“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work,” Woody Allen, who turned 90 this year, once quipped. “I want to achieve immortality through not dying.”
Allen’s frequent co-star, one-time partner, and staunch supporter, Diane Keaton, died Oct. 11 from bacterial pneumonia. She was 79. Robert Redford died Sept. 16 at 89. Another screen legend, Gene Hackman, died last February from advanced Alzheimer’s. The 95-year-old two-time Oscar winner lived for a week after the unexpected death of his wife, Betsy. He was found without food in his system, indicating his final days were spent in confusion and isolation, a nightmare scenario for anybody.
Most recently, Hollywood has reeled from the double murder of longtime actor-director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, allegedly at the hands of their own son, Nick. The bodies were found by their daughter, Romy.
All walks of life come to Hollywood in the hopes of fortune and glory. And we all know how common, almost cliché it is, for many of these dreams to end, sometimes tragically. In a song released the year he was shot to death, John Lennon sang, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
Reality plays out far differently than how it is usually projected, especially in Hollywood, an industry and geographic location that sells itself on beauty and immortality and indifference to the trials of life that plague us mortals.
But Hollywood is composed of people — the AI revolution notwithstanding — and thousands of decent people find employment, community and family within the entertainment world. When the trials of life befall the rich and famous, especially those who have in some ways impacted us with their career, we are jarred by this, as if forgetting that “death comes to us all,” as the film’s narrator reminded us in one of Hollywood’s greatest accomplishments, Citizen Kane.
Orson Welles directed, starred and co-wrote Kane when he was only 25, but displayed a command of mortality and aging beyond his years. Perhaps that’s why Welles loved Shakespeare so much. Welles himself made his own quip about life and death: “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone. Only through our love and friendship can we create the illusion for the moment that we’re not alone.”
In the case of the Reiner family murder, comic legend Billy Crystal went to the home and witnessed the scene of the crime a few hours after the killing. The night before the murder, a family argument apparently erupted at Conan O’Brien’s Christmas party. The 78-year-old Rob recently released a new film. The tragedy thus affects colleagues, families, audiences and fans and everyday Americans. How many families make the Reiner-directed The Princess Bride annual viewings? How can one watch that now without thinking of the director’s grisly end?
Such events glaringly confront the famous connected to the deceased that unwittingly turn a light on their own shock and grief. Consider Billy Crystal being recorded by paparazzi as he left the Reiner home, clearly dazed by what transpired. Actress Robin Wright, the leading lady from The Princess Bride, released a statement to Entertainment Weekly: “I am deeply shocked and devastated. I cannot begin to imagine what the family is experiencing or what they will have to endure in the months and years ahead. It is truly heartbreaking.”
In addition to grappling with tragedies like these, Hollywood is aging, and its best-known faces are facing the reality of death in a very public way. The public decline of some of the world’s most recognizable personas can be lessons in the dignity that can be found in suffering and death, as the Catholic faith teaches. For years Bruce Willis, for example, was a reliable action box-office draw. Now, at 70, he’s battling frontotemporal dementia and no longer speaks. Alan Alda, now 90, publicly battles Parkinson’s, advocating a positive outlook along the journey. He is blessed to be accompanied by his wife of nearly 70 years, Arlene.
On the other hand, Dick Van Dyke recently turned 100. “I’m in the market for some 100-year-old friends,” he joked to The New York Times, citing his grandchildren and great-grandchildren coming over to his house as a great joy.
But what about the great elephant in Hollywood’s room: God?
Pope Benedict XVI used to refer to what he called “the outlook of faith.” While director Oliver Stone once remarked that “Only when dark does the eye begin to see,” the outlook of faith might say, “Only with faith does the eye begin to see.” And though Hollywood has historically placed itself on a holier-than-thou pedestal when it comes to matters of God, faith and religion, the suffering of those experiencing these tragedies and deaths of very beloved figures is really just an opportunity to recognize the meaning of the Cross in such situations.
That recognition, that outlook, can change everything.
I often think about 88-year-old filmmaker Ridley Scott, who continues to show no sign of slowing down. I think about him after the suicide of his brother, Tony, who at 68 in the summer of 2012 drove down to the Vincent Thomas Bridge at the Los Angeles Harbor and leaped to his death. He left a wife and two young sons — and brother Ridley.
I found it poignant and wistful Scott dedicated his 2014 film on Moses, Exodus: Gods and Kings, to Tony. That film is essentially a film about brothers and sibling rivalry. But Ridley steadfastly steers clear of giving over to that “outlook of faith” in his films.
Like much of America, Hollywood is aging. These celebrity deaths are stark indicators that the Hollywood establishment — that is, Hollywood stars who defined the era when movies were events and must-sees — is aging out … and dying.
Sure, Hollywood is still cranking them out. But times are different. Movies no longer have the cultural pull they did when stars like Diane Keaton or Woody Allen were in their heyday. When Keaton walked out in her self-selected wardrobes for Allen’s Annie Hall back in 1977 — which won Keaton her Best Actress Oscar — women’s fashion changed forever. When you saw Gene Hackman or Robert Redford, you knew you were watching great acting.
But those names and faces embodied a time when a movie meant something, something important, something that rallied all walks of life — regardless of age, race, skin color — to experience the movie collectively, enraptured and captivated by the unfoldings of the big screen.
My children likely will not know how movies can impact people as a community, as an experience, as a way of empathizing with humanity, what it does to the human psyche to rally around a hero like Indiana Jones or Frodo or Luke Skywalker, and emerge from that world of adventure back into our own reality somehow transformed. I am trying to show them. But heroes are hard to find now.
In fact, perhaps the two biggest movie stars today are men in their 60s: Tom Cruise, 63, and Brad Pitt, who turned 62 Dec. 18. They may have public and problematic personal lives, but who can forget the exchange between Cruise and Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men:
“I want the truth!”
“You can’t handle the truth!”
That film was directed by Rob Reiner. It will be hard to think of that wonderful acting moment and not remember how Reiner eventually met his end.
May they all be welcomed into the light of his face.