A good year for obituary writers

The deaths of Nelson Mandela, Paul Walker and Tom Clancy have been the subject of internet conspiracy foolishness.

Sarah Lazarovic for The National

This week, as Nelson Mandela was finally laid to rest, two more well-lived lives came to an end and under the news spotlight: Peter O’Toole and Joan Fontaine. Fontaine, who died at the age of 96 and won an Academy Award for best actress in Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion, epitomised 1940s Hollywood glamour. Peter O’Toole, 81, was best-known for the starring role he played in David Lean’s epic Lawrence of Arabia and for not winning an Oscar despite eight nominations. He was finally given a lifetime achievement award in 2003.

Who could forget O’Toole in the guise of Lawrence? His eyes the same piercing Technicolor blue as the vivid desert sky.

Writers have had a field day, both in speculating on the feud between Fontaine and her equally starry sister Olivia de Havilland and sharing reminiscences about O’Toole. About his health, a constant source of concern to those who knew him, the actor is reported to have said: “The only exercise I take is walking behind the coffins of friends who took exercise.”

It’s been a year marked by the departure of hugely influential figures from politics, the sciences, arts and entertainment: Hugo Chavez and Lady Margaret Thatcher; rock star Lou Reed and jazz trumpeter Donald Byrd; novelists Doris Lessing, Elmore Leonard and Tom Clancy and the poet Seamus Heaney; Kofi Awoonor, the Ghanaian writer and activist who died in the Westgate shopping mall attack in Nairobi and Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist and poet; Nobel physicist Kenneth Wilson and Douglas Engelbart, an engineer and the designer of the computer mouse; broadcaster David Frost, who famously extracted President Nixon’s apology; and Peter Kaplan, The New York Observer editor.

Many were controversial, none could be called dull. And the lives of some, like the actress Esther Williams , 91, whose gift was to to swim like a fish and look wonderful in a one-piece swimsuit, are a fascinating reminder of a bygone age. Time magazine wrote about her:

“Sleek as a seal, with gorgeously toned arms and a lustrous smile, Williams embodied the midcentury California dream for a country weary of war. She was Doris Day, underwater.”

Others such as the US journalist Michael Hastings, who died aged 33 when his car crashed and exploded in Los Angeles, continue to cause controversy. A contributor to Rolling Stone magazine, for which he wrote the article that cost General Stanley McChrystal his job, and a critic of the Obama administration’s surveillance policies both before and after Edward Snowden’s dramatic security leaks, there’s vivid speculation about whether his sudden death was really an accident.

He had “powerful enemies”, according to a lengthy story on Hastings in New York magazine, but conspiracy theories don’t necessarily need logic to thrive and that’s particularly true online. The deaths of Nelson Mandela, Paul Walker and Tom Clancy have also been the subject of internet conspiracy foolishness.

At least one man had a reprieve this year. In July, the actor Jackie Chan took to Facebook to deny online reports that he had died in a stunt sequence for his latest film. Sometimes a hoax obituary can have just as much life force as the real thing.