Too beautiful to live?

My wife had been planning this article for ages. Every time she thought about writing about all the young and good-looking actors/actresses/ performers/celebrities who had died before their time, she got busy with another assignment.

And then, fast as you can blink, somebody else would shuck off the mortal coil. Disappear into the night. Fade way, leaving behind a good-looking corpse.

So she decided to give it to me instead: the A.J. Benza of the young-and-tragic beat.

Why is it that this parlor game never really ends? Young celebrities, lost in some career/personal wilderness, turning up as AP headlines while we surf the Net in the wee hours. “Died in his LA mansion…” “Was found dead in her bed…”

The most recent to go, Australian actor Heath Ledger, was not outrageously beautiful. We don’t even know enough about him personally to conclude he was beautiful inside. But there was something beautiful, starting to emerge, in his acting. His turn as an ill-fated prison guard in Monster’s Ball showed he wasn’t going to be stuck in teen comedies and big-budget historic epics like The Patriot forever. His turn in Brokeback Mountain, whatever you think of the subject matter, was exceptionally good. Truth was rearing its head up there, on the screen, and this guy was becoming a real actor. In his recent SAG speech, Daniel Day Lewis dedicated his award to Ledger, calling his character in Monster’s Ball “almost like an unformed being, retreating from himself, retreating from his father, from his life, even retreating from us, and yet we wanted to follow him. Yet we’re scared to follow him almost. It was unique.”

Ledger died, for still unclear reasons, at the age of 27 last week.

This news came a week or so after Brad Renfro’s unexpected death. Unexpected, because we hadn’t seen the 25-year-old actor in public in years. Known as a young teen heartthrob after his turn in The Client, he soon took on more indie roles, things like Larry Clark’s Bully and Ghost World that showcased an anguished side. A heroin bust in 2006 was the last we heard from Renfro. Until Jan. 15, that is, when he was found dead in his LA apartment after a night out partying with friends.

The death list has to begin somewhere. Maybe September 30, 1955 is the best place to start. That’s when James Dean crashed his Porsche 550 Spyder out in the California desert. And it was at this very instant that his legend began to grow and mutate beyond words. Marilyn Monroe was perhaps the next major icon of death. Overdosing on prescription pills in her Brentwood bungalow in August, 1962 wasn’t exactly the most original way to die, but Monroe definitely made that unhappy exit her own. She was 36.

Though no mere celebrity, Princess Diana was perhaps one of the few on this list who was conceivably as beautiful inside as out. At least that’s how the public likes to remember her. Is there some cosmic conspiracy that singles out those touched with too much humanity for early departure? All is speculation. Princess Di died after a high-speed car chase in a Paris tunnel on August 31, 1997. She was 36.

No article on prematurely expired acting talent would be complete without a discussion of River Phoenix. One of the first celebrity deaths to occur under our noses, so to speak — long before the Internet became a haven of death-watching vultures — Phoenix died surrounded by gawkers on a Hollywood sidewalk at the age of 23, on Halloween night, 1993. His acting was mercurial, full of Method tics and inward brooding that seemed to mark him as James Dean’s successor. His acting reached a kind of zoned-out Zen mastery in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, playing a narcoleptic hustler named Mike. But his research methods for the role apparently included drug experimentation: it wasn’t so easy to get out of character for River. Despite his often bleary performances in final movies, Phoenix remained lucid about the world around him: “Addiction is not just for bad people or scumbags; it’s a universal disease,” he said in an interview shortly before collapsing from an overdose of heroin and cocaine outside Johnny Depp’s Viper Room. Sayang! cried his many Filipino fans.

There is a theory that Method acting is responsible for killing some of the best actors of the past century. Certainly, the Rebel Without A Cause curse — starting with Dean and ending with Method boy Sal Mineo — comes to mind. Something about getting too deep into roles, too emotionally involved, can be lethal to young, emotionally brooding actors. This may explain Heath Ledger’s mood shifts, his apparent inability to sleep without pharmaceutical aid (though a breakup with actress Michelle Williams probably didn’t help). River’s descent into character was, according to friends, hard to shake. It affected his moods. It’s easy to imagine a life devoted to emotional truth leading to personal turmoil. Artists, ever since the Romantic era, have fallen victim to the notion that feeling deeply is the only way to live, the only way to make true art. (Poet John Keats was one: he died at 26 of tuberculosis. His friend, Percy Bysshe Shelley, was another: he drowned at sea at age 28.)

Certainly, rock musicians have been frequent victims of the Romantic curse. Starting with ex-Rolling Stone Brian Jones (drowned in his swimming pool, age 27, in ’69) and Jim Morrison (who was no longer beautiful, but a 27-year-old bloated alcoholic when he died in a Paris bathtub in ’71), the death toll of people who have taken on a public role of Dionysus — a kind of golden god of music ­— has lengthened over the decades.

What’s a golden god’s life without tragedy? Both Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix — sex gods to some, hermaphroditic musical aliens to others — also died at 27. Kurt Cobain, too: he shotgunned himself at age 27. No wonder this ill-fated age has come to seem like a curse to many young rock gods: the list of those who don’t survive 27 is long.

But the most cursed of all seems to have been Jeff Buckley.

My wife got quite interested in Jeff Buckley, the doomed alternative offspring of ‘60s folk singer Tim Buckley (who himself died at age 28 from a heroin overdose), a few years back. Buckley had the looks, the high cheekbones and sad-puppy eyes; but he also possessed an embarrassment of riches in terms of talent. A singer who leapt across octaves, entranced by every musical style from French chanteuse Edith Piaf to Van Morrison, Buckley was genetically endowed with a gift for captivating audiences. (His solo sets on the CD “Live at Sine-E” are proof enough of this.) But music can take people to confusing places, places full of doubt. Who knows what Buckley was thinking when he climbed into Wolf River Harbor, a branch of the Mississippi River, on May 29, 1997, between sessions for a follow-up album to “Grace”? He was fully clothed, wore boots, and had a chunky ring of housekeys in his pockets. Something dragged him away, or down, and his body was only recovered three days later along the river.

There are many others, famous faces who exuded beauty and died young, tragically: somehow it seals them off in our minds. Edie Sedgwick is some kind of icon to the fashionistas, perhaps a symbol of the brutality of the beauty biz: she OD’d on barbiturates and alcohol in 1971, age 28, having achieved little lasting screen work, but leaving a lasting impression as a doomed poster child for the culture vultures. Actor Brandon Lee, son of ill-fated martial arts legend Bruce Lee, also died violently, victim of a loaded prop gun on the set of The Crow in 1993. He was gifted with some of his dad’s charisma and died, too young, at 28. And singer/actress Aaliyah was poised for major stardom at an even younger age, 22, when her plane crashed in 2001, clipping short her promise.

For many of these celebrities, the road of life was filled with emotional pitfalls that, at such a young age, may have been too difficult for them to navigate. We can’t really say these people were too beautiful to live. We can say, though, that their willingness to navigate the intensely inward, often painful world of their art, despite the pitfalls, did make them beautiful.