5 Guys Who Used Their Last Words to Troll Everyone

5 Richard Harris

Viewers of a certain generation will best know Richard Harris for playing Dumbledore in the first couple Harry Potter movies, because it’s every acclaimed actor’s destiny to end their lives playing some old wizard. They’ll also know him for playing Marcus Aurelius in Gladiator at around the same time. Then his acting career and life were cut short by a diagnosis of Hodgkin’s disease in 2002. He died within three months of that. 

We don’t imagine he had many interesting last words during his final hospital stay, as it consisted of three days spent in a coma. Immediately before that, though, he was living it up at this place:

That’s the Savoy Hotel in London. He stayed there till October 2022, when they carried him out and moved him to University College Hospital. They took him out in a stretcher, passing guests, and he made it a point to yell to the guests, “It was the food!”

We have to now picture the hotel patrons looking at each other horrified and sticking fingers down their throats to purge themselves of the poison. 

4 ‘Tight Lips’ Gusenberg

On February 14, 1929, one set of Chicago gangsters shot up another set of Chicago gangsters. The shooters — some in police uniforms, but we assume they were not truly policemen — killed members of the North Side Gang against a wall in the city’s Lincoln Park neighborhood.

Seven died in the Valentine’s Day Massacre, but one of these victims, Frank “Tight Lips” Gusenberg, survived long enough for the (real) cops to show up. He may never have had that nickname while alive as far as we know, but he earned it thanks to his response to the shooting. Police asked him who’d done it, and Gusenberg didn’t tell them. He didn’t just stay quiet, though, or say, “I’m not telling.” He said, “No one. Nobody shot me!” Then he died, from being shot. 

His statement was the final one on the massacre because even today, we don’t know who did it. It’s a fair guess that it was Al Capone’s gang, but we never found out for sure and never arrested anyone for it. 

3 Henrik Ibsen

This summer, the hit play in New York has been An Enemy of the People, starring Succession’s Jeremy Strong. It’s about a doctor who discovers an infection is about to set off a disease outbreak, and then business owners conspire to silence him, for fear of how much the response might cost. Though set in a village sometime long ago, the play is very obviously a commentary about recent events. That includes the title, which in addition to being a phrase with a long history is a Trump quote about the media. But the play was actually written in 1882 by Henrik Ibsen. 

A couple decades after writing An Enemy of the People, Ibsen had a set of strokes and wound up bedridden. In May 1906, his nurse walked into his room and assured him that he was getting better. “On the contrary,” said Ibsen, and died.

Incidentally, there’s a bit in An Enemy of the People where the doctor declares that he will leave and go somewhere where no one suffers the same issues that he does — America. The audience laughs, as though this is intentional irony, but that line was in the original Norwegian play. 

2 Emperor Vespasian

In the year 69, Rome experienced what we call the Year of Four Emperors. It was a nice time indeed, the likes of which we’d never see again, at least not until the Year of Five Emperors a century later (a year of multiple assassinations and the killers auctioning off the Roman Empire). 

The fourth of the four emperors was Vespasian. Despite the craziness of that year, no one assassinated him, and he reigned for a full decade. Then, when he himself turned 69, he came down with some painful stomach ailment. This was a constant risk back in the days before anyone knew how germs worked. 

On his deathbed, he said, “Vae, puto deus fio.” This translates as, “Dear me, I think I'm becoming a god.” Which sounds like a pompous statement, but the feeling that he was describing was actually the sensation of something pressing its way through his anus from the inside. He then let loose a blast of diarrhea and died. Some might say that the blast, not the words, constituted his last statement. 

1 Doc Holliday

When an outlaw in the Old West lived a dangerous life, people used to say, “He’ll die with his boots on.” That meant he’d probably get gunned down, rather than lasting till old age and passing away warm in his bed. Today, people still say the phrase, but it’s lost its violent connotations. Many think it’s just about someone who goes on working till the end of their life, dying in their work boots.

One of those Old West men who earned the “with his boots on” prediction was John “Doc” Holliday. He was a terrifying figure, because he was a professional dentist. He was also a gunfighter — he was one of the guys charged with the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, along with Wyatt Earp. He’s didn’t die by gunshot wound, though. He died from tuberculosis (which meant that those dental patients of his really did have reason to fear him). 

Right when he was dying, he looked at his bare feet on the bed. He realized that though he was indeed dying young (at 36), he didn’t have his boots on after all. “This is funny,” he said, and died. The line made it into the movie Tombstone:

The filmmakers went with his actual line, with no elaboration, instead of, say, having him declare, “This is funny. I always thought I’d die with my boots on.” It was a bold attempt at authenticity, which left many viewers saying, “What? What was funny? What the hell was he talking about?” 

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