THIS PROJECT BEGAN WITH AN Elvis Presley tribute concert in 2004. Elvis’s announcer, Al Dvorin, the man who’d say, “Elvis has left the building” at the end of shows back when Elvis was alive, spoke the phrase into a microphone after the performance by Elvis impersonator Paul Casey. Al got a standing ovation, then signed autographs in the lobby. One of us was there at the Trump 29 Casino in Coachella, California, that night, when some fan suggested to Al that he write his autobiography. “I know, I keep putting it off,” Al replied. “But I will one day. I have time.” He set off for home in Las Vegas the next morning, only to be killed in a car crash in the desert.
This unfortunate Elvis-related event led to a discussion that turned into an exploration that was even more ambitious and unwieldy than the one you’re about to read. It was a study of performers who died after a show. These were the show people who took their bows, wiped off the greasepaint, put on their top hats, and made it to the car or plane or back to the hotel room—and then, like poor Al Dvorin, wound up “leaving the building.” Next came an accounting of the troupers who didn’t quite make it to the stage or set, because death stuck out its bony foot and tripped them up along the way.
That exploration became an investigation that landed on an even more surprising and devastating show business phenomenon that has gone, for the most part, unexamined until now: the ones who died onstage, while performing.
The investigation took us to Broadway shows, nightclubs, dinner theaters, amphitheaters, playhouses, arenas, concert halls, auditoriums, studios, tents, movie sets, and televised events and introduced us to an illustrious group that includes actors, singers, musicians, magicians, comedians, deejays, chorus girls, models, journeymen, and social media stars—people who are remembered as much for the way they left the building as for what they did inside. (We didn’t include athletes, fighters, toreadors, race car drivers, or others who enter the field, arena, or ring, accepting that death is always a potential outcome.)
Initially, we chronicled every recorded death of a performer onstage. Our research led to hundreds of incidents, dating back centuries, and a project that turned out to be more comprehensive than any study previously attempted. Urban legends were debunked, long-held assumptions contradicted, Wikipedia-style misinformation corrected, new details from well-known stories unearthed, and the obscure stood (or were laid) shoulder to shoulder with the legendary. As the work continued and the pages flew from the calendar, however, we discovered a phenomenon just as compelling and even more frustrating: performers keep dying onstage. Every month or so, a singer would collapse mid-song, an act of violence would shatter the tranquility of a recital, or one of the new breed of social media personalities would expire live on camera before millions of fans. The number of performers who die onstage is always growing, too many and too often to be contained within the pages of a single volume.
So we boiled it down to the onstage deaths that really stood out among the rest. These are performers who died in front of an audience, grouped roughly into the categories of their specialties, with nods to additional related onstage passings that bring the total well into the three-figure range. These are our picks. The reader can debate if others deserve equal attention.
To die onstage—is it a curse? Could it be a gift? Is there any consolation in knowing that these performers died doing what they loved? And was it really the way they’d have wanted to go? Some answers, and much more, will be found in the pages to follow.