5 Celebrities Whose Last Days Were Deeply Painful

5 Salvador Dalí

There are famous photos of Dalí when he was a young man and when he was an old man, which might give the impression that the spark of creativity remained in him right till the end. But when he was 76, in 1980, he was treated for depression and for a tremor that interfered with his painting. Then his wife died, and he sank into depression harder. He moved to the castle where his late wife was buried and refused to leave. 

During his last years, he refused to even leave his bed. Often, he’d refuse to eat. He kept an electric bell beside the bed, to summon his staff when he wanted them, and one time, this bell short-circuited and set the bed on fire. So, he did leave the bed once — to be hospitalized, for his burns. 

He painted almost nothing during this period, but he did sign his name to thousands of sheets of paper, which his agents sold for $10 each. Selling autographs sounds like a lame way of making money, and the reality was sadder. Since the page was blank but for the signature, fraudsters could (and did) draw on these and pass these forgeries off as original Dalís. Either Dalí didn’t realize this, or he did realize it and just didn’t care. 

4 Eva Perón

The Eva Perón story — as known by the public and as told in the musical Evita — is that she rose from poverty, became First Lady of Argentina and ran for vice president before that got cut short by her early death from cancer. The truth about her final days was sadder and wasn’t known until 2011, 60 years after her death. 

Doctors treated her cervical cancer in September 1951, using a process called intravaginal radium brachytherapy. That means inserting a radioactive cylinder into the vagina, which sounds like quack science but is, in fact, how we sometimes address cancer even today. Then, while in the hospital bed undergoing this vagina treatment, she ordered 6,500 guns by letter from the Netherlands. She was arming the nation’s trade unions, and we can speculate on what sort of uprising she had planned next. 

This was a problem, and Evita could start a civil war if left unchecked. So, President Juan Perón, despite being her political partner as well as her husband, ordered a prefrontal lobotomy on her. She didn’t consent, and the doctor acted in secret, only admitting to it years later after a postmortem analysis of her brain scans revealed evidence of the operation. 

As tragic as that sounds, we’ve heard that she didn’t want you to cry for her.

3 George Orwell

Orwell completed the book 1984 in 1949, admirably finishing the job 35 years ahead of schedule. He died in 1950, making 1984 the last thing he ever wrote. 

He died of tuberculosis, which remains a serious problem even today. It kills a million people a year, making it the single deadliest infectious disease. He had the painful lung condition even while writing the book, and biographers now figure that this influenced the book’s torture scenes.

Then came a new complication. Reacting poorly to the medication, which included antibiotics that doctors knew don’t treat tuberculosis, he came down with something called toxic epidermolysis necrosis. As the name suggests, that’s when the skin dies, irreversibly. 

He spent the last six months of his life hospitalized. That’s especially surprising considering that he got married within the last three months of his life. He married Sonia Brownell, who inspired 1984’s Julia, while in the hospital and while lying on his deathbed. He never left this bed.

2 Billie Holiday

Holiday died in the hospital in 1959 of cirrhosis. She was also suffering from heroin withdrawal, which doctors treated with methadone until representatives from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics showed up and stopped them. These agents also put Holiday in handcuffs while she lay in her hospital bed, booking her for heroin possession. That would be a cruel thing to do to any patient, but it was particularly unethical in this case because they planted the heroin in question.

The Bureau had long had a vendetta against Holiday. Specifically, Bureau head Harry Anslinger had a vendetta against her. Anslinger hated jazz as much as he did drugs, and for the same reason (racism). He’d told her to stop performing the song “Strange Fruit,” which is about lynched Black Americans hanging from trees...

...and when she refused, Anslinger sicced his agents on her repeatedly. Along with jailing her for heroin use, he banned her from performing afterward anywhere that served alcohol, which was something the government had the power to do. And now, when she was on her deathbed, he sent agents in again to place heroin on the scene. They set it down outside her reach but still claimed it was hers. 

They didn’t take her into custody after cuffing her, though. There was no need. She’d die in that same bed, just days later. 

1 Ernest Hemingway

People remember Hemingway as manly and strong, with a life full of whiskey and war. You’d do well to also know that in the last months of his life, his wife checked him into the hospital under a false name, to treat his mental illness. 

One sign of this illness was when Life commissioned him to write 10,000 words on bullfighting, and the famously concise writer came up with a 100,000-word manuscript. Though not diagnosed at the time, this was probably a manic episode, and depression followed it. He became paranoid, sure that the FBI was tailing him. His wife put him in the Mayo Clinic, where he was unable to answer doctors’ questions about his name and address or who his parents were. 

The prescription for Hemingway’s ills? Electroshock treatment, dozens of times. Today, we’ve largely figured out a safe and painless dosage for electroconvulsive therapy, but in those days, the shocks were more severe. The White House invited him to attend JFK’s inauguration, but he missed it because he was in the hospital receiving electroshock. By the end of it, he was crying and begging his wife to stop them. 

The hospital discharged him. Soon after, his wife found him cradling a shotgun and sent him back in, for even more electroshocks. This time, he didn’t respond by crying. He responded by grinning. The hospital discharged him again, and within a week, he pointed his shotgun at his head and fired. 

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