George Clooney
George Clooney almost died when he cracked his head open while filming a torture scene for the movie “Syriana.” The pain of the injury was so intense that it even made him contemplate taking his own life. He recalled in a Rolling Stone interview: “I was lying in a hospital bed with an IV in my arm, unable to move, having these headaches where it feels like you’re having a stroke, and for a short three-week period, I started to think, ‘I may have to do something drastic about this’ … but I never thought I’d get there.”
It took doctors weeks to figure out what had happened to him during filming. It wasn’t until his friend (and “Friends” star), Lisa Kudrow, referred him to her neurologist brother, who noticed fluid leaking from Clooney’s spine, and realized that the condition was much more serious than anyone had initially thought.
“We started doing these things called myelograms, where they shoot contrast into your system and you can see what’s leaking out,” Clooney explained to Rolling Stone, “I had a two-and-a-half-inch tear in the middle of my back and a half-inch tear in my neck. The doctors did these blood patches, where they tie you down to a bed, and you’re awake because they have a long needle and need to know if they’re touching your spinal cord, and they take blood out and shoot it directly into your spinal column to try to get the blood to coagulate in those spots. I did about 15 of those over 15 days. It’s like getting a spinal tap every day, and you’re awake… I thought I was going to die.”
Anne Hathaway
Anne Hathaway almost died while vacationing in Hawaii in 2014. According to the New York Daily News, Hathaway was swimming in the ocean and got caught up in a powerful riptide.
Thankfully, a local surfer heard Hathaway’s screams and raced out to her rescue, bringing her safely back to shore. At some point during the drowning fiasco, the Oscar-winning actress must have injured her foot because her husband was later seen sucking her toe clean and applying a dressing from a small medical kit.
Perhaps the toe-sucking helps instill calmness after nearly dying?
Orlando Bloom
At the age of 21, Orlando Bloom almost died with some friends. He ended up falling three stories when the drainpipe he was climbing collapsed and broke several vertebrae in his back. He was paralyzed for four days, went through multiple surgeries, and had 18 months of rehab.
“I’m grateful for it,” Bloom explained in a MensHealth interview (via UsWeekly). “I’m always working on my back. It hasn’t prevented me from doing anything. But it’s a constant reminder.”
After going through rehab, he was able to start acting again and chose to come back to the business by landing the part of Legolas in 2001’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.”
Bloom also credits the accident for helping him gain a new lease on life.
“Fear is not a friend of mine. But it’s something to have a healthy awareness of. However, I can’t stop living. It would ruin my creativity, the person I am.”
Rachel Bilson
Rachel Bilson actually died and came back to life following a car wreck when she was 14 years old. She was riding around with some friends on the Pacific Coast Highway when the car crashed into another vehicle.
“Everyone was lucky to have survived,” Bilson told Mirror__in 2008. “I was with my girlfriend and these two guys driving down the Pacific Coast Highway. We were going really fast and we were involved in a head-on collision with a truck. We were in a tiny car and it was a pretty bad crash. They had to cut us out and I was in a coma for a few days. The crash ended that relationship, which is a good thing.”
“Everyone was lucky to have survived,” admits Rachel, who stars in the new thriller Jumper, out today. “I was with my girlfriend and these two guys driving down the Pacific Coast Highway. We were going really fast and we were involved in a head-on collision with a truck. We were in a tiny car and it was a pretty bad crash. They had to cut us out and I was in a coma for a few days. The crash ended that relationship, which is a good thing.”
Ellie Goulding
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In 2016, Ellie Goulding almost drowned in a frozen lake while traveling through Norway on the European leg of her tour. Photographer Conor McDonnell, who was with Goulding at the time, recounted the terrifying incident after posting a picture of the drowning car on Instagram.
“So me and @elliegoulding weren’t going to post about this but we decided that it’s too mad of a story not to tell. This photo is from when we were in Norway a few weeks ago – That moment when you’re in -25 in the middle of nowhere in Norway in the pitch black and your belt wagon crashes through the ice in the middle of a lake and you have to emergency evacuate through the roof. “Oh sh_t we’re in” was my first thought. Second was to take photos. We were in the front cabin. That is pretty much underwater in this photo. A few minutes later it was all completely gone under the water and ice for good.”
Leonardo DiCaprio
Leonardo DiCaprio is either the luckiest or unluckiest guy alive. We’ll let you decide. First, he was almost eaten by a shark while diving in South Africa in 2014.
“A great white jumped into my cage when I was diving in South Africa. Half its body was in the cage, and it was snapping at me,” he said in a Wired interview. “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. It flipped itself back out again. I have it on video. It’s insane.”
In that same interview, Leo talked about the time he went skydiving and almost got himself killed.
“We pulled the first chute. That was knotted up. The gentleman I was with cut it free. We did another free fall for like another 5, 10 seconds. I didn’t even think about the extra chute, so I thought we were just plummeting to our death. He pulled the second, and that was knotted up too. He just kept shaking it and shaking it in midair, as all my friends were, you know, what felt like half a mile above me, and I’m plummeting toward earth. And he finally unravels it in midair. The fun part was when he said, ‘You’re probably going to break your legs on the way down, because we’re going too fast now.’ So after you see your whole life flash in front of your eyes—twice—he says, ‘Oh, your legs are going to get broken too.'”
Diane Kruger
Diane Kruger nearly died when she was strangled by Quentin Tarantino on the set of Inglorious Basterds. During an interview with Graham Norton, Tarantino explained that he wanted to make the scene as realistic as possible and thought that most strangling scenes looked very fake, so he told Kruger, “I’m gonna just strangle you, alright? Full on, I’m gonna cut off your air, for just a little bit of time. We’re gonna see the reaction in your face, and I’m gonna yell ‘cut.'”
The scene went too far, and Kruger actually lost consciousness. The things actors will do for their craft…also Tarantino is just crazy.
Kanye West
In 2002 Kanye West almost died in a car accident and ended up having his jaw wired shut as he recovered from breaking it in three places.
Thinking back on the accident, Kanye told Yahoo Entertainment: “Well, the only thing this accident is saying is, ‘I am about to hand you the world, just know at any given time I can take it away from you.’ To nearly lose your life, to nearly lose your mouth, your voice, your whole face, as a rapper… and I had to be on TV!”
Kanye ended up writing his hit single, “Through the Wire” about the accident and even included footage of the wires being removed from his jaw in the music video.
Isla Fisher
Isla Fisher almost drowned when filming Now You See Me. She was performing a stunt underwater when she became trapped for over three minutes.
“My chain got stuck. I had to really swim to the bottom; I couldn’t get up,” she said on an episode of Chelsea Lately. “Everyone thought I was acting fabulously. I was actually drowning. No one realized I was actually struggling.”
Apparently, Fisher’s release chain got stuck on her costume and the underwater scene went from great acting to life-threatening in a matter of seconds. The safety latch was eventually pulled, and Fisher was saved.
Sarah Silverman
In the summer of 2016, comedian and actress Sarah Silverman suddenly came down with a rare case of epiglottitis, which is a condition where the epiglottis (the cartilage covering the windpipe) becomes inflamed and blocks airflow to the lungs. She was rushed to Cedar-Sinai hospital where she credits the doctors with saving her life and posted a status on Facebook, detailing the whole event.
“I was medicated just enough to not feel the pain and have no idea what was happening or where I was,” Silverman said in the Facebook post. “They had to have my hands restrained to keep me from pulling out my breathing tube.”
Though she admits most of her time spent at the hospital was hazy in her memory, one particularly odd interaction still sticks out in her mind.
“I couldn’t speak for a while and I don’t remember a lot of my ‘lucid’ time, but Amy (the Zvi) told me I stopped a nurse – like it was an emergency – furiously wrote down a note and gave it to her. When she looked at it, it just said, ‘Do you live with your mother?’ next to a drawing of a guy’s junk.”
Mark Wahlberg
Mark Wahlberg was scheduled to fly on American Airlines flight 11 on September 11, 2001. Wahlberg changed his plans last-minute, deciding instead to stop in Toronto for a film festival before heading back to Los Angeles. Flight 11 later crashed into the World Trade Center.
“If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did,” Wahlberg said in a 2013 interview with_MensJournal. _”There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, ‘Okay, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.'”
Wahlberg later apologized for his insensitive comments to the families of the victims on flight 11. He also said he’s had as many as 50 nightmares about what would have happened had he been on that plane.
Johnny Depp
While filming a movie in 2011, Johnny Depp and director Bruce Robinson decided to fly a small plane and nearly died. They were mid-flight when the engines suddenly died out. “The sound of the engines stopped,” Depp said in an interview with Live Magazine (via Huffington Post). “There was silence. Bruce and I were looking at each other and I think I said, ‘Is this it?’ It was like this weird extended moment when you’re just floating for a second, and you could feel this unpleasant descent. Nobody said a word except for Bruce and I sitting next to each other saying, ‘This is death; I guess this is how it goes down.’ Then we burst into hysterical laughter at the idea that this was how we were going to die.”
Moments later the engines kicked back on, and the two were more than a little relieved to know they were going to survive. “I guess you could say that was a big bonding experience for Bruce and me,” Depp said. “For a moment there, we were going down together.”
Michael J. Fox
While filming a scene forBack to the Future Part III, Michael J. Fox almost died when a stunt went wrong. The actor misplaced his hands during a hanging scene, and he ended up really hanging by a noose. He passed out before someone noticed that he wasn’t acting anymore.
Margaret Hamilton (aka the Wicked Witch from “The Wizard of Oz”)
Margaret Hamilton almost died on the set of The Wizard of Oz when a trap door malfunctioned and she caught on fire. She received second and third-degree burns and refused to work with fire for the rest of the shoot. She took six weeks off to recuperate before returning to the set.
When asked about the incident, Hamilton remarked, “I won’t sue because I know how this business work, and I would never work again. I will return to work one condition–no more fireworks!”
Tracy Morgan
Tracy Morgan was on his way back from a show when the car he was riding in was hit by a truck in 2014. One person, Morgan’s friend and mentor, James “Jimmy Mack” McNair was killed in the six-car accident. Morgan was left in critical condition with a broken leg, nose and several ribs after the accident. During his first two weeks in the hospital, he was in a coma and doctors feared he might never get his same cognitive abilities back. But after a month of rigorous rehabilitation, the comedian was released in a wheelchair from the hospital and continued recovering with help from his wife.
Morgan and two of his fellow passengers, who were also critically injured, filed a federal lawsuit against Walmart in July, accusing the megastore company of negligence. The retailer employed the truck driver, Kevin Roper, who was going 20 miles over the speed limit. Walmart filed a response to Morgan’s lawsuit and alleged that Morgan and his group wouldn’t have suffered such severe injuries had they been wearing seatbelts. That prompted Morgan to react publicly.
“After I heard what Walmart said in court I felt I had to speak out,” Morgan told the New York Daily News. “I can’t believe Walmart is blaming me for an accident that they caused. My friends and I were doing nothing wrong.”
The truck driver ended up being indicted by a New Jersey grand jury and was charged with first degree aggravated manslaughter, vehicular homicide, and eight counts of aggravated assault in varying degrees.