 2, 1999, in Valletta, Malta, during a break from shooting Gladiator, a Ridley Scott film starring Russell Crowe. Reed's career path was marred by his alcoholism. After shooting a few takes, the actor drank more than he should in a pub and his body couldn't take it. Oliver passed away at the age of 61. The film's producers considered reshooting Reed's scenes with another actor but ultimately decided to hire a double and digitally edit his face.
6 actors died while filming a movie
