They Died on Halloween, 2.0 Trivia Quiz

Answer: Sean Connery

Young Sean Connery joined the Royal Navy at age 16, but was discharged at age 19 with an ulcer. The handsome, athletic man almost had a career as a footballer with Manchester United, but he decided to go with acting. Connery played James Bond in six films (and at 6'2" was the tallest actor to play the part), though the part was initially offered to Patrick McGoohan. On the other hand, Connery turned down the parts for Gandalf in the "Lord of the Rings" series and the Architect in "The Matrix" trilogy. During his long acting career he won many awards, including one Oscar and three Golden Globes.

In 1993, Japanese and South African news agencies falsely reported Connery's death from lung cancer (he was a heavy smoker, but he would live for many years afterward). Alas, Sean Connery suffered from dementia in his final years, and on Halloween 2020, he died peacefully in his sleep at his residence in Nassau, The Bahamas, after enduring pneumonia caused by heart failure.

Answer: John Houseman

Jacques Haussman was born in Romania but educated in England. He immigrated to the USA in 1925 and took the stage name John Houseman. On Broadway, Houseman wrote and directed plays, and insisted on casting a young Orson Welles in Archibald Leash's verse play "Panic" (1935). Houseman and black actress Rose McClendon headed the Negro Theatre Unit of the Federal Theatre Project of the Works Progress Administration. For the NTP's 1936 production of "Macbeth", Houseman assigned Welles as director. Together, Welles and Houseman formed the Mercury Theatre company which eventually developed into "The Mercury Theatre on the Air" a popular and critically acclaimed radio series that produced the infamous broadcast of "The War of the Worlds" that caused a panic on the night before Halloween 1938, when far too many listeneres believed that they were hearing the news and not a play.

Houseman did a great deal of work in cinema and television as well, and perhaps his best-known role was that of Professor Charles W. Kingsfield in the movie "The Paper Chase" (1973) and the 1978 TV series adaptation. John Houseman died at age 86 from spinal cancer on Halloween 1988, and his ashes were scattered at sea. Cameos of Houseman can be seen in "Scrooged" (1988) and "The Naked Gun" (1988), released posthumously.

Answer: Federico Fellini

Federico Fellini was influenced by the Italian Neorealists but eventually forged his own special blend of fantasy, symbolism, hallucination, and reality, particularly after he met psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Over time he earned five Oscars, and in 1985 a "Golden Lion" award at the 42nd Venice Film Festival for his life's work.

A blocked femoral artery necessitated an angioplasty in 1993. Two months later, he had a stroke which left him partially paralyzed. A second stroke left Fellini in a permanent coma until his death on Halloween at the age of 73.

His widow, Giuletta, died just a couple of months later from lung cancer.

Answer: Rosalind Cash

Born in New Jersey, Rosalind Cash was fluent in English, Spanish, and German. She was a founding member of the Negro Ensemble Company (est. 1967) and at the New York Shakespeare Festival she played Goneril opposite James Earl Jones' King Lear. On "Sesame Street" albums, she voice the sister (Mary Frances) and the mother of the Muppet Roosevelt Franklin. Cash earned an Emmy nomination in 1996 for her portrayal of Mary Mae Ward, a grandmother running an orphanage, on the long-running daytime soap opera "General Hospital". Cash briefly appeared on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in an audition for an editorial position and had to deal gracefully with anchor Ted Baxter's vapid remarks.

Besides 'Omega Man' (1971), her films included "Klute" (1971) with Jane Fonda and "Uptown Saturday Night" (1974) with Sidney Poitier. Cash never married and had no children, and she died at Cedars-Sinai hospital on Halloween, 1995. (Newspaper reports did not specify what type of cancer she suffered from).

Answer: Henry Daniell

Surrey-born Charles Henry Pywell Daniell was educated at St Paul's School in London. He made a career in stage before embarking in film at the dawn of the talkie era with his maiden film "The Awful Truth" (1929) oppositie Ina Claire. Daniell appeared in "Camille" (1936), co-starring with Greta Garbo under the direction of George Cukor.

He was involved in a sex scandal (orgies) with his wife Ann in the 1930s, but somehow he managed to emerge from it in the 1940s without being blacklisted. In "Jane Eyre" (1943) he played the sadistic schoolmaster Brocklehurst, appearing with Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine, and he held his own with two horror legends, Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, in the chilling RKO classic "The Body Snatcher" (1945).

He was also a memorable Professor Moriarty in Basil Rathbones' eleventh Sherlock Holmes film, "The Woman in Green" (1945).

He continued to act through the 1950s and 60s, playing icy, malicious heavies. On the set of the film "My Fair Lady" (1964), Henry Daniell suffered a heart attack and died on October 31, 1963.

Answer: Otto Rank

Otto Rosenfeld came from a poor family in Austria and was working as a machinist when he read Sigmund Freud's "The Interpretation of Dreams". The book gave him the inspiration to write "Der Künstler" ("The Artist") in 1907, an explanation of art with psychoanalytic concepts.

The book enchanted Freud, who arranged for young Otto to study at the University of Vienna, where he received a doctorate in 1912. Changing his last name to Rank, Otto was eventually expelled from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society for his work "The Trauma of Birth" (1924), for reducing all psychology to this one event.

He immigrated to the USA in the 1930s and developed his concept of the will as the guiding force in the development of the personality, and he continued to write and lecture on literature examined through the lens of psychoanalysis.

In 1939, Rank suffered a kidney infection, and just one month after Freud's physician-assisted suicide on Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement), he spoke his last. "Komisch!" (meaning "strange, odd, comical"), said Rank that Halloween night, whereupon he died.

Answer: P. W. Botha

Pieter Willem Botha served as the 6th State President of South Africa from 1984 to 1989. Although it once appeared he was going to announce reforms to the apartheid system, instead he wagged his finger and told the world he would not be intimidated. That moment of perverseness triggered massive divestment, political isolation, and economic sanctions, which eventually led to new leadership and an end to apartheid.

In the 1990s, witnesses testified that Botha had ordered the State Security Council to carry out campaigns of human rights violations, violence, and terror, including the assassinations of anti-apartheid activists.

When Botha refused to appear before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, he was jailed (though the sentence was overturned). Apparently escaping all consequences, Botha the Big Crocodile died of a heart attack at age 90 in his home on the seaside town of Wilderness, South Africa on October 31, 2006.

Answer: Abe no Seimi

Abe no Seimei was an onmyôji, that is, an advisor to the Emperor of Japan on the spiritually correct way to handle various matters. As such, he practiced Onmyôdô, a blend of religion and science, magic and astronomy, divination and alamanc-writing. Many legends have arisen about this onmyôji, including his magical abilities and the notion that he was a liminal being, in between human and divine. Nonetheless, Abe no Seimei breathed his last on 31st October 1005 at the age of 85.

The Emperor Ichijo deified him two years later, and the Seimei-Jinja Shrine in Kyoto, Japan is flooded with visits to this day.

Answer: Mary Nolan

With the stage name Imogene "Bubbles" Wilson, Mary Nolan danced with the Ziegfeld follies, but was fired for having a scandalous affair with comedian Frank Tinney. It would be revealed later that he used to beat her. She did vaudeville for a while and eventually the native of Louisville, Kentucky, reached Hollywood signed a contract with Universal Pictures.

She appeared in pre-Code movies like "Docks of San Francisco" (1932). Her success was short-lived, however, when studio executive Eddie Mannix began an affair with her, for he, too, beat her regularly, to the point of hospitalization. Using drugs and "acting out" to cope with the assaults, for which neither man was ever prosecuted, Nolan eventually found she had been blacklisted in the film industry as "temperamental". Finally, she lived out her life quietly with her sister, until she was found dead on Halloween at the age 43 of an overdose of Seconal.

She had been suffering from malnutrition and weighed a mere 90 pounds at the time of her death.

Answer: his wife

William Woodward was the heir to the Hanover National Bank fortune and to the Belair Estate, including the stud farm, and he was an important figure in Thoroughbred horse racing. William and his wife Ann attended a dinner party for American socialite Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, on October 30, 1955. Afterward, the couple retired to their separate bedrooms at their sumptuous home in Oyster Bay, New York. Having heard reports of prowlers on neighboring estates, each of them were keeping by their bedside a loaded shotgun (normally used for one of their favorite pastimes, hunting). Sometime in the early morning hours of Halloween, Ann heard a noise on the roof. She went into the dark hallway, saw a shadowy figure, aimed her shotgun, and fired. It was not a prowler, however, but her husband William. The police found her holding her husband's body and sobbing, and she confessed to the killing right away.

Later, a man named Paul Wirths admitted to trespassing on the Woodward's estate to rob them, but he said the sound of shotguns scared him off. William's mother Elsie, however, never shook her belief that Ann had deliberately killed William (though she would never say so publicly). Ann Woodward was never indicted for the shooting of her husband, who was only 35 when he died on Halloween.