Actors Who Never Saw Final Movie

Heath Ledger is the toast of tinsel town for his performance in The Dark Knight as the Joker, a role which has led him to dominate the awards circuit scooping a Best Supporting Actor Oscar, Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild and Bafta.

However it was revealed that Ledger only saw six minutes of The Dark Knight, a film which dominated the box office last summer and has now passed the $1 billion mark, before he suddenly passed away last year.

So FemaleFirst takes a look a some of the actors who didn't see their final on screen performances.

No other actor fitted the phrase live fast and die young more than James Dean who became a legend and screen icon in the years since his death, despite only making three movies.

His short career saw him nominated for two Academy Awards for East if Eden and Giant and a Bafta for Rebel Without A Cause, the film remains one of the best coming of age and teen angst movies of all time.

But Dean passed away in a car crash in 1955 at the tender age of twenty four and he never saw Giant which was released a year after his death. For his performance he received the second of his Oscar nods.

Bruce Lee is the most influential martial artist  to ever grace the big screen as well as going on to become a cultural icon.

He single handedly elevated the martial arts movie to popularity and critical acclaim, Enter the Dragon remains one of the most popular movies in this genre.

But it was to be Lee's final performance and a film he never got to see. After being given a painkiller for a headache which led to a fatal reaction in which Lee's brain swelled, he was just thirty two.

But Brandon Lee was there to follow in his father's footsteps as he moved into acting and the action movie genre... however tragedy was to strike the Lee family for the second time.

Whilst shooting The Crow, the movie many believe would have made Lee a star, he was shot and killed by a make-shift bullet from a prop gun.

He died twenty years after his father at the age of twenty eight, he never saw The Crow completed.

River Phoenix was set to have a very successful movie career, with the likes of Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade and Stand By Me under his belt, he had shown a promising talent.

But at the age of twenty three, after taking a combination of heroin and cocaine, he died of heart failure, robbing him of what would have been a very long and fruitful career.

His final movie Silver Tongue was released a year later but Dark Blood, a film he has been working on, had to be abandoned as it
couldn't be completed without the actor.

Other actors who passed away without seeing their final moves include the King of Hollywood Clark Gable who never saw The Misfits, Natalie Wood missed Brainstorm and Spencer Tracy never saw Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, suffering a heart attack just seventeen days after completing filming.

FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw