Gregg Toland

popular name: Natalie Talmadge

date_of_death: June 19, 1969

age: 73

cause_of_death: Heart failure

claim_to_fame: Show Business

best_know_for: Unlike her more famous sisters, Constance and Norma, Natalie was an occasional silent film actress and wife of silent film actor and comedian Buster Keaton. She appeared in D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), and Buster Keaton's Our Hospitality (1923), her final appearance.

popular name: Bette Davis

date_of_death: October 6, 1989

age: 81

cause_of_death: Metastasized breast cancer

claim_to_fame: Show Business

best_know_for: Bette Davis was an American actress of film, television, and theater. Regarded as one of the greatest actresses in Hollywood history, she was noted for her willingness to play unsympathetic, sardonic characters and was known for her performances in a range of film genres, from contemporary crime melodramas to historical and period films and occasional comedies, although her greatest successes were her roles in romantic dramas. In 101 feature films and TV movies, she created Hollywood’s first and finest portrait of the thoroughly modern woman: her independence born in neurosis, her strength forged in professional and domestic combat, her man of the moment an irrelevance or a desperate burden. ”I either have to hold him off/ Or have to hold him up,” she sang in Thank Your Lucky Stars. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress twice, was the first person to accrue ten Academy Award nominations (and one write-in) for acting, and was the first woman to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. In 1999, Davis was placed second on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest female stars of classic Hollywood cinema. In 1983, after filming the pilot episode for the television series Hotel, Davis was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy. Within two weeks of her surgery, she had four strokes which caused paralysis in the left side of her face and in her left arm, and left her with slurred speech. Davis collapsed during the American Cinema Awards in 1989, and later discovered that her cancer had returned. Too weak to make the long journey back to the U.S., she traveled to France, where she died of metastasized breast cancer on October 6, 1989, at the American Hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Davis was 81 years old. Bette was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood, California.

popular name: Laurence Olivier

date_of_death: July 11, 1989

age: 82

cause_of_death: Kidney failure

claim_to_fame: Show Business

best_know_for: Laurence Olivier was one of the most influential actors, directors and producer of the 20th century, renowned for his commanding Shakespearean performances on stage and screen. Born in 1907, he rose to prominence in British theatre in the 1930s before gaining international fame with film roles such as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1939) and Maxim de Winter in Rebecca (1940). Olivier cemented his legacy with his film adaptations of Shakespeare, directing and starring in Henry V (1944), Hamlet (1948)—for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor—and Richard III (1955). A towering figure at the Old Vic and later the founding director of Britain’s National Theatre in 1963, he helped shape modern British theatre. His later films included Spartacus (1960), The Shoes of the Fisherman (1968), Sleuth (1972), Marathon Man (1976) and The Boys from Brazil (1978). Over his long career, he earned multiple Academy Awards, honorary titles, and a life peerage as Baron Olivier. His marriage to Vivien Leigh was one of the era’s most famous artistic partnerships. Olivier remained active in film and television into the 1970s, leaving a lasting legacy as a master interpreter of Shakespeare and a central architect of contemporary British drama.