Death happens. Why not make it interesting?
The online competition to guess which famous people won't make it to the end of the current year. If they're elderly, ill, or just live a high-risk lifestyle, stick 'em in your team, and for each one whose death you correctly predict, you'll score points. DDP was dreamt up in Derby, England (hence the name...) by Big Iain back in 1996. Other hosts: Siegfried Baboon and Rude Kid (2003-7), Octopus of Odstock (2008-9), The Man in Black (2010-17), Spade Cooley (2018-19), msc (2020-21), Grim Up North (2020-22), and Reptile (2020-23). Now the Committee of DI (2022), time (2024), and Banana (2023) oversee the biggest deadpool going...
Two days after the 50th anniversary of the moon landings, Christopher Kraft Jr took a final giant leap into the great beyond. In 1958 he was recruited to the Space Task Group, a team dedicated to putting the first man into space. They failed that task – beaten by the Ruskies – but Kraft’s skills […]
And so it’s time to bring Li Peng to a conclusion… Peng served as China’s premier between 1987 and 1998, during the presidencies of Yang Shangkun and Jiang Zemin. A favourite of party elders such as Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun, Peng was strongly opposed to any market reforms in the country. This put him […]
At the age of six, violin prodigy Paul Krassner became the youngest ever person to play Carnegie Hall. However, he drifted away from music during his higher education years and instead became raptured with the comedy of Lenny Bruce. Krassner was briefly a stand-up himself (under the name Paul Maul), but had much more impact […]
Voted the greatest Dutch actor of all-time in a 1999 poll, Rutger Hauer was a cult star across the globe. He originally had his sights set on a career as a military medic, but left the armed forces over his refusal to handle deadly weapons. Instead he became an actor: first on Dutch television, and […]
Jeremy Kemp was part of the original Z-Cars cast, the ground-breaking TV cop show that changed the way episodic drama was tackled in the UK. However, he left the show during its second season – allegedly because he found wearing the police uniform too uncomfortable. He went on to become a prolific character actor both sides […]
Born Albert Hedison, our hero was made to change his name while doing the publicity rounds for his breakthrough TV show, 1959’s Five Fingers. Choosing “David”, which was his middle name, Hedison went on to have a near-60-year career on the big and small screen, with supporting roles in both The Fly and The Greatest Story Ever Told. […]
Goddamn it’s too fucking hot to be updating a deadpool website, but these are the travails I put up with while maintaining the world’s greatest celebrity death prediction competition… Johnny Clegg, aka the “White Zulu”, was one of South Africa’s favourite sons. Born in the Lancashire town of Bacup, he moved to Johannesburg at the […]
While 2019 DDPers have been more concerned with the health of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of her old co-workers has slipped out the back door. John Paul Stevens served as a Supreme Court justice between 1975 and 2010, the third-longest tenure on record. Appointed to the court by Gerald Ford (who called the move one […]
Dunno what the deal is with the French and comas. The current longest-comatose person, and the most comatose man in history, is a Frenchman: former France international footballer Jean Pierre Adams, who fell into a coma back in 1982. Anyway, Vincent Lambert didn’t get the chance to break that record, lasting only 11 years in […]
Less than a month after her old mucker Franco Zeffirelli passed on, Valentina Cortese has swapped day for night. Cortese had a varied career, and was perhaps the only actress who was both a former contract system player (she signed with 20th Century Fox in 1948), and a favourite of the European arthouse directors of […]
