10 Best Swan Song Movie Performances

Warner BrosIt€™s always sad when an actor gives their last ever film performance -- there's a tremendous amount of lost potential there. You know that no matter how great an actor was, you're never going to get to see a new film with them in it. You'll never know if their next film would have been a masterpiece, and especially when it comes to actors who die prematurely, there's an entire segment of their acting career that was unfairly stolen from all of us. But there's a certain reprieve from the sadness when their last performance was remarkably good, a bittersweet feeling in knowing that even though they died, they went out on the highest note possible. They got in one last great film, and that means a lot. While it's never fun to lose an actor that we love, it's much more depressing when a formerly well-respected actor fades into obscurity and dies after having a cameo in one last made-for-TV movie just to pay the bills. At least when they put out performances like the ones on this list, we can celebrate all the stages of their career. Given the choice, who doesn't want to go out with a bang rather than a whimper?

10. John Wayne - The Shootist

ParamountOne of the often told myths of Hollywood is that John Wayne filmed The Shootist, a movie about an aging gunslinger dying of cancer, while he himself was dying of the same disease. This makes a good story, but it's not technically true. Wayne had been treated for cancer in the early 1960s, but when he was making this film in 1976, he had been cancer-free for nearly twelve years after having his entire left lung removed. It was discovered to have reappeared during a gall bladder surgery in 1979, and he died several months later from the disease. But regardless, his eventual demise does give The Shootist an added sense of poignancy. His final shootout was already an emotional event, a man determined to die on his own terms (it's essentially suicide, with John Wayne's character going so far as to order his own tombstone and gift his beloved horse away). But knowing what we know now, that this would be Wayne's last performance, and that he would die of the very same disease as Books, turns this into a monument to one of the greatest movie legends of all time.