Anthony Bourdain among the names on this thread. He was in the prime of his career and friends with Andrew Zimmern, who came up from as far down as one apparently could rise. (Zimmern was an alcoholic sleeping on a park bench.) I didn't follow him much, but knew he had a thriving career, and a friend in Zimmern who had actually been homeless. I knew after the fact Bourdain had spoken openly about being depressed and was aware he was temperamental, but his ongoing success still made his death startling to me.
Robin Williams didn't really surprise me as many comedians are known to be chronically depressed, and in his failed single season 2013 sitcom "The Crazy Ones" with Sarah Michelle Gellar, he was in apparent decline to me months before his suicide, but I expected an early death from his well known drug use, not a suicide or something like the diffuse Lewy body disease which was going to kill him soon. (Williams had been hanging out with John Belushi and the girl who killed Belushi with a speedball injection the night Belushi died in 1982 and told cops he'd been weirded out by her. That girl, Catherine Evelyn Smith, had been warned about to the entire world eight years earlier by her then boyfriend Gordon Lightfoot in Lightfoot's biggest career hit, Sundown. Smith herself died in August at age 73 after having been on oxygen for a few years, but considering the hard drugs she'd been addicted to, reaching 73 was a major miracle.)
I think the lack of recent celebrity suicides is a bit more surprising when considering the pressures so many of them struggle under, and how screwed up so many of them seem to be.
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www.dailymail.co.uk
