20 Harry Potter Actors Who Are No Longer With Us

15. Rik Mayall - Peeves

He might not have actually made it into the finished movie, but initially, Rik Mayall was supposed to play a major part in The Philosopher's Stone. The British comedy legend was cast to play Peeves The Poltergeist - which would have seen him appear in every film subsequently, presumably.

Sadly, his perfect casting didn't lead us where it should have and his scenes were cut entirely, because of the inferior design of the character, as Chris Columbus revealed:

The reason he was cut is that none of us were happy with the design. David and I looked at the design of Peeves and thought, We can get it better. So we shot the sequence but we won't have it ready for the initial release of the DVD. We'll try and get it out for maybe a year and a half, two years, from now.

Mayall himself claimed he was shunted out because he kept making all of the actors - especially the kids - corpse during filming. This feels just as believable.

The actor died on 9th June, 2014 after returning home from a morning run.