Wow.... so many famous deaths this week.
See my theory that I previously posted. We are entering an age of being inundated with celebrity deaths. The era of the life long celebrity didn't come about till the 70s or 80s. People in the 1940s or 1950s didn't have the same concept of society-wide megastars who stayed famous their whole life. There were some, like John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart or Joe DiMaggio, but even MOST people involved in showbusiness or sports did not reach mega-stardom.
With the rise of those forms of entertainment really starting to take off in the 1980s (see the NFL's salary structure and how it exploded in the 1990s too), it also gave rise to a much bigger class of celebrities.
Therefore, though "movie stars," and "sports stars," have existed for a hundred years and many generations of them have already died off, we are reaching the end of the line for the first real group of lifelong mega stars, think the Jack Nicholson generation that came about in the late 60s and to super-fame in the 70s and 80s.
Think of how many famous people there are in our consciousness now versus back in 1950.
The ones from 1950 all died off already in obscurity. The ones who were famous in 1990, there were four times as many, and the ones who are famous now, they are ten times as many.
We are gonna get three celebrity deaths a week pretty routinely, soon.