Great actors' sad, surprising final films
Michael King We don’t choose when we come into this world – nor when we leave it. And that holds true for the great and good as much as the man on the street. While most actors would prefer to be remembered for their crowning work, the fact remains even the biggest stars need to keep earning and many are still working when they take their final bow. Some go out on their greatest work. Others… not so much.
For every Chadwick Boseman or Paul Walker, whose deaths during production became the most moving part of posthumous releases Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Furious 7, there’s Orson Welles flogging frozen peas.
In fact, Welles is the ne plus ultra of this trend. The man who gave the world arguably the greatest film of all time, signed off by voicing a living planet in a film based on plastic robots with waggily articulated arms. Yes: Welles’s final film was the first Transformers film, Transformers: The Movie. And yes, he hated it.
So in tribute to Welles dogged professionalism, and to the umpteenth Transformers film, which is currently screening in cinemas, we present other unlikely last films of brilliant actors:
Orson Welles, Transformers: The Movie (1986)
This wasn’t the first time Hasbro had put its line of morphing robots on screen. The 1986 film followed two seasons of a TV show which first began broadcasting in 1984.
But for the film, the toy makers wanted to make a splash. And who splashier than Welles to play Unicron, the giant planet nemesis of the Transformers? Welles, though, did not take his fall from Citizen Kane to cartoon shame lightly.
In an publicity interview for the film, he couldn’t remember the name of his character and simply described the picture thus: “I play a big toy who attacks a bunch of smaller toys.”
Perhaps mercifully, he died in 1985 before it was released, so didn’t have to watch it bomb at the box office.
Joan Crawford, Trog (1970)
Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? may have revived Joan Crawford’s career in 1962, but that didn’t mean that all of her subsequent roles were high-calibre.
In this monstrosity, she plays an anthropologist who discovers a troglodyte (played by Joe Cornelius in a monkey suit) living in a cave and sets about trying to domesticate him.
Crawford didn’t choose this stinker because she needed the work – she did it because she enjoyed working with producer Herman Cohen on Berserk! so much that she wanted to collaborate with him again.
Paul Newman, Cars (2006)
The Cool Hand Luke star’s last outing saw him play a CGI car who mentors a plucky youngster named after his old contemporary: McQueen.
It was actually a great fit for Newman, who was a massive car enthusiast and skilled racing driver.
In fact, Newman himself considered his role as Doc Hudson to be his finest work since The Verdict in 1982.
Unlike most animated movies, Pixar heavily emphasised the star power of the voice cast, and Cars became Newman’s highest grossing film.
Lauren Bacall, The Forger (2012)
The star of The Big Sleep and doyenne of Golden Age Hollywood played a former art forger who adopts a teenage runaway in Lawrence Roeck’s straight-to-dvd drama, which was shot in just 24 days.
Despite having star power in the form of Bacall, Alfred Molina, and the then-very-hot Josh Hutcherson and Hayden Panettiere, The Forger got little publicity.
Part of this is down to the fact that it had a very delayed DVD release so it could come out after Hutcherson appeared in The Hunger Games. Part of it is due to the fact that this coming-of-age drama was marketed as a thriller. But largely it’s down to the fact that it never made it to theatres because it’s just not very good.
However, Bacall’s final feature film still might be a better monument to her than her final ever role – playing Evelyn, an elderly lady who befriends Peter Griffin, in Family Guy.
Marlon Brando, The Score (2001)
Director Frank Oz, of The Dark Crystal and Little Shop of Horrors fame, must have been delighted when he cast Edward Norton, Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando in this, his first drama outing.
He was soon regretting his luck. Although Brando was paid $3 million for three weeks’ work, he hated being directed by Oz and refused to go on set when he was there. Robert De Niro had to act as a go-between.
He also taunted the Muppets puppeteer by calling him “Miss Piggy” after the character Oz played on the show and said: “I bet you wish I was a puppet so you could stick your hand up my ass and make me do what you want.”
It was Brando’s last film to be released. He also recorded three scenes of dialogue as a female bug for animated film Big Bug Man from his bed just before his death in 2004, but it never saw the light of day. Playing the role of a beetle, Mrs Sour, he apparently showed up for his one day of recording in a wig, dress, white gloves and full makeup. A trouper to the end.
Patrick Swayze, Powder Blue (2009)
Swayze played Velvet Larry, an eccentric bewigged gangster and nightclub owner opposite Ray Liotta as an ex-con with terminal cancer – just five months before Swayze was himself diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
The ensemble film was shot on location in LA, and revolves around the misfits that gather in Larry’s club, Wild Velvet at Christmastime, and the ludicrous snowfall that appears in California at the dramatic climax is hardly the most ridiculous part. It also features Eddie Redmayne running over a dog with a hearse and Jessica Biel as a coke-addicted stripper with a son in a coma.
The Onion’s AV Club wrote of the direct-to-DVD drama: “Powder Blue shoots for art, but dead-ends at gloomy smut.” Not a glowing epitaph for the actor who died months later.
Groucho Marx, Skidoo (1968)
Groucho played a mobster called God in this satirical takedown of sixties counterculture.
In the film, Jackie Gleason’s convict pens a letter to his wife on LSD-soaked stationery, and soon the whole prison is on a bad acid trip.
To understand the subject matter better, Marx prepared for his role by dropping LSD with writer Paul Krassner, an experience he largely enjoyed – as opposed to actually making the movie.
In his 1976 book The Groucho Phile, he described his performance as God, and the film itself, as “God-awful!”.
It received almost universally negative reviews, but Marx wasn’t too bothered; he spent his twilight years hanging out with Alice Cooper.
After Marx’s death in 1977 Cooper donated $27,777.77 towards the restoration of the iconic Hollywood sign in his memory, and the second ‘O’ is dedicated to him.
Dennis Hopper, The Last Film Festival (2016)
In an odd twist, The Last Film Festival was the last film the star of Easy Rider and Apocalypse Now released.
This low-budget comedy is all about the desperate attempts of Hopper’s film producer character to get his own indie movie into the one film festival that hasn’t rejected it yet – which is in a sleepy town in Ohio. Cue lots of Hollywood-meets-Midwest fish-out-of-water jokes.
The Last Film Festival was itself left on the shelf after it wrapped in 2009, and wasn’t released until 2016, six years after Hopper had died from prostate cancer aged 74.
Peter Cushing, Biggles: Adventures in Time (1986)
Cushing’s career included iconic roles such as Frankenstein and Van Helsing opposite close friend Christopher Lee in the Hammer Horror series and Sherlock Holmes. But his last film, the preposterous time travel caper Biggles: Adventures in Time, did no favours for the character actor.
But whilst this was the last feature film he actually acted in before he died in 1994, it was not the last one he appeared in. In Rogue One: A Star Wars story, he reappeared as Grand Moff Tarkin 20 years after his death. A body double performed his scenes, then archive recordings and CGI were used to superimpose Cushing.
Whilst it can be debated whether resurrecting Cushing was in good taste, it does at least make for a more dignified finale than Biggles: Adventures in Time.
Bob Hoskins, Snow White and the Huntsman (2012)
Bob Hoskins proved he could carry a film with his star turns in classics The Long Good Friday and Who Framed Roger Rabbit? so it’s somewhat merciful that he was just a supporting cast member in his flop of a final film, Disney’s gritty live-action reboot of Snow White.
Hoskins, like his co-star Ian McShane, was almost unrecognisable under heavy prosthetics. Meanwhile, the production was criticised for using CGI trickery to shrink the actors, rather than simply giving roles to little people, and overshadowed by the affair between married director Rupert Sanders and his star Kristen Stewart.
Bela Lugosi, The Black Sleep (1956)
Bela Lugosi’s classic role was Dracula, which made full use of his native Hungarian accent. However, his voice was also his downfall. Hampered by his accent, Lugosi couldn’t shed his horror villain typecasting, as evidenced in his final film, B-movie The Black Sleep.
He was very disappointed to find that his role was that of a mute, and pestered director Reginald Le Borg for lines. Some were eventually shot – but never used, leaving Lugosi silent in the last film he made before his death from a heart attack in 1956.
Famously, in an appropriately eerie last appearance, the (silent) test footage he shot for Ed Wood saw him resurrected in Plan 9 From Outer Space three years after his death.
Gene Hackman, Welcome to Mooseport (2004)
Unlike most people on this list, Hackman isn’t dead.
The French Connection star announced his retirement on the Larry King show after starring as a former US President in this small town comedy.
He stepped into the role at the last minute after his Runaway Jury co-star – and former roommate – Dustin Hoffman bowed out.
It marks the third US President that Hackman has played, if you count the fact that Lex Luthor whom Hackman portrayed in the first two Superman films, went on to become the President in the original comics. (The other was in Absolute Power.)
John Cazale, The Deer Hunter (1978)
Cazale was only able to turn in his last performance due to the support of his Deer Hunter co-stars and director Michael Cimino. Still riding high on the success of Dog Day Afternoon, Cazale had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and the studio wanted to fire him, but Cimino and Meryl Streep, who he was dating at the time, said they would walk if Cazale was axed.
De Niro, with whom he had acted in the first two Godfather films, paid for his expensive insurance so he could stay on. Cimino shot the dying Cazale’s scenes first, and he passed away before he could see the film. Streep earned her first Oscar nomination for the role she had threatened to give up for him.
Heath Ledger, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009)
Ledger’s untimely death at the age of 28 came halfway through the production of this Terry Gilliam fantasy, but the nature of the film meant he could be recast.
The Imaginarium’s magical mirror transformed his character into various incarnations played by Jude Law, Colin Farrell and Johnny Depp, who all stepped in due to their prior friendships with Ledger, and gave their earnings to his daughter Matilda.
Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra, Cannonball Run II (1984)
This Wacky Racers-style caper was the last film outing for the three lead members of the Rat Pack, and the last film outing at all for Martin and Sinatra.
Whilst Martin and Davis Jnr both played fictional characters, they still managed to sneak in snatches of their most famous hits, The Candyman and Everybody Loves Somebody Sometimes.
Sinatra was a later addition, allegedly because he had heard his friends talk about how much fun they were having making the movie. Despite the fact that he played himself and only had two scenes, Sinatra’s star power meant he got second billing after Burt Reynolds.
Gene Kelly, Xanadu (1980)
The star of Singing in the Rain and An American in Paris was charm incarnate, beguiling audiences throughout the 1950s as a bona fide triple threat.
But fashions change and, as the musical fell out of fashion, the work began to dry up. When Xanadu – a madcap post-modern tilt at the genre centred around a titular LA nightclub – came along then, it must have seemed destiny.
Alas, Robert Greenwald’s roller-skating fantasy proved fateful in a different sense, becoming one of the most notoriously dire films of the decade. The trade paper Variety described Xanadu as “a stupendously bad film”, and the film writer John JB Wilson was so staggered by its ineptitude that he created the notorious Golden Raspberries Awards, or “Razzies”, to honour the worst achievements in cinema in any given year.
Ethel Merman, Airplane! (1980)
There’s nothing ignominious about this final appearance – but it has to mark one of the wittiest self-sendups of any star.
Among the delights of this disaster spoof, and leading contender for The Funniest Film Ever Made – I’ll brook no argument – is this blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo of the Broadway titan.
She plays a traumatised soldier who “believes she’s Ethel Man”. Cut to Merman sweeping from the bed and lustily bellowing out her hit Everything’s Coming Up Roses from the Sondheim musical, Gypsy.
“War is hell,” pilot Ted Striker observes after this performance. Maybe – but Merman proves the celluloid afterlife can be quite a lot of fun too.
