4. Wallace Beery Allegedly Beat to Death One of the Original Three Stooges
This list entry is very unpleasant. Probably because Wallace Beery was, according to retrospective accounts, a very unpleasant man. A drunkard, a woman beater, and an actor so insecure that he would often try to upstage his well-known child co-star, Jackie Cooper. In short, as I said, Wallace Beery was a very unpleasant man. But the incident that he's most infamous for is 'allegedly' beating comedian Ted Healy - the original ringleader of the comedy troupe that would go on to be The Three Stooges - to death outside the Trocadero nightclub in 1937. According to historian E.J. Fleming, Beery was helped by organised crime figure Pat DiCicco and Cubby Broccoli, the producer of the
James Bond franchise (sorry to put a bit of a dampener on your Skyfall movie experience there, folks). There was nothing personal to the attack, just Beery and his cronies being vile, intoxicated animals who assaulted a man so badly that he died in a damn parking lot. Soon after the 'official' story from MGM studios was that it was 'three college boys' and Beery all of a sudden got an all-expenses paid trip to Europe (translation: he needed to get the heck out of Hollywood ASAP). The debate still rages on as to whether Beery was actually the perpetrator of the crime, but if he was... well, Jesus Christ.