Famous Celebrities Who Died In Their 40s

They say life begins at 40, and while that can be something normal people who are getting old tell themselves to feel better as the years tick by, for celebrities, it can be a reality. By the time a celeb has hit their 40s, they are either cementing legendary status or slowing down after a couple of decades in the public eye. It might even be the first time they have considered starting a family. For a celebrity, the 40s can be a sweet spot.

But sadly, for other celebrities, life ends at 40. Or at least, in their 40s. After spending half their lives in the glare of the media spotlight, some celebrities are cracking under the strain. Substance abuse might be taking its toll. Illnesses related to aging start creeping in. And then there are the unfortunate accidents and senseless murders.

Regardless of how it happened, these celebrities all tragically died in their 40s.

Gary Coleman might have found fame on "Diff'rent Strokes," but as he told a reporter for the Las Vegas Sun in 1999, it had effectively ruined his life. "That, 'Whatchoo talkin' 'bout,' ugh," Coleman said. "If I could go back 14 years and not say that line, I'd do it. Realistically, I hear that line at least twice per day. It has become part of the national vernacular."

While Coleman still got relatively steady acting work, most of the roles he was offered weren't the kind of thing he really wanted to do. He explained, "Playing myself gets really old, really quick ... I like good humor. I like being the pivotal character, the supporting character who gives comic relief. At heart, I'm a scene-stealer. I'm just waiting for my next opportunity."

It was only when he died from injuries sustained in a fall down the stairs in 2010, aged 42, that the world found out how much Coleman hated the situation he'd found himself in in life. According to the BBC, his will instructed there would be no funeral, and the only memorial could be a wake – but one arranged by people who hadn't made money off him when he was alive and were able to "look each other in the eyes and say they really cared personally for Gary Coleman."

Natasha Richardson came from a famous acting dynasty, and while this had plenty of perks and helped open doors for her, there were also some downsides. She told the New York Times about inviting her father, the director/producer Tony Richardson, to come see her in one of her first paid acting jobs, performing in "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in London. Instead of being proud, he trashed her performance. She recalled, "I'd thought I was so wonderful! I cried, made excuses ... He said I must find something more interesting than myself in the character. The next day he FedExed a copy of the play to me from Los Angeles, marked up with suggestions!"

Thankfully, Richardson went on to have a very successful career, as well as a happy marriage to fellow actor Liam Neeson. But the Guardian reports that, tragically, she died in 2009, while on a skiing trip with her family, from injuries sustained in a fall on the slopes.

When asked by Richardson's friend Andy Cohen (via Little Things) what his favorite film of hers was, her son Micheál said, "Just based off of who she is and how I remember her, it has to be 'The Parent Trap.' That's more or less what she was like. She was this sweet, amazing mother figure — my best friend."

In 1971, the singer Marvin Gaye did a rare interview with Disc and Music Echo (via the Guardian). The reporter described Gaye as the "the least known-about" Motown singer, despite already selling millions of albums. That's certainly no longer true today, thanks in large part to the album "What's Going On," which was released that same year, and tackled some of the biggest topics of the turbulent time. Gaye told the reporter, "The material is social commentary but there's nothing extreme on it. I did it not only to help humanity but to help me as well, and I think it has. It's given me a certain amount of peace."

But in an eerie bit of foreshadowing, when asked about his plans for the future, Gaye replied, "I don't have any plans at all. I never plan anything. I never have and I never will." He was killed 13 years later, aged 44, shot by his father during an argument.

At Gaye's funeral, his friend Dick Gregory eulogized (via UPI), "Marvin told me, 'I like to raise people's consciousness. I want to give them hope.' Well, brother Marvin, you did that — with class and warmth and love. You left us too soon, but any time would have been too soon."

Billie Holiday is "often called the greatest American jazz singer," according to Encyclopedia.com. Frank Sinatra said, "Billie Holiday was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me." And the writer Leonard Feather raved, "Her voice was the voice of living intensity, of soul in the true sense of that greatly abused word." Rave reviews if ever there were.

But outside of her career, Holiday's life was far from a fairy tale, with boyfriends who took advantage of her, marriage to a "wannabe gangster" (per NPR), drug and alcohol addiction, time in jail, and blatant racism all disrupting her career. In an interview in 1956, she explained that many jazz musicians died young because "we try to live a hundred days in one day, and we try to please so many people. Like myself, I want to bend this note, bend that note, sing this way, sing that way, and get all the feeling, eat all the good foods, and travel all over in one day, and you can't do it."

Holiday joined those other gone-too-soon musicians in 1959, dying from "alcohol- and drug-related complications," per Biography. Her husband buried her in a "small square of gray, mean-looking ground" in an out-of-the-way cemetery, "probably because it was cheap." She didn't even have a tombstone, leading DownBeat magazine to ask (via NPR), "Where were all the people who had made money off the singer during her life?"

Judy Garland will forever be best known as Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz," but she had a prolific career after that as well. Unfortunately, things often didn't go well, like with her starring role in the 1954 remake of "A Star is Born." She started the production clean, but when the studio pushed her too hard, Garland turned to drugs again. Then the execs ruined the movie, according to the film's director (via RogerEbert.com), who said, "When we finally got the film into the can, we had what I considered one of Garland's finest performances. But the studio ran into trouble – the public thought the picture was too long – and so they butchered it. Absolutely butchered it." It was her last really notable film role.

The issues with drugs when performing was a pattern that had plagued Garland since the beginning. Her third husband Sid Luft wrote (via the New Yorker), "She confessed it was virtually impossible for her to sustain a work mode in front of the cameras without taking some kind of medication."

Garland died in 1969, aged 47, of an accidental overdose. "Judy's great gift," James Mason eulogized at her funeral, "was that she could wring tears out of hearts of rock."

John Lennon was still in his 20s when The Beatles broke up, which meant he had a lot of creative years ahead of him. And being a solo artist gave him complete control over the music he made and the kind of songs he wrote. As he told Rolling Stone (via American Songwriter) in 1971, "I always wrote about me when I could. I didn't really enjoy writing third person songs about people who lived in concrete flats and things like that. I like first-person music."

But even the freedom of his post-Beatles years stopped being fun, and Lennon took a lengthy hiatus. He told the Los Angeles Times (via NBC News) in 1980 about how he came to the decision: "Finally, Yoko said, 'You don't have to do it anymore.' I was shocked. I had never thought that: Could the world get along without another John Lennon album? Could I get along without it? I finally realized that the answer to both questions was yes."

The time being a "house husband" (in his words) allowed Lennon to find joy in creativity again. He told the New York Times, "In a way, we're involved in a kind of experiment. Could the family be the inspiration for art, instead of drinking or drugs or whatever? I'm interested in finding that out." Sadly, he said that shortly before he was murdered in 1980. He was 40.

When Elvis returned to Las Vegas in 1969, to perform again after a long hiatus, he was subjected to a press conference where reports yelled all manner of questions at him (via Elvis Australia). Would he make more films? Yes, but only if he could make "Something with meaning. I'm going after more serious material. I couldn't dig always playing the guy who'd get into a fight, beat the guy up, and in the next shot sing to him." Was he planning on retiring? "Not, not really. No. I've got too much energy. I don't think so. Not as long as I can." How did he stay looking so young? "One of these days I'll probably fall apart. I feel, I've just been lucky."

Elvis did fall apart, rather spectacularly and with the eyes of the world on him. After he died in 1977, aged 42, a hospital employee told Rolling Stone that the King had been treated there throughout the decade. "They were treating him for everything — hypertension, enlarged colon, gastroenteritis, stomach inflammation ... one doctor said Elvis might have had systemic lupus erythematosus ... He also had a severe liver condition." In the end, his body gave out.

Philip Seymore Hoffman was one of the best actors of his generation, and over his career, he chose to play some very difficult roles which took him to dark places. In 2008, he told Fresh Air's Terry Gross (via NPR) that acting those characters was harder than people might realize: "I think that the amount of concentration — sometimes the amount of personal exploration — it takes to do something well, can be not pleasant ... like hard work is. That doesn't mean that you don't want to do it, or that you don't love it, or that it's not ultimately satisfying ... There's always something about that job that's exhausting, and that's what's exhausting about acting, is the level concentration over very long period of time."

Hoffman was also open about the other hardest thing in his life, his sobriety. The actor had been to rehab and explained to Gross that he couldn't drink in moderation. "It's not a great pleasure for me to have a couple of glasses of wine. That just — that's kind of annoying ... Do you know what I mean? Like, why aren't you having the whole bottle? ... That's much more pleasurable."

Tragically, the Los Angeles Times reports Hoffman fell back into substance abuse and died of a heroin overdose in 2014, aged 46.