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Everybody gets a date. Some people get a headline first. This is where Morty's news desk files the ones worth reading — every celebrity death, actor death, politician death and sports figure death we cover, written from real reporting, illustrated with real photographs, and delivered without the funeral-parlour voice.
13 September 2026 · Sports Figure Death
Barry Melrose — the Saskatchewan defenceman who coached Gretzky’s Kings to the 1993 Stanley Cup Final and then spent 27 years explaining hockey to America on ESPN — died on 9 September 2026, aged 70, three years after a Parkinson’s diagnosis ended the broadcast run.
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11 September 2026 · Sports Figure Death
Andy Williams — AEW's The Butcher and founding guitarist of Every Time I Die — collapsed after a tag-team match in Millvale, Pennsylvania and died on 6 September 2026, aged 48. Two careers, both extremely loud, and nobody with a bad word to say.
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4 September 2026 · Celebrity Death
Cassandra Wilson died at home in Jackson, Mississippi on 2 September 2026, aged 70. Two Grammys, an NEA Jazz Master fellowship and a contralto that dragged the Delta blues, Joni Mitchell and a Monkees single into the same room and made all three behave.
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30 August 2026 · Celebrity Death
Tim Curry died at his Toluca Lake home in Los Angeles on 25 August 2026, aged 80. The British actor who built a midnight religion out of fishnets, then spent forty years playing every other monster in the cupboard — Pennywise, Darkness, a Plaza concierge, three Tony nominations and a memoir written after he had to learn to speak again.
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28 August 2026 · Celebrity Death
Dolly Parton died in Nashville on 25 August 2026, aged 80, after a brief battle with cancer. Three thousand songs, ten Grammys, one theme park holding up an entire corner of Appalachia, and 332 million free books — the only file in this cabinet where the good-deeds column needed its own drawer.
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23 August 2026 · Actress Death
Hayden Panettiere died on 16 August 2026 in Greenville, South Carolina, aged 36, after cardiac arrest. The child actress who became Claire Bennet on Heroes and Juliette Barnes on Nashville left a career that started at eleven months and a memoir that finally told the story in her own voice.
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22 August 2026 · Sports Figure Death
Tommy John died at his Florida home on 16 August 2026, aged 83, eight days after publishing his own farewell letter. A sinkerballer from Terre Haute who tore his elbow apart in 1974, took a 1-in-100 shot on an operation nobody had tried, then won 164 more games and turned his own name into the most famous surgery in sport.
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13 August 2026 · Politician Death
Ben Jones died of a heart attack at his home in Luray, Virginia on 9 August 2026, aged 84, waiting to watch the Braves play the Yankees. A railroad-shack kid who was arrested at civil rights sit-ins, he played Cooter Davenport for 141 episodes of The Dukes of Hazzard, then won a Georgia seat in Congress and ended Newt Gingrich’s career on his way out of one.
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10 August 2026 · Actor Death
Vincent Pastore died on 1 August 2026 at his home on City Island in the Bronx, aged 80, of natural causes. The Bronx native who played Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero on HBO’s The Sopranos left one of the most quoted character-actor performances of the prestige-TV era, a Navy stint, a limo-driving past, and a lifetime of refusing to act like a rat off-camera.
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6 August 2026 · Singer Death
Bonnie Tyler died on 8 July 2026 in a hospital in Portugal, aged 75, months after emergency intestinal surgery near her home in Faro. Born Gaynor Hopkins outside Swansea, she built the most recognisable rasp in pop by ignoring a surgeon's orders and screaming after throat surgery. Jim Steinman handed her a seven-minute Nosferatu offcut called “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, and the rest is every wedding disco on Earth.
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3 August 2026 · Actor Death
Randolph Mantooth died on 9 July 2026 at a hospice in Ventura, California, aged 80, after a long illness that began with a cancer diagnosis in 2015. For six seasons he was Johnny Gage of Squad 51 on NBC's Emergency! — the show that introduced America to the word “paramedic” and talked a whole country into building the profession. Most actors leave a filmography. This one left an occupation, plus fifty years of soaps, theatre and firefighter benefits.
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31 July 2026 · Actor Death
Sam Neill died in Sydney on 13 July 2026, aged 78 — “sudden and unexpected,” his family said, and three months after he announced he was finally cancer free. He was the man who taught two generations to fear a doorknob turning slowly, and he did it while being almost aggressively unbothered by fame.
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31 July 2026 · Actress Death
Brenda Fricker died in Dublin on 16 July 2026, aged 81, after a period of ill health. She was the first Irish woman to win an Academy Award, for My Left Foot, and the pigeon lady in Home Alone 2.
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New death news is filed most weeks — celebrity deaths, actor deaths, politician deaths, sports figure deaths and the occasional influencer nobody over forty has heard of. To see who went today, try Who Died Today, or browse the running ledger in the Dead Celebs guest book.
