5 Movies Whose Stars Were in Severe Pain
Workers shouldn’t feel pain. Instead, the client should feel pain, and they should pay you by the hour for the pain you provide them.
That rule should hold equally true in the world of filmmaking. But sometimes, everything goes wrong, and the actor finds themselves screaming in agony. And no: We’re not just talking about when someone pulls off some impressive physical stunt. The pain can also come from far more unexpected sources.
Kenpachiro Satsuma, ‘Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster’
As a guy who put on a Godzilla costume in half a dozen movies, Kenpachiro Satsuma experienced plenty of painful moments. Most fall under the category of “impressive physical stunts,” which we said we weren’t going to be focusing on today. He had concussions. He almost drowned, because he had to linger underwater before popping up as Godzilla. He got electrocuted, because we guess the only way to take down a guy in Godzilla suit is to build pylons for real.
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But something a little different happened on the set of 1971’s Godzilla vs. Hedorah, also known as Godzilla vs. The Smog Monster. Satsuma was playing Hedorah here, the smog monster, wearing a costume that weighed 150 pounds. He had finished filming a scene and had started to take the costume off, which is the point at which a stuntman’s chance of injury is usually done. But now came the stabbing pains of something not caused by the shoot — appendicitis.
Satsuma wound up in the hospital, where doctors had the unusual task of operating on Hedorah. The costume was so unwieldy that they figured removing what remained of it before operating would take too much time and too much trouble.
Toho
That was a fun day for the surgeons. It wasn’t such a fun day for Satsuma, who had the unfortunate condition of being resistant to pain treatment. That means anesthesia didn’t work on him. To hear the sounds he made that day, just search online for “Godzilla roar.”
Anne Ramsey, ‘Throw Momma from the Train’
Sometimes, when a celebrity talks in a trademark manner, that results from some medical condition that few people know about. Emma Stone and Bonnie Tyler both had nodules on their vocal cords, which results in either a husky voice or an extremely husky voice, depending on how well you recover. Anne Ramsey, the Momma from 1987’s Throw Momma from the Train, talked with a sort of speech impediment, and this wasn’t just acting. This was the result of surgery that Ramsey had just had on her tongue.
The condition that made that tongue surgery necessary? Throat cancer. Which would make for a fun enough story if recovering from the cancer was what helped Ramsey put together that memorable character, except she never did recover from it. The cancer killed her in August 1988.
That was less than a year after the movie came out. It was also exactly four months after the Oscars ceremony for which she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.
Jonny Kennedy, ‘The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off’
If that last story got you feeling sad, let’s go ahead and get the saddest entry of all out of the way right now.
You’ll know this lead actor was in pain, if you happen to have seen his movie. It’s called The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off, and it’s a documentary about Jonny Kennedy, who suffered from dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa. The disease means you have delicate skin — kids with it are often called “butterfly children” because their skin is as fragile as a butterfly’s wings. Kennedy, though 36, came off as a child because he never went through puberty. His version of the disease was extra severe, and several parts of his body had no skin at all, raising his daily existence from “constant pain” to “constant harrowing pain.”
Kennedy died during the course of the documentary. He had just met the prime minister’s wife and was returning home by train. The documentary had already been about his upcoming death, complete with him buying his own coffin, and it now shifted to covering his actual death. The very first scene shows his dead body propped up in a wheelchair.
Channel 4
When the documentary finally aired on TV, even doctors were like, “Uh, maybe this is a little too much. No one’s going to learn anything if they change the channel in horror before they even hear the guy speak.”
Charmian Carr, ‘The Sound of Music’
Let’s switch gears and talk about the last movie you’d associate with action and injuries: The Sound of Music. Sure, there is that one scene where a boat tips over, and the cast had to scramble to scoop up the little girl since she couldn’t swim, but other than that, you don’t see much opportunity for danger.
But during the “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” song, where Liesl and Rolf dance in a gazebo, Charmian Carr’s foot went through one of the gazebo’s glass panes. Not only does this make this the clearest example we have on an actor in pane, but it meant that when they sprang up and did the final take immediately after that, Carr had a sprained ankle. Supposedly, you can see the flesh-colored bandage they tied to her if you look really hard.
That’s impressive because this isn’t just another scene but Carr’s big dance number. The secret to her pulling it off? The studio injected her with something, which they insisted was “vitamin B-12.” That “weee” she gives at the end isn’t merely the delight of a girl who’s kissed her first Nazi but the reaction of someone whose blood is coursing with a vial of 1960s studio serum.
Edwina Booth, ‘Trader Horn’
Hollywood had even fewer rules in 1931. The first Hollywood production to film outside America went all the way to Kenya and shot with no script, basing the story largely on whichever animals they encountered. This resulted in the occasional disaster. One scene placed actress Edwina Booth in a crocodile-filled river, with the crew’s guns ready to intervene if the crocs attacked. When the crew did sweep in at the end of the shot, one man fell in the water — and got eaten by a crocodile.
Another scene aimed to feature a charging rhino. This pretty much just involved filming an actual charging rhino, who ran into another crew member, killing him as well. These two slain guys’ names are lost to history because they were locals (“native boys”), and the studio shrugged off the deaths and moved on.
Slightly better recorded is what happened to Booth. She caught jungle fever, and we don’t mean that she hooked up with one of the native boys.
On the boat ride over, the studio guys told her she should sunbathe, to accustom herself to the African sun. In fact, they told her to sunbathe nude, for maximum acclimatization. As a result, an insect bit her and gave her a disease, which we think today was malaria. During the remainder of the shoot, she requested medical attention, to no real response. The result? She made it through the shoot but was afterward confined to a bed for five years.
She sued MGM, who settled out-of-court. She then never acted again. People heard about the incident, and rumors spread that the disease killed her, so when she really did die all the way in 1991, people were surprised. “Her death has been wrongly reported so many times,” announced her family, “but this time she really did die.”
We suppose outliving every single other person who worked on the movie offered some level of sweet revenge.
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