Posthumous roles a film tradition

LOS ANGELES -- When R&B singer Aaliyah died in a plane crash last summer, she had been working on roles in three movies. Only one role survived her -- that of a 4,000-year-old vampire in "Queen of the Damned."

The film is the latest case in which filmmakers had to decide whether to complete and market a movie after a star dies.

In the case of this horror thriller, based on an Anne Rice novel, the 22-year-old Aaliyah had already finished most of her work.

"Everything is pretty much intact. It was a blessing that she was able to finish shooting it," said Rashad Haughton, Aaliyah's 24-year-old brother, who helped salvage the role by re-recording some of his sister's dialogue.

In the two upcoming sequels to "The Matrix," however, which were filming simultaneously, there wasn't enough footage of Aaliyah to preserve her performances. Although fans petitioned Warner Bros. to keep her in the movies, producers had to recast the role.

"It's a touchy subject," Haughton said. "Some people don't understand she had just started filming. There was no way to finish it with her in it."

New actors costly

In this era of digital technology, some filmmakers have saved performances by actors who die during production -- including Brandon Lee in 1994's "The Crow" and Oliver Reed in 2000's "Gladiator" -- by recreating the actors through computerization.

It wasn't that easy years ago. In the 1959 Biblical epic "Solomon and Sheba," star Tyrone Power had completed about half the movie when he died from a heart attack. Yul Brynner was hired to refilm all of Power's scenes, although film buffs claim Power is visible in some long shots.

Hiring a new actor to restart production is often extremely costly. Production insurance covers much of the loss, but such policies often have enormous deductibles.

Spencer Tracy's heart ailment on the set of 1967's "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" was such a liability that no company would insure him.

Director Stanley Kramer and co-star Katharine Hepburn agreed to use their salaries as collateral in case Tracy died and the film needed to be reshot.

"He worked only in the mornings," Kramer said in 1991. "His energy would drain. He wouldn't have it in the afternoon. ... He was very proud of getting through it."

Tracy finished the movie, but died just 10 days after filming his last scene.

For slapstick comedies, the pall cast by a star's death can be devastating. Even fans who liked John Candy's performance as a stagecoach driver in the critically savaged 1994 comedy "Wagons East" said it is hard to laugh at the footage from the last days of his life.

Drama survives death

Serious dramas, on the other hand, often can survive a star's death, which may even add to the actor's mystique. Of James Dean's three major movies, only "East of Eden" debuted before his 1955 death in a car crash at age 24.

"Rebel Without a Cause" came out a month later, and the actor's death added to the sense of doom hanging over his character. The next year, Dean's fame was still on the rise, and his final performance, as a Texas rancher in "Giant," earned him a posthumous Academy Award nomination.

Lee, son of martial-arts star Bruce Lee, died at 28 on the set of "The Crow" in 1993 when he was shot with a fragment from a prop gun that was supposed to fire blanks.

Several major scenes were left to shoot, but director Alex Proyas digitally placed Lee into new shots using previous footage.

Slight script rewrites and clever use of shadows and lookalikes did the rest.