Cinemorgue is a crowdsourced encyclopedia that documents which actors or actresses "died" in which movie or TV show. So if you've ever wanted an open-ended exploration then Cinemorgue is a great resource for you.

Unfortunately wikis are just big text files that lack a way to find the cool data points. In order to get to the bottom of things, I parsed the wiki dump myself. Below I've created an exporable dataset of every actor in the wiki, along with leaderboards for which actor has died the most in film and most interestingly how.

Leaderboards

How Was The Data Sourced?

This data was directly pulled from the .xml.7z database dump of Cinemorgue on Fandom, but turning this into usable data was a bit of an uphill battle.

In theory, every page should have been in a predictable format, but rarely is manual-entry data truly reliable once you start to dig into things. Getting from a wiki dump to a clean table was a deeply unglamorous trial-and-error process, but sometimes you have to get your hands dirty.

While extracting actor's filmography was difficult on its own, inferring a cause of death at scale from raw text is a much more difficult problem set. The least over-kill (pun kind of intended) way to go about this is tokenizing the text, and using a corpus of classifiers to flag the most likely scenario.

The most efficient method was to classify by the first "action" word in a string, since cause of death is usually stated up front.

As an example, let's say the keyword dictionary only tracks two causes, gun for Firearms and punch for Personal Weapons. Here's how order decides the outcome:

"He tries to punch his way out, but they pull a gun and end it there."

punch appears at word 4, gun at word 9. Even though the gun is what actually kills him, punch is earlier in the string, so this gets classified as Personal Weapons.

This earliest-word approach isn't perfect, it will occasionally lock onto an incidental word before the real cause shows up, but it's a solid proxy at this volume.

Explore The Data Yourself!

The cleaned .csv lives in my public datasets repository, alongside a column reference. Every actor, film title, release year, and classified cause of death, free to download and reuse. It is rebuilt monthly, so it stays current as the wiki grows.

Looking to join the conversation? This project has been shared on r/movies with a fun little infographic I made. if you want to argue with strangers! Post: Who has died the most in film?