10 Huge Celebrity Deaths - That Were Completely Fake

Benjamin Franklin once famously stated, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." Had he been around in the era of celebrity news, he might have included a third certainty — announcements of the deaths of famous figures that are determined to be false. While it has most definitely become all the more prominent in the internet age, there is a long history of premature obituaries for actors, musicians, and other well-known public figures.

The most common example is the mere rumor of a celebrity death gaining enough traction that media outlets report it as if it's fact. But it's not always a case of miscommunication — a lot of fake celebrity deaths are deliberate hoaxes, and in a few instances, the hoax was perpetuated by the celebrity themselves for one reason or another. 

The main thing that all of these examples have in common is that the hoax became widespread enough that the celebrity — or at least, one of their reps — had to make an official statement on the matter to confirm that the reports of their death were greatly exaggerated. Here are 10 cases where a celebrity death was fake — and arguably got out of hand.

We've unfortunately already lost four of the seven main cast members of "Star Trek: The Original Series," with Nichelle Nichols being the most recent to pass away following her death in 2022. But there was a moment in October 2024 when we thought Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner, had also left us, thanks to an AI-related error.

Copilot, Microsoft's AI program, included the 93-year-old Shatner in a list of celebrities who had died in 2024 — prompting someone to share a screenshot of that information in a reply to Shatner on X and asking if he was okay. A few hours later, Shatner himself replied, "Not after reading this," followed by the "face screaming in fear" emoji, confirming that he was still alive and also seeming to find the humor in the mistake. The original reply subsequently had a community note added to it confirming that it was untrue. As it stands, Shatner, George Takei (Mr. Sulu), and Walter Koenig (Ensign Chekov) are the only three actors still alive from the cast of "Star Trek: TOS."

Whatever happened to Bender from "The Breakfast Club?" If you believe the internet, he died 10 years ago. But it's not always just some random blog or little-known website that falls victim to a celebrity death hoax. In the case of actor and Brat Pack alum Judd Nelson, reports of his death in October 2014 had seemingly grown so credible that Fox News International released a story that he had been found dead in his condo. The article quickly went viral, being shared on social media over 250,000 times as people mourned the "St. Elmo's Fire" and "New Jack City" star. 

Things had gotten so out of hand that Nelson's agent, Gregg Klein, thought that a simple press release refuting the news wasn't going to suffice in getting the truth across. So he drove to his client's house and had Nelson take a photo holding that day's newspaper, with the date in the shot as a way to definitively prove that the actor was alive and well. Klein sent that to the Los Angeles Times to share on its website and social media accounts. 

If the debacle surrounding the ill-fated Fyre Festival in 2017 taught us anything, it's that a celebrity endorsement on social media holds a lot of power in terms of what people accept as truth. And that happened in January 2012, when a fake CNN retweet claiming that musician, style icon, and Oscar-winning actor Cher had passed away gained so much traction that it became a trending hashtag — at which point Kim Kardashian herself mentioned it to her 12 million+ followers.

At the time, Kardashian was in the top five of Twitter accounts with the highest number of followers, so she even so much as asking the question of whether the news was real was enough to have people run with it. The fact that Cher hadn't tweeted in four days at that point only added fuel to the fire that she had passed away. To be fair, Kardashian never explicitly stated that Cher had died — but she also didn't take a minute to look into it herself before putting the question out there to her millions of followers, who immediately began to spread it around. Cher's publicist, along with various friends and family members, eventually got out in front of the rumors and put them to rest.

Most fake celebrity death announcements come from outside sources, but in the case of Jack Black's supposed 2016 passing, the announcement was taken as credible because it came from the official Twitter account of his comedy rock band, Tenacious D. Since people reasonably assume that whoever runs a band's social media account would know as well as almost anyone whether or not a member of that band died, the news was taken seriously for a hot minute.

However, it didn't take long before the account tweeted to say that it had been hacked, and that the death announcement was a prank perpetrated by the hacker(s). This was subsequently backed up by Tenacious D guitarist John Konesky. Tenacious D itself was seemingly dead for a brief moment in 2024, following the Donald Trump-Jack Black controversy that saw Black distance himself from both the band and his friend, Tenacious D co-founder Kyle Gass. But Black later reassured fans that it was only a temporary break, and that Tenacious D would be back at some point. 

Word choice is everything, especially in a headline. This became painfully clear when ESPN-owned pop culture blog Grantland published an article in January 2015 looking back at the career and legacy of Hollywood legend Gene Hackman. The original headline read, "The Greatest Living American Actor at 85: Gene Hackman Is Gone But Still in Charge," with the "gone" referring to the fact that he had retired from acting as well as public life, for the most part. 

But despite the fact that the first part of the headline proclaimed him to be the "Greatest Living American Actor," many people focused on "Gene Hackman is Gone" and thought that he had died. Tributes to the actor began showing up on social media soon after, with an entire Facebook page being created specifically for people to mourn his passing and share memories of his films. The next day, Hackman's rep contacted ABC News to confirm that Hackman was still very much alive, and Grantland subsequently changed the "gone" in the offending headline to "retired." As for Grantland, it was retired by ESPN later that same year. 

For reasons known only to those who enjoy starting and spreading fake celebrity death rumors, it is popular to claim that a celebrity died from falling off a cliff in New Zealand. Those that have been the victims of that particular hoax include Natalie Portman, Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, Tony Danza, George Clooney, Hilary Duff, and Dwayne Johnson.  In the case of Jeff Goldblum, his alleged 2009 demise via plummeting from a precarious New Zealand precipice spread so quickly that the actor couldn't even contact all of his friends and family before they got the bad intel from multiple outlets that were already reporting on his death. 

Goldblum explained in an appearance on "Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen" that he started making phone calls the moment the fake news went viral. But before he could contact his mother, she had already called him to make sure he was okay. Goldblum said he also got a distraught voice mail from a friend who had heard the news, and clearly assumed the worst when Goldblum didn't answer the call. The actor performed a tongue-in-cheek memorial to himself on "The Colbert Report" not long after the death hoax surfaced. 

Celebrities: They're just like us! And that includes going down YouTube spirals of videos featuring dark pop culture trivia. Ozzy Osbourne, best known as a rocker and occasional reality TV star — though he played more fantasy creatures than you probably thought — was doing that very thing in December 2023, when he clicked on a video about celebrities who had recently passed away. Imagine his surprise when he saw himself in that video. "I put it on and I died!" he told his family co-hosts on "The Osbournes Podcast."

While initially lighthearted and making jokes about the situation, Osbourne than shifted gears a bit, expressing disgust that such videos will often prematurely announce a celebrity's death specifically when they are advanced in age and/or have had recent medical issues. Son Jack Osbourne then pointed out that one of the great things about the family doing a podcast is that fans already know the on-again/off-again Black Sabbath frontman is alive and doing fine specifically because they listen to the show every week — so Ozzy never has to bother issuing a statement or anything of the sort denying any unfounded claims of his passing. 

Everyone else in this list is still alive at the time of publication, a choice that was made intentionally. But Sean Connery's death hoax in 1993 is still worth mentioning despite his very real 2020 passing, both because of how the news came about, and how Connery decided to announce that he was still very much alive. 

All of the things that had to come together just right to lead to reports of Connery's death are fascinating indeed. It started with the death of a retired race car driver who was a friend of Connery's, and naturally, that friendship with the "Highlander" actor was frequently mentioned in obituaries. That news happened to coincide with the death of an American politician named John Connally. When those two death reports hit Japanese news outlets at the same time, the names "Sean Connery" and "John Connally" sounded nearly identical when spoken in Japanese — so everything got all jumbled up to the point that it was Connery who was thought to have died.  

Connery claimed during his subsequent October 1993 appearance on "The Late Show with David Letterman" that he was mainly there to prove that he was still alive — after doing his 007 legacy proud by dropping into the studio via jetpack, despite the fact that Connery regretted playing James Bond. 

Netflix's "Mr. McMahon" confirmed what we all suspected about Vince McMahon, the disgraced WWE co-founder who was never one to shy away from a controversial stunt. And he himself was often involved in such stunts, from getting into violent feuds with his wrestlers to ongoing storylines where he was having affairs with various female talent. Nothing seemed off limits, up to and including McMahon depicting his own supposed death during a June 2007 episode of "WWE Raw."

Near the end of the episode, McMahon is seen walking out to a limo that then explodes seconds after he gets in. It was very convincing, and the show made it seem like it was an unexpected accident and that McMahon had indeed died in the blast. Everyone on the inside kept the ruse going, allowing the media to report on the shocking incident in the days that followed without correcting anyone. Another episode of "Raw" came and went, with all involved still insisting that McMahon was in fact dead. 

McMahon and the WWE let the world believe he was dead for a full two weeks, until news of the very real death of WWE wrestler Chris Benoit hit just before the next episode of "Raw." At that point, McMahon appeared on screen to announce that his death was a storyline and was being dropped immediately in light of what had happened to Benoit, his wife, and his son – including the revelation that Benoit was believed to have murdered them before taking his own life.  

Here's a celebrity death hoax that gained so much steam it became a full-blown urban legend — which some still believe to this day. It's tough to pinpoint the exact starting point for the conspiracy theory that musician Paul McCartney died in the 1960s, but among the most popular "clues" that supposedly support it are that various songs on the landmark Beatles album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" confirm McCartney's death. Of course, it requires playing some of the songs backwards to hear it — and you can project pretty much anything you want to hear on distorted, reversed vocals.

While McCartney's continued and prevalent existence in the public eye should have been all the proof anyone needed that he wasn't dead, conspiracy theorists weren't satisfied. Instead, they doubled down, claiming that the Paul McCartney we were seeing after his supposed mid-1960s death — commonly believed to have been in a car accident — was actually a lookalike. A lookalike that somehow managed to have his own very long and successful career for roughly 60 years. 

Yes, there are indeed people who believe to this day that the "original" Paul McCartney is long dead and that we've only known the imposter Paul ever since. Time Magazine called "Paul is Dead," as the legend is most commonly known, one of the 10 most enduring conspiracy theories of all time in 2009, owing to how many people still subscribe to it.