THE SCREEN GOES DARK

They made us laugh, they made us weep. Their sudden departures left us bereft

TROUBLED STAR “Why do I feel this torture?” Marilyn Monroe (in 1955) wrote in her diary. “Or why is it that I feel less human than the others?”

The Sheik

Rudolph Valentino

1895 — 1926

GREAT GRIEF Valentino's last appearance was in Son of the Sheik; it was released two weeks after his death and became an instant hit.

The hysteria began to mount in August 1926 with reports that actor Rudolph Valentino had fallen ill with a ruptured appendix and had been taken to a New York hospital. Newspapers chronicled every fluctuation in the 31-year-old star’s breathing and temperature. Fans swamped the hospital’s phone lines. When the New York Evening Graphic published a story with the headline RUDY DEAD (he wasn’t yet), mobs collected outside on the street.

But the reaction to Valentino’s illness paled in comparison to the public’s behavior after his death. Once the actor was transported to the Frank E. Campbell funeral home in Manhattan, reporters speculated that the body on display was a hoax, prompting more drama. One afternoon, 50,000 bereft fans queued up to catch a glimpse of their idol, and Campbell’s had to seal Valentino’s coffin to prevent them from ripping locks of hair from his head. The Polish actress Pola Negri, who said she had been having an affair with the star, fainted over his bier.

And things only got worse. The day of the funeral, lines 11 blocks long formed as people waited in the rain to see Valentino’s body. Some mourners screamed and fought as they tried to reach St. Malachy’s Church. Reports circulated that several women committed suicide. About a hundred New York police officers were deployed to restore order and contain a crowd that swelled to 100,000.

It was an outpouring the likes of which had never been seen for a movie star. But in the era of swashbuckling Douglas Fairbanks and suave Ronald Colman, Valentino, with his smoldering good looks, was something else. He was arguably Hollywood’s first sex symbol, and he had unleashed the national libido. It began with his breakout role as a fiery, tangoing Argentinian in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Women, beside themselves, donned bolero jackets like the ones Valentino wore, while men tried to keep up, mimicking Valentino’s moves and slicked-back hair. When Valentino played a sadistic prince in The Sheik, female theatergoers fainted in the aisles. “Sheik” mania swept the country. Drugstores stocked Sheik brand condoms, and “The Sheik of Araby,” became a hit song.

Then came the downward slide. Valentino’s image drifted from sex symbol to dandy and he was dogged by rumors he was gay and attacked in xenophobic, homophobic editorials. Valentino seemed to get the last word when United Artists offered him $200,000 per picture, and he made two films before succumbing to peritonitis on Aug. 23, 1926.

Clearly, he had retained his hold on his fans. After his death, rumors circulated he’d been poisoned by a jealous lover. Some said he’d been injured in a fight, others that he’d been shot in a quarrel during a gay party. Doctors disputed the tales, but no matter. For decades, a veiled woman arrived at Valentino’s tomb on the anniversary of his death and placed 12 red roses and one white one on the grave. The ritual turned out to be bogus, a press agent’s stunt. Yet once it was uncovered, the nonsense continued, with competing veiled women showing up and knocking roses to the ground as they scuffled to pose for photographers.

Thousands lined up outside the Frank E. Campbell funeral home to get a glimpse of Valentino's body in its silver coffin, said to cost $10,000.

The Rebel

James Dean

1931 — 1955

HARD RAIN Dean was photographed on a drizzly day near New York City’s Times Square in 1955.

James Dean loved race cars and loved driving them fast, and that was a problem. In 1955, the 24-year-old was already an established Hollywood star, thanks to his portrayal of the tempestuous Cal Trask in East of Eden, but he had competed in three motor races and wanted to pursue more. His studio, Warner Brothers, was having none of it. Until Dean was finished shooting his next film, Giant, Warner forbade its young star from racing. It also arranged for Dean to appear in a promotional “featurette” for Giant, answering questions from actor Gig Young about his interest in auto racing. Dressed in character as ranch hand Jett Rink, Dean warned audiences about the dangers of speeding. The scripted conclusion called for him to say, “The life you save may be your own,” but Dean ad-libbed a different line: “The life you might save might be mine.”

The actor’s comment, of course, was eerily prescient. On Sept. 21, just days after Giant wrapped, Dean traded in his Porsche 356 Super Speedster for an even faster Porsche 550 Spyder—nicknamed Little Bastard. He was eager to test it out in competition, and the next opportunity was a race in Salinas, Calif., on Oct 1.

Normally a driver would arrange for a race car to be towed to the track, but Rolf Wütherich, Dean’s mechanic, encouraged the actor to drive the car the 298 miles to Salinas himself to get comfortable with the Spyder. They set off together, followed by Bill Hickman, a Warner Bros. stunt driver and good friend of Dean’s, and Sanford Roth, a photographer for Collier’s magazine. The group departed at about 1:15 p.m. Two hours later, Dean had already been issued a speeding ticket—for driving 65 miles an hour, 10 mph over the speed limit—just south of Bakersfield, Calif.

Dean and Wütherich raced ahead and at roughly 5:45 p.m. crossed the Polonio Pass traveling west on Route 466. As they approached the intersection with Route 41 outside Cholame, they crossed paths with Donald Turnupseed, a 23-year-old student at California Polytechnic who didn’t see Dean’s low-riding Porsche. Dean swerved to avoid Turnupseed, but the two vehicles collided nearly head-on. The accident scene, according to onlookers, was horrific. One witness claimed that Dean’s Porsche somersaulted skyward, tumbling two or three times as it bounced up and down off the pavement. The heavier Ford was propelled some 40 feet down the highway and came to rest in the westbound lane of the road.

Wütherich was thrown from the vehicle but Dean, who broke his neck and suffered massive internal injuries, was trapped in the mangled Spyder. When Hickman and Roth arrived on the scene moments later, Hickman was able to pull Dean from the car, but to no avail: his friend died in his arms. Turnupseed survived and was cleared of blame, but gave only one interview to a local newspaper and never spoke publicly about the accident again. Wütherich, whose injuries required several surgeries to repair, returned to West Germany and worked in Porsche’s testing department, though reportedly he continued to struggle with psychological and legal problems. In 1981, at the age of 54, he too was killed in an auto accident, in Kupferzell.

Though Dean, too, was cleared of blame, speculation surrounding the accident persists to this day. Some maintain the Spyder was cursed, suggesting that several other cars that used parts from Little Bastard were involved in fatal accidents. Others believe Wütherich was actually at the wheel, since Dean was found closer to the passenger seat, and the mechanic was ejected on impact. There is little additional evidence to support this claim.

Dean was buried in his hometown of Fairmount, Ind. A memorial, financed by Japanese businessman and fan Seita Onishi, was built in Cholame, about a mile from the fateful intersection, in 1981. A sign, naming it “James Dean Memorial Junction” was erected at the crash site in 2005, marking the 50th anniversary of the accident. More than 60 years later, fans still leave cigarettes there—in his brief movie career, Dean’s characters often had a cigarette dangling from their lips—in tribute to their fallen idol.

FINAL DAYS Dean and Natalie Wood rested between takes during the filming of Rebel Without a Cause in the spring of 1955.

Roth shot the picture of Dean and his Porsche 550 Spyder at a gas station (above) just hours before the horrific crash (following photo) that ended the star’s life.

The Bombshell

Marilyn Monroe

1926 — 1962

SEEKING SHELTER Monroe was photographed on the set of The Misfits in 1960.

It was Aug. 4, 1962. Dr. Ralph Greenson, Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatrist, was worried about his most famous patient. Despite intense, almost daily, therapy sessions, the woman who remains Hollywood’s most transcendent sex symbol was deeply troubled, struggling with depression and unable to sleep. After a long afternoon session with Monroe at her home in Brentwood, Calif., Greenson asked the star’s housekeeper, Eunice Murray, to stay overnight to keep an eye on her employer. At around 7:15 p.m., Monroe received the first of two calls; it was from Joe DiMaggio Jr. His father, Joe Sr., the legendary New York Yankees center fielder, had once been married to Marilyn, and Joe Jr. in recent years had become a friend and confidant. Joe Jr. thought Marilyn seemed fine during the conversation and he hung up unconcerned.

The second call was later, sometime after 8:00 p.m., from actor Peter Lawford, whom Marilyn had known for nearly a decade and who had introduced her to his brother-in-law, President John F. Kennedy. The reason for the call, Lawford later said, was to invite Marilyn to a party that evening, but he became worried when her voice sounded drugged and she signed off by saying, “Say goodbye to Pat [Lawford’s wife], say goodbye to the President, and say goodbye to yourself, because you’re a nice guy.” According to Lawford, he tried and failed to reach Greenson to express his concern, but he did get through to Monroe’s lawyer, Mickey Rudin, who called Murray, who assured him that Marilyn was fine.

Later, around 3 a.m., the housekeeper woke up and noticed a light under Marilyn’s door. The door was locked, and when Murray knocked, she received no response so she called Greenson. He rushed over, broke a window to get into the room and found Marilyn dead, facedown on her bed, holding a telephone receiver in one hand. There were unusually high concentrations of barbiturates in her blood, suggesting Monroe had taken her own life.

A determination of suicide was certainly reasonable, given Monroe’s troubled history. Born Norma Jeane Mortenson (though she also used the last name Baker) in Los Angeles on June 1, 1926, Monroe never knew her father, and she was deserted by her mother, Gladys, who put her in foster care at just 18 months. A diagnosed schizophrenic, Gladys was committed to a state hospital when the future star was only 7. Monroe spent most of her childhood in orphanages and foster homes—where it is likely she was sexually abused—and got married at 16 in 1942. That union, to older schoolmate James Dougherty, ended four years later. Her subsequent marriages, to DiMaggio and playwright Arthur Miller, were also short-lived and though both ended for different reasons—alleged abuse by DiMaggio and Miller’s wish that she become a full-time wife—Marilyn emerged from both feeling inadequate and unloved.

In the years before her death, Monroe’s depression deepened. She had trouble sleeping without the assistance of alcohol and sleeping pills. She began missing entire days of shooting, and many directors grew leery of working with her. In spite of it all, her acting, under the tutelage of legendary coach Lee Strasberg, improved and she delivered acclaimed performances in comedies such as Some Like It Hot (1959) and such dramas as The Misfits (1961), written for her by Miller.

In 1961, Monroe took a break from acting to undergo surgery for endometriosis, and on her psychiatrist’s orders she checked into a mental hospital for a “rest cure,” but instead was mistakenly housed with severely disturbed patients. The spring of 1962 was more promising, as Monroe signed to star in Something’s Got to Give, but she was later fired after repeated absences due to illness. Less than three months before her death, Monroe performed her famously breathy rendition of “Happy Birthday” for President Kennedy.

Monroe’s death attracted an endless parade of murder theories, in part because of her many rumored and actual affairs with celebrities like Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, mobster Sam Giancana and, of course, powerful politicians John and Robert Kennedy. The autopsy and inquest ruled Monroe’s death to be a “probable suicide,” determining that the barbiturates in her system had been taken “in one gulp or in a few gulps over a minute or so.” But ongoing controversy—including questions about who might have visited Monroe’s bedroom after her death and what evidence might have been removed—persuaded the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to conduct a second investigation in 1982. The new investigators reached the same conclusion as the original inquest, but conspiracy buffs continue to claim that an alleged affair between Marilyn and Robert Kennedy resulted in an accidental—or intentional—overdose and that Lawford, Greenson and the powerful Kennedy clan colluded to fake the circumstances supporting suicide. Little or no hard evidence has been produced to support this theory, but the speculation continues.

DiMaggio Sr. kept Monroe’s funeral small—only 30 guests attended—and her cremated remains were buried in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery on August 8. Lee Strasberg delivered the eulogy; DiMaggio arranged for fresh red roses to be delivered to the crypt three times a week for the next two decades. In 2017, there was a flurry of activity near Monroe’s burial place: Hugh Hefner, who had published a nude photo of a 22-year-old Monroe to boost publicity for the first issue of Playboy in 1953, was interred in the neighboring crypt. “I’m a big believer in things symbolic,” Hefner told the Los Angeles Times when he purchased the crypt in 1992. “Spending eternity next to Marilyn is too sweet to pass up.”

Monroe and second husband Arthur Miller retreated to Miller’s farm in Roxbury, Conn., in 1957.

SUDDEN END Monroe was flanked by Robert Kennedy to her right and John Kennedy to her left at a party in 1962.

Joe DiMaggio and his son, Joe Jr., departed Westwood Cemetery after Monroe’s funeral.

The bedroom where Monroe’s body was found has remained a source of fascination for Monroe conspiracy buffs.

Hollywood Royalty

Natalie Wood

1938 — 1981

STRESSFUL JOURNEY Wagner and Wood (above, in 1959) hosted many of their friends aboard the Splendour (below), but on Thanksgiving weekend, 1981, when two invitees couldn’t make it, actor Christopher Walken became their only guest.

The weather was gray and the temperatures cool on Thanksgiving weekend 1981, when Natalie Wood and her husband, Robert Wagner, boarded their 60-foot yacht for a cruise off the California coast to Catalina Island. Also on board the Splendour was the Wagners’ longtime skipper, Dennis Davern, and Christopher Walken, who was co-starring with Wood in Brainstorm.

The relationship between Wood, the 43-year-old star of Splendor in the Grass and Rebel Without a Cause, and Wagner, 51, was tumultuous. They first married in 1957 when Wood was just 19 and one of Hollywood’s most sought-after young actresses, while Wagner was struggling through a series of forgettable roles in a career that seemed to be going nowhere. The couple divorced in 1962 but wed again 10 years later after extricating themselves from second marriages. By 1981, their careers had reversed: Wagner was in his third successful television series, Hart to Hart, while Wood, who had largely stepped away from show business to raise her two children, was looking for ways to get back in.

Many of the events of that Thanksgiving weekend are unclear, but this much we do know: At 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, November 29, Wagner and Davern radioed the authorities: “This is the Splendour, needs help.” They reported that Wood had disappeared from the ship and was probably nearby in the Splendour’s 13-foot inflatable dinghy, which was also missing. Some six hours later, Wood’s body was discovered floating facedown in the ocean, 200 yards off Catalina Island. She was wearing her bedtime clothing—a flannel nightgown—and also a down jacket and wool socks. The dinghy washed up onshore about a mile away, apparently unused—the oars were stowed, the ignition was off.

There apparently was considerable tension during the trip, much of it exacerbated by large quantities of alcohol. A drunken dinner at a restaurant on Catalina Island on Saturday night resulted in arguing, broken glass and, at least according to the dining staff, an unhappy group that returned to the Splendour.

Wagner would later admit that he had argued with Wood and Walken aboard the ship that night, though about what remains in dispute. According to Davern, who has changed his story over the years, Wood was flirting with Walken, making Wagner jealous and angry. In this version of events, Wagner confronted his wife and Walken, slamming a wine bottle into a table and spewing glass all over the room. Wagner has disputed Davern’s account, maintaining that the argument never got that heated and had nothing to do with Walken.

All three agree that Wood retreated to bed early, while Wagner and Davern remained awake. Davern maintained that he stayed on the bridge and that Wagner went below to speak further with his wife. The couple launched back into an argument so heated it was audible throughout the ship. When Wagner came back up to the bridge, he was “tousled, sweating profusely, as if he had been in a terrible fight, an ordeal of some kind,” Davern told Vanity Fair’s Sam Kashner in 2013. Two hours later, Wagner informed Davern that Natalie was missing and Davern discovered the dinghy gone too.

What really happened? Wagner’s publicly stated view is that Wood may have untied the dinghy because of the noise it was making banging into the yacht and then fell into the water while attempting to retie it to the ship. But with questions continuing to swirl around the case, investigators reopened it in 2011, and Wagner, now 87, has repeatedly declined to be interviewed. In Feb. 2018, the Los Angeles County sheriff’s office, citing statements from new witnesses, reclassified Wood’s death as “suspicious.” Though they did not have enough evidence to arrest Wagner, they named him a “person of interest.” At press time, a representative for Wagner had not responded to media requests for comment.

The Fairy Tale Princess

Grace Kelly

1929 — 1982

THE FAIRY TALE ENDS Kelly (above) was elegantly dressed for the 1955 Academy Awards, where she won the award as Best Actress in The Country Girl. “I still can’t go down that road, even if someone else is driving,” Stéphanie said in 1989 of the highway (below) where her mother’s car plunged down an embankment.

On the morning of Sept. 13, 1982, Princess Grace of Monaco—formerly movie star Grace Kelly—declined an offer from the family chauffeur for a ride from her country estate into Monaco. Instead, Kelly got behind the wheel of the family’s convertible and headed out with her 17-year-old daughter, Stéphanie. Two miles outside the town of La Turbie, the car skidded off the road at a hairpin curve, smashed through a retaining wall and careened down a 120-foot embankment. Ambulances arrived at the scene quickly and transported the princess to Monaco Hospital, but she died the next day.

Doctors believe that just before Kelly reached the curve, she suffered the first of two cerebral hemorrhages or strokes, rendering her unable to respond quickly to the twisty road. The theory was backed up by Princess Stéphanie, who reported that her mother had complained of a headache in the minutes before the accident and suffered some sort of shooting pain just before the fateful turn. It was the second hemorrhage, in the hospital, that ended the 52-year-old star’s life.

For millions of fans, Kelly’s life story was the stuff of fairy tales, a flesh-and-blood version of the “happily ever after” stories that glittered on the silver screen. In the middle of a successful career, having appeared in films like High Society, Dial M for Murder and To Catch a Thief, Kelly fell deeply in love with Prince Rainier III of Monaco. She decided to give up Hollywood for the tiny principality, and when the couple wed in April 1956, as many as 30 million people watched the event on television. More than two decades later, nearly 100 million tuned in to her funeral at St. Nicholas Cathedral in Monaco-Ville, with its indelible images of her eldest daughter, Caroline, reaching out to comfort a grief-stricken Prince Rainier.

After the accident, when the public learned that Kelly ended up in the backseat and Stéphanie in the front, the tabloids began speculating that Stéphanie, and not Kelly, might have been driving. The stories proliferated despite the testimony of two witnesses who saw Grace driving the car before the accident and the opinion of experts that Grace could easily have been thrown into the backseat by the force of the collision. Stéphanie suffered fractured vertebrae, broken ribs and a shattered collarbone, and while she recovered from her injuries, the emotional toll proved more difficult to overcome. “You cannot imagine the suffering I have endured,” she told The Guardian in 2002, “and that I endure still. So when I read in the papers that I killed my mother, it is quite simply horrible.” Asked if she felt any lingering guilt about her mother’s death, she said, “Never, because I have nothing to reproach myself with. Unless, perhaps, the fact that I am still here, and that it was I who survived.”

Star Soprano

James Gandolfini

1961 — 2013

JERSEY BOY Gandolfini (above, as Tony Soprano) was honored in a booth in Holsten’s diner (below) in Bloomfield, N.J., where the final scene of The Sopranos was shot.

Six years had passed since James Gandolfini’s last performance as the complex mob patriarch in HBO’s groundbreaking series The Sopranos. Gandolfini had told the New York Times that he wasn’t concerned about being typecast. “Mostly it’s not a lot of that stuff anymore with shooting and killing and dying and blood,” he said. “I’m getting a little older, you know.”

But Gandolfini’s body was a ticking time bomb, more the victim of poor health habits than age. On June 19, 2013, he was vacationing in Rome before heading to a film festival in Sicily. He spent the day visiting the Vatican and sightseeing with his 13-year-old son, Michael, then enjoyed a big dinner at the Boscolo Exedra Roma hotel’s outdoor restaurant. Later that night, Michael found his father in severe distress in his hotel room bathroom. Medical personnel spent 40 minutes trying to revive him, to no avail. He was 51. The autopsy ruled that the actor had died of “natural causes.”

The actor’s passing was not entirely surprising to those who knew him. His newfound success—he won three Emmys for outstanding lead actor in a drama for The Sopranos—had brought the almost predictable struggles with drugs, particularly cocaine, and alcohol, leading to occasional angry outbursts on the Sopranos set and repeated absences. He went on booze-fueled benders and snorted cocaine with several Sopranos castmates, according to divorce papers filed by his first wife, Marcy Wudarski (Michael’s mother), in 2002. Since the end of the hit series, which aired its last episode in 2007, Gandolfini had gained a little weight—about 25 pounds—but seemed to have his cocaine use under control. His autopsy found no evidence of cocaine or any other controlled substance in his system.

“I had to get up and leave,” Steve Schirripa, who played Bobby Baccalieri on The Sopranos, said of his reaction to the news of Gandolfini’s death. “It was like being told a brother had died. Jimmy Gandolfini was as great a friend as he was an actor and a human being . . . I spoke to a lot of the guys from The Sopranos. We were crying. People joke about us being a family. But we are a family.”

The Comic’s Comic

Robin Williams

1951 — 2014

STARRY SKIES Williams’s daughter Zelda quoted French author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry in her tribute to her father on Twitter and Instagram: “And so it will be as if all the stars were laughing when you look at the sky at night. You—only you—will have stars that can laugh.”

With his wild, improvisational humor, Robin Williams made people laugh in a way few comedians ever have, often until their sides hurt. From his manic turn as Mork, the oddball alien, to his uproarious late-night appearances with Johnny Carson and David Letterman, to his memorable film roles, both comic (the voice of the genie in Aladdin) and dramatic (inspiring teacher in Dead Poets Society), Williams had exceptional range. But that frenzied, rapid-fire delivery and his trademark ear-to-ear smile and twinkling eyes hid a deeply personal secret. For decades, Williams had struggled with depression and with addictions to cocaine and alcohol.

His personal troubles wreaked havoc on his relationships. He married Valerie Velardi in 1978, just before his career began taking off with the success of Mork & Mindy. In the years that followed, he became addicted to cocaine, but the death of his friend John Belushi in 1982 and the birth of his son Zachary in 1983 helped to steer him to sobriety. Williams and Velardi divorced in 1988. His second wife, Marsha Garces, was Zachary’s nanny, and she was pregnant with his second child, Zelda, when the couple married in 1989. They also had a son, Cody, born in 1991. The pair split in 2008 after Williams began drinking again and formally divorced in 2010. From 2006 to 2014, Williams had several well-publicized rehab stints, as well as surgery to replace an aortic valve in 2009. In October 2011, Williams married Susan Schneider, who had nursed him back to health after the heart surgery, and the couple shared a home outside San Francisco.

Despite the years of personal turmoil, Williams had always been able to work. By 2014, however, as his mind and body both began to fail, it became clear that something was seriously wrong. A few months before his death, Williams was incorrectly diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease; the autopsy revealed his real malady to be Lewy body dementia, a progressive neurological disorder that was robbing Williams of the skills for which he was so celebrated. In the spring, while shooting Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, in which he reprised his role as Teddy Roosevelt, Williams forgot his lines and had a panic attack, according to his widow, Susan. The “loss of memory and inability to control his anxiety was devastating to him,” she wrote in an essay titled “The Terrorist Inside My Husband’s Brain” for the medical journal Neurology in 2016.

The last time Susan saw her husband was Aug. 10, 2014, around 10:30 p.m. The couple had been sleeping separately in their Tiburon, Calif., home because of Williams’s insomnia. When the comedian came to Susan’s bedroom to retrieve his iPad, the 50-year-old graphic designer took it as a positive sign, since Williams had not done any real reading for months. The next morning, the house was quiet when Susan went out, and she assumed her husband was still sleeping. But when Williams’s longtime assistant Rebecca Erwin Spencer had not heard from her boss by 11:45 a.m., she became concerned, first calling the house and then driving to Tiburon to knock on the door. When Spencer got no response, she picked the lock and found Williams hanging by a nylon belt in a closet door frame. He was officially declared dead at 12:02 p.m. He was 63.

The news of Williams’s death shook the entertainment world. Fans constructed makeshift memorials at a host of sites associated with Williams: his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the bench in Boston featured in Good Will Hunting, the San Francisco home featured in Mrs. Doubtfire, the house where Mork & Mindy was filmed in Boulder, Colo. Billy Crystal paid tribute to his friend during the 2014 Emmy Awards, describing him as “the brightest star in our comedy galaxy.” “I lost my father and a best friend, and the world got a little grayer,” said Zachary Williams, Robin’s eldest child. “I would ask those that loved him to remember him by being as gentle, kind and generous as he would be. Seek to bring joy to the world as he sought.”

Two years later, Susan Williams, in her essay for Neurology, described her husband as “growing weary. The Parkinsonian mask was ever present and his voice was weakened. His left-hand tremor was continuous and he had a slow, shuffling gait. He hated that he could not find the words he wanted in conversations. He would thrash at night and still had terrible insomnia . . . At times, he would find himself stuck in a frozen stance, unable to move . . . His loss of basic reasoning just added to his growing confusion.”

In a 2015 interview with Good Morning America, Williams said her husband, in the weeks before his death, was “just disintegrating” mentally and physically. “If Robin was lucky, he would’ve had maybe three years left,” she said. “And they would’ve been hard years.”

The Parkinson’s diagnosis, though later shown to be incorrect, did little to calm her husband. “He kept saying ‘I just want to reboot my brain,’” wrote Williams.

A DARK NIGHT Williams (above) won the Golden Globe for Best Actor for his performance in 1983’s Mrs. Doubtfire. On the evening after Williams died, the Imperial and Music Box theaters honored the actor by putting him on their marquees (following), while the other Broadway theaters dimmed their lights in tribute.

Chemical Undoing

For these talents, drugs combined lethally with living on the edge

John Belushi

JOHN BELUSHI as John “Bluto” Blutarsky in National Lampoon's Animal House (1978).

Oddball funnyman Belushi burst on the scene in 1975 as part of the original Saturday Night Live cast and by 1980 had filmed hilarious big-screen classics such as National Lampoon's Animal House and The Blues Brothers. Behind the scenes, Belushi also struggled with cocaine and heroin, and on March 5, 1982, was found dead at 33 in the Hollywood hotel where he was living, the Chateau Marmont. Belushi had spent the night before his death partying, mostly with Cathy Smith, an occasional backup singer with the Band, who had become an addict and drug dealer. The pair went from party to party, drinking and snorting cocaine, finally leaving a nightclub called On the Rox and returning to Belushi’s hotel room in the early morning hours. Smith claims that Belushi, who was afraid of needles, asked her to shoot him up with heroin several times during the night, and the coroner gave the cause of death as “acute cocaine and heroin intoxication.” Smith, who drove away from the Chateau in Belushi’s Mercedes, was charged with first-degree murder but accepted a plea of manslaughter and eventually served 15 months in prison for her role in the comedian’s death.

River Phoenix

River Phoenix, 1988

When Phoenix, the older brother of actors Rain, Joaquin, Liberty and Summer Phoenix, overdosed on Oct. 31, 1993, he was just 23, even younger than Belushi. He had impressed audiences early in such films as the coming-of-age drama Stand by Me; Running on Empty, about a counterculture couple on the run, for which he earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor; and My Own Private Idaho, about two street hustlers.

Phoenix was filming the thriller Dark Blood when, on Halloween night, he collapsed outside a popular Hollywood nightclub, the Viper Room, where Johnny Depp and Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers were performing together. The actor’s siblings Rain and Joaquin were unable to revive him, and by the time the EMTs arrived, he was in full cardiac arrest and pronounced dead at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The cause of death was ruled “acute multiple drug intoxication,” which included cocaine and morphine.

Heath Ledger

Heath Ledger, 2006

The Australian actor, perhaps best known for his Oscar-nominated performance in 2005’s Brokeback Mountain, was 28 when he was found unresponsive by his housekeeper and his masseuse, who arrived at his New York City apartment at 2:45 p.m. on Jan. 22, 2008. Reports confirmed that he died of a heart attack brought on by drug toxicity from an accidental but deadly combination of prescription medications. Eight years later, Ledger’s father, Kim Ledger, told The Daily Mail Australia that his son’s death “was totally his fault. It was no one else’s. He reached for [the pills]. He put them in his system. You can’t blame anyone else in that situation.”

Philip Seymour Hoffman

Philip Seymour Hoffman, 2007

Best known as a versatile actor in films including The Hunger Games series, Capote and Charlie Wilson’s War, Hoffman experimented with drugs early in his career and was clean for two decades before relapsing in 2012 and again in 2014. On Feb. 2, 2014, Hoffman was found dead by police in his New York City apartment, a syringe stuck in his arm and packets of heroin strewn about the bathroom. Toxicology reports revealed that the 46-year-old actor died of “accidental acute mixed-drug intoxication” consisting of heroin, cocaine, benzodiazepines and amphetamines.