Emilia Clarke, Leonardo DiCaprio and Drew Barrymore have all narrowly escaped death. Photos / Getty Images, AP
Emilia Clarke, Leonardo DiCaprio and Drew Barrymore have all narrowly escaped death. Photos / Getty Images, AP
Celebrities fool us with their jaw-dropping film stunts so often it feels like they are superhuman. But it turns out some of their near-death experiences would leave even Hollywood shocked.
A prime example came earlier in the year when Marvel star Jeremy Renner narrowly escaped death trying to stop his seven-tonne Pistenbully snowplough from running over his nephew. After breaking more than 30 broken bones and a punctured lung, the actor has undergone intensive rehab and is finally back on his feet.
Jamie Foxx also suffered a close call recently when he was rushed to hospital with an unknown medical emergency. One month later, the star is reportedly still in hospital and little has been revealed about his condition.
But Renner and Foxx aren’t the only famous faces who have escaped death in their lifetime. Ozzy Osbourne has experienced a few near-death scenarios, Emilia Clarke survived two brain aneurysms and Kanye West was involved in a terrifying car accident.
From house fires to plane accidents and strokes, here are nine celebrities who cheated death:
She’s a Hollywood sweetheart with a slew of successful films behind her and a talk show that makes other celebrities feel at home - but all that could have been quite different for the actress if it weren’t for her labrador, Flossie.
In 2001, Barrymore and her then-fiance Tom Green almost died in a fire when their five-bedroom home in Beverly Hills caught fire. Asleep and unaware of the flames engulfing their estate, the couple narrowly escaped thanks to their dog.
A spokesperson told the New York Post at the time, “Flossie barked and literally banged on their bedroom door. She was really the main alert that there was a fire.” Still groggy from sleep, Barrymore then smelt smoke and woke up Green before calling emergency services, however the fast-moving blaze cut into the telephone wires and the line went dead.
Thankfully the dispatchers located the address and Barrymore, Green, Flossie and her two other dogs, Highla Flopsy and Templeton, escaped through heavy smoke.
Mark Wahlberg
Mark Wahlberg. Photo / AP
The heartbreaking terrorist attack that killed 3002 people on September 11, 2001 almost saw a very famous casualty.
Wahlberg was initially booked on American Airlines Flight 11 - the plane which crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Centre - but he changed his flight to a different one a few days earlier.
Wahlberg narrowly cheating death was all thanks to a friend who had asked him to change his plans and fly up to Toronto to watch his film at the Toronto Film Festival.
Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane also had a ticket for the same flight but his agent told him the wrong departure time, which saw the star miss boarding by a few minutes. He ultimately took another flight and survived.
Sharon Stone
Sharon Stone. Photo / Getty Images
At 65 years old, Sharon Stone has done a lot in her lifetime including winning a Golden Globe. But there were moments she wasn’t sure she was going to see the future, let alone the next day.
Speaking to The Sun in 2020, the actress revealed she has cheated death three times, once after being struck by lightning, another after suffering a stroke, and once when she almost cut her jugular open.
She told the news outlet: “I’ve had a lot of things, it’s crazy. I had my neck cut to a sixteenth of an inch from my jugular vein when I was 14 on a clothesline.
“I’ve been hit by lightning and, wow, that was really intense,” she said, adding, “I was at home, we had our own well. I was filling up the iron with water and I had my hand on the tap.
“The well got hit by lightning and it came up through the water. I was indoors and I got picked up and thrown across the kitchen and hit the refrigerator. Thankfully my mum belted me round the face and brought me to.”
As if that wasn’t enough, the Pennsylvania-born actress also suffered a stroke in 2001 and was hospitalised for nine days as a result. Despite her 1 per cent chance of survival, the mother-of-three is alive and well, reflecting on how “tremendously lucky” she is to be alive.
Speaking to Harpers Bazaar, she said, “I felt like I had been shot in the head. I remember laying there thinking, ‘I’m having a stroke’.”
Following the stroke, the actress underwent a seven-hour surgery and had 22 coils inserted into her brain.
The Hollywood alum told Wired magazine in 2015 that he has escaped death three times - one of those times being when a great white shark “jumped into my cage when I was diving in South Africa”.
“Half its body was in the cage, and it was snapping at me,” DiCaprio recalled. “They leave the tops open and you have a regulator line running to the surface. Then they chum the water with tuna. A wave came and the tuna sort of flipped up into the air. A shark jumped up and grabbed the tuna, and half its body landed inside the cage with me. I sort of fell down to the bottom and tried to lie flat.
“The great white took about five or six snaps an arm’s length away from my head. The guys there said that has never happened in the 30 years they’d been doing it.”
Other near-death experiences the star survived included his plane engine exploding mid-air and a skydiving mishap when both of his parachutes had issues and almost didn’t open. The first chute was tangled and so was the second, but thankfully the instructor untangled it in time and they landed injury-free.
On October 14 that year, 17-year-old Christopher Lewis tracked the royal tour to the Otago Museum in Dunedin where he concealed a .22 (5.6mm) calibre rifle in an old pair of jeans and hid in a toilet cubical at the Adams Building. Out of sight from the general public, Lewis pointed the gun out of the window and shot at the Queen as she exited a car.
Thankfully, the shot did not hit the Queen or anyone else but it did create a loud noise and police told journalists that it was from a sign falling down.
Jackie Chan
Jackie Chan.
He’s one of the greatest stuntmen in the world and is known for performing all of his own film stunts but one performance almost changed everything for Jackie Chan.
While filming a stunt for the 1986 film Armour of God, Chan’s character chugs from a freshly opened beer can and leaps off a ledge before swinging from a tree. The first stunt went smoothly but when he attempted it again things took a scary turn.
Chan made it to the tree but unfortunately slipped and plummeted to the ground where he hit his head on a rock and cracked his skull. The injury left him with internal bleeding and blood dripping out of his ear. The film crew didn’t have a medical professional onsite and had to carry him down the mountain they were filming on to the hospital where “surgeons tended to his cracked skull and the bone that had penetrated his brain as a result of the fall”, reports said.
Other injuries the actor has sustained include a pelvis dislocation, spinal damage, broken bones - and he has even been electrocuted.
Isla Fisher
Isla Fisher. Photo / Getty Images
Actress Isla Fisher revealed on Chelsea Lately in 2013 that while shooting a scene for the hit film Now You See Me, she was stuck underwater for almost three minutes.
Fisher was in the middle of filming a magic trick in a water tank that was meant to be a simple escape for the star, however she found herself in trouble when her release chain got stuck in her costume.
“I was actually drowning,” she said. “Everyone thought I was acting fabulously... no one realised I was actually struggling.”
Despite laughing while telling the story, the actress said it was a traumatising ordeal.
Brendan Fraser
Brendan Fraser in The Mummy.
Brendan Fraser made his welcome return to Hollywood last year after starring in the award-winning film, The Whale but his acting career - and life - almost came to an end while filming the 1999 film The Mummy.
In one scene Fraser’s character was meant to be hung, so he was standing on a platform with a rope around his neck. Wanting the scene to look as realistic as possible, the star recalled the moment telling UK comedy show, There’s Something About Movies, “I remember the camera came around, and I thought, ‘I’m gonna make this look really good,’ so I sort of took a few deep breaths and kind of barred down. Then I realized I was on the balls of my feet and the rope was going up and I had nowhere to go. Then the world kind of dialled down.”
The star passed out and was thankfully okay but woke up to the film’s stunt co-ordinator clapping in his face. “He goes, ‘Hey. Congratulations. You just joined the club with Mel Gibson. He got choked out on Braveheart, too.’”
Emilia Clarke
Emilia Clarke. Photo / Getty Images
Game of Thrones actress Emilia Clarke suffered not one but two brain aneurysms throughout her rise to fame on the hit series and it resulted in the inability to use significant parts of her brain.
Speaking to the BBC last year, the 36-year-old star said, “It was the most excruciating pain,” explaining she suffered severe headaches that came on suddenly during a workout in February 2011, roughly around the time she was wrapping up filming the first season of the HBO hit.
“The amount of my brain that is no longer usable... it’s remarkable that I am able to speak, sometimes articulately, and live my life completely normally with absolutely no repercussions.”
She said after her second major episode, blood was cut off to her brain for over a minute, meaning it will no longer work. She likened the condition to having your brain “short circuit”.
