Estate plans usually include an individual’s wishes regarding their funeral. I thought you’d find reading about what some celebrities wanted for their last starring role interesting. Here is Part 1 of this post, which is from ATI online by Austin Harvey, edited by Maggie Donahue, and published on 11/7/23. Stay tuned next week for Part 2, which includes the funeral wishes of a Cincinnati native.
“From Aretha Franklin’s posthumous outfits to Janis Joplin’s all-night wake party, these weird celebrity funeral requests all have interesting stories behind them.
Death is a sad but inevitable part of life, and throughout history, people have come up with meaningful ways of honoring the dead. Whether it’s through special burial and disposition customs or personalized funeral services, there are so many ways people can customize a loved one’s sendoff to reflect who they were in life.
Often, families will attempt to honor the funeral requests of the dead — even if those requests are admittedly rather strange. The deceased might have wanted their ashes sprinkled in a place that was meaningful to them, or to be buried next to a loved one. But they also might want their remains fired up into space, or mixed with concrete and shaped into a memorial reef to be placed at the bottom of the ocean.
Of course, it helps to be famous. Wealthy celebrities certainly have more means to afford extravagant funerals than the average person, and that means their odd requests have a better chance of being fulfilled.
These are 11 celebrity funerals that stand out among the others as some of the strangest of all time.
Tupac Shakur’s Friends Smoked His Ashes
When hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur died just six days after being shot by an unknown gunman, the world was in shock.
While fans worldwide mourned the loss of a great artist, those closest to Shakur suffered worst of all. Devastated by the death of their friend, the other members of Shakur’s group Outlawz chose to commemorate the late rapper’s memory in a unique way.
In a 2011 interview with DJ Vlad, the Outlawz confirmed a long-running rumor that they had rolled some of Tupac Shakur’s ashes into a joint after he died and smoked them.
“I came up with that,” said Outlawz member E.D.I. Mean. “If you listen to [Tupac Shakur’s song] ‘Black Jesus,’ he says, ‘last wishes n****, smoke my ashes.’ You know what I mean? So, that was a request that he had. Now, how serious he was about it? We took that s*** serious.”
According to the Outlawz members, on the night of Shakur’s memorial, they went together to the beach and threw a number of things Shakur liked into the ocean, including weed and chicken wings. They said it was their own way of giving him a farewell.
They then mixed Shakur’s ashes with “some of that great granddaddy California kush” so that he would be “flowing through [their] system.”
Hunter S. Thompson Had His Ashes Blasted Out Of A Cannon
Hunter S. Thompson’s had one of the most extravagant celebrity funerals of all time.
Hunter S. Thompson was a pioneer of “gonzo journalism,” a style of reporting that places the reporter at the center of the story. In order to write his book on Hell’s Angels, for example, Thompson famously embedded himself within the biker group. In 1971, Thompson wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, a semi-autobiographical novel that was later adapted into the hit film starring Johnny Depp as the fictionalized version of Thompson.
Thompson was certainly worthy of being turned into a Hollywood character — the man was quite the character himself. He lived a wild, drug and alcohol-fueled life. In fact, E. Jean Carroll once chronicled Thompson’s daily routine, noting that his days began at 3:00 p.m. with whiskey and ended at 8:00 a.m. with prescription sleeping pills.
Still, Thompson had a surprisingly long life considering his numerous run-ins with law enforcement, his constant consumption of drugs, and the fact that he once kept his ashtray on top of a crate of live dynamite. He lived to be 67 years old before tragically dying by suicide in February 2005 after battling multiple medical conditions.
Six months after his death, a private funeral was held in Thompson’s honor.
During the ceremony, his ashes were catapulted into the sky from a 153-foot tower amid a fireworks display as Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky” provided a soundtrack to the spectacle.
In total, the funeral cost $3 million — a price paid by Thompson’s good friend, Johnny Depp. John Kerry, Bill Murray, Sean Penn, George McGovern, Jack Nicholson, Charlie Rose, and Benicio del Toro were among the celebrities in attendance.
Actual Footage Of Bruce Lee’s Funeral, Including His Casket, Was Used In His Last Film
Robert Clouse used archival footage of Bruce Lee for the actor’s final film, including footage from his real funeral.
Bruce Lee’s death was another one of those unfortunate and untimely Hollywood deaths that sent ripples across the world, made all the more heartbreaking when his son Brandon Lee, died in an equally tragic manner.
Bruce Lee had been one of the biggest action movie stars in the world, and for years, movie studios continued to use archival footage of his fights in productions even after his death. Numerous “Bruce Lee” clones also came onto the scene, including Bruce Li, Bruce Le, Dragon Lee, and Bruce Lai.
But one posthumous Bruce Lee film stands out among the rest for its use of actual footage from Bruce Lee’s funeral.
According to Far Out, Lee had filmed around 100 minutes of footage for a Hong Kong martial arts film called Game of Death prior to his death.
In America, Robert Clouse was brought on to direct a localized version of the film. Rather than stick to the original plot, however, Clouse took a different direction, reworking the script into a revenge story about the mafia.
Released in 1978, the film only used roughly 11 minutes of Lee’s scenes from the original Game of Death. It also featured archival footage from Lee’s fights in other films — and footage of Bruce Lee’s open casket, for a scene in which the main character fakes his own death in order to escape the mafia.
It was certainly an odd choice, but evidently, it paid off. Although critics panned the film, it ended up being a commercial success. Perhaps audiences were just happy to see Bruce Lee in one final film.
James Doohan Had His Ashes Flown Into Space
James Doohan is best known for his role as chief engineer Montgomery Scott, a.k.a. Scotty, on the original Star Trek television series, but according to a 2020 report from The Verge, Doohan is also known for being the only person to be smuggled onto the International Space Station after his death.
In 2005, Doohan died at the age of 85, having never achieved his dream of getting on the ISS one day. His family wanted to honor that wish, or at the very least get him into space. In 2008, a portion of Doohan’s ashes were launched aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket — which failed just minutes after launch.
In 2012, another portion of his ashes were sent into space aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9, and have since orbited the Earth more than 70,000 times. But still, Doohan never made it to the ISS, alive or dead.
That is, no one knew that he had.
It was later revealed that although all official requests to bring Doohan’s ashes onto the station were denied, Richard Garriott — one of the first private citizens to travel on the ISS — happened to smuggle a portion of Doohan’s ashes into the station’s Columbus module, along with a laminated photo of the late actor.
Garriott snuck the laminated photograph and the ashes on board and hid them away under the floor of the Columbus. For years, no one knew about it other than Garriott and Doohan’s family.
“It was completely clandestine,” Garriott said. “His family were very pleased that the ashes made it up there but we were all disappointed we didn’t get to talk about it publicly for so long. Now enough time has passed that we can.”
Carrie Fisher Was Buried In A Prozac-Shaped Urn
Carrie Fisher’s unusual funeral reflected her witty sense of humor.
Carrie Fisher is known in equal parts for her role as Princess Leia in the Star Wars franchise and for her cunning wit and humor. That sense of humor didn’t die with her in 2016, though.
As Vanity Fair reported at the time, when Fisher was buried alongside her mother, Debbie Reynolds, in January 2017, she was buried in a large Prozac pill-shaped urn.
“It was a porcelain antique Prozac pill from the ’50s that was one of Carrie’s prized possessions,” her brother Todd Fisher said.
Fisher had long been open about her own bipolar disorder and advocated throughout her life for mental health awareness. She had also had a morbid sense of humor about her death years before it came.
In her 2008 memoir Wishful Drinking, she wrote about how George Lucas instructed her not to wear a bra when playing Princess Leia “because there’s no underwear in space.” She mused:
“What happens is you go to space and you become weightless. So far so good, right? But then your body expands??? But your bra doesn’t—so you get strangled by your own bra. Now I think that this would make for a fantastic obit—so I tell my younger friends that no matter how I go, I want it reported that I drowned in moonlight, strangled by my own bra.”
The sight of her brother carrying her ashes in that Prozac-shaped urn likely would have amused the late star. Indeed, speaking to the BBC, Todd said the urn “was where she would want to be.”
This post is not intended to make light of funerals or death, but it does remind us that we have a choice when it comes to our final wishes. Putting those choices in writing as part of your estate plan is important. It allows your loved ones to honor your wishes while not causing them additional stress by making them guess what you might have wanted. Call me to schedule a meeting to discuss your estate plan at 513-399-7526 or visit my website, www.davidlefton.com, for more information.
Source: ATI online by Austin Harvey, edited by Maggie Donahue and published 11/7/23.