Ingrid Bergman died in London on August 29, 1982, the day she turned 67. She had won three Oscars and had kept acting through years of cancer treatment, finishing a television film about Golda Meir months before her death. Hers is the best-known case of a famous person dying on their own birthday, and researchers have found that it is less of a coincidence than it sounds.
1. Raphael (April 6, 1520)
The Italian painter of the School of Athens died in Rome at 37. His early biographer, Giorgio Vasari, wrote that he was born and died on Good Friday, and many accounts give April 6 as both his birthday and the day of his death. Historians still argue over his exact birth date, but the story was part of his legend within a few decades of his death.
2. William Shakespeare (April 23, 1616)
Shakespeare died in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 23, 1616. Nobody recorded the day he was born, only that he was baptised on April 26, 1564, but by tradition his birthday is celebrated on April 23, which would mean he died on his 52nd birthday. England also marks St George’s Day on April 23, which helped the tradition stick.
3. Machine Gun Kelly (July 18, 1954)
George Kelly Barnes, the Prohibition-era gangster known as Machine Gun Kelly, was arrested in 1933 after kidnapping an Oklahoma oil man and spent most of the rest of his life in Alcatraz and Leavenworth. He died of a heart attack at Leavenworth on his 59th birthday.
4. Sidney Bechet (May 14, 1959)
The New Orleans clarinettist and soprano saxophonist was one of the first great soloists in jazz. He moved to France in 1950 and became a star there, with hits like “Petite Fleur”. He died of lung cancer near Paris on his 62nd birthday.
5. Ingrid Bergman (August 29, 1982)
Bergman won Oscars for Gaslight, Anastasia and Murder on the Orient Express, and played Ilsa in Casablanca. The cause of her death is usually given as breast cancer, though some accounts describe it as complications of lymphoma after cancer surgery. She died at her home in London on her 67th birthday.
6. Corrie ten Boom (April 15, 1983)
Corrie ten Boom and her family hid Jews from the Nazis in their watchmaker’s house in Haarlem during the Second World War. They were betrayed in 1944, and her father and sister died in custody. She survived Ravensbrück concentration camp, wrote about it in The Hiding Place, and spent the rest of her life travelling and speaking. She died after a stroke in California on her 91st birthday.
7. Betty Friedan (February 4, 2006)
Betty Friedan’s 1963 book The Feminine Mystique described the frustration of American housewives and is often credited with starting the second wave of feminism. She co-founded the National Organization for Women in 1966. She died of heart failure in Washington on her 85th birthday.
What the research says
In 2012 a team of Swiss researchers studied the death records of about 2.4 million people and found that deaths were about 14 percent more common on a person’s birthday than on other days. The rise was larger for some causes, including strokes, heart attacks, suicides and falls, especially among people over 60. The researchers suggested that the stress, emotion and drinking that come with birthdays may play a part.
Bergman’s last performance, as Golda Meir in A Woman Called Golda, won her an Emmy that was presented a few weeks after her death, so the last award of her career came after the last birthday of her life.