People Who Became Famous After Death

Sinbad

Joan of Arc

Well, some people could of been famous before they died, if they concentrated more on their dance routines and presentations rather than being a tawdry, little cocksucking slut! A pint-sized harlot, if you will.

Vincent van Gogh

John Kennedy Toole

Chandra Levy

James Dean

James Dean was famous before he died.

Laci Peterson

There is a distinction between becoming famous after death and becoming famous because of your death.

Bukowski. Known by not many, before his death. Very well known now.

Lee Harvey Oswald, starting a couple of days before his death.

Ron Goldman

Mozart, largely

One of our own from Kew Gardens in Queens, Kitty Genovese.

What happened to Ms. Genovese led to the development and institution of the consolidated unified 911 emergency response phone number.

John the Baptist

Matthew Shepard

Henry Darger

Matthew Shepard

The Unknown Soldier

r7, Not in the same way.

Edgar Allan Poe

Brandon Lee

Donald Trump’s assassin.

Elizabeth Stride

Mary Ann Nichols

Annie Chapman

Mary Jane Kelly

Catherine Eddowes

Ron Goldman

r20, Poe was made an international literary celebrity during his lifetime when "The Raven" was published.

r9, This will be a very short thread then. Thats why I included known actors James Dean and Bruce Lee. James Dean was probably more popular in life than Lee. Dean's death popularized and iconicized him in a very dramatic way.

Huguette Clark

Bruce Jenner. Trannys consider there former selves dead right. Thats why they use that word deadnaming.

Bruce Jenner was the biggest celebrity in the USA in 1976.

Although not very well known in his day, Jesus Christ became quite popular over 250-300 years later, thanks to Constantine.

Zorah Neale Hurston.

The singer Selena was only well known in certain regions of the US. She became famous at a national level after her death.

Half the cast of the Poltergeist.

Martha Moxley

William Blake

Emily Dickinson

Dale Earnhardt

Vermeer was moderately successful during his lifetime, but became famous two centuries later.

Sal Mineo. Galileo Galilei.

R13, don't undercount Mozart's fame in his lifetime.

Most enduringly famous people become more broadly known as time passes. Don't play false equivalencies.

Mozart played Europe as a boy, was celebrated by the pope, and had enormous fame and notice among the elites in Vienna, then the center of Western music.

As far as his fame now, knowing a couple of musical phrases and retaining a dim memory of "Amadeus" is a sorry kind of fame.

OP, Jesus "of Nazareth" (sic) doesn't fit, because he is a mythical figure.

Eva Cassidy - DC area singer who became nationally known in the early 00s for her cover of Over the Rainbow . She had died of cancer in 1996 at age 33.

Does achieving fame for singing Over the Rainbow bring premature death?

[quote]OP, Jesus "of Nazareth" (sic) doesn't fit, because he is a mythical figure.

He was not a mythical figure. You can argue whether he was divine or just a mortal man, but there are enough sources to prove the man existed.

[quote]Does achieving fame for singing Over the Rainbow bring premature death?

The song is cursed. Sing it and you'll die prematurely.

r40. That's a good point; very well made distinction.

Its like Lana Del Ray. She is well known among hipsters and NY cultural types. She's not a household name but not C-list either. As her legacy endures she will become well known among the masses especially after death.

R44, the only somewhat contemporary source(s) are the Gospels and writings of Paul in the Bible, and even those were put in writing decades after Jesus’ supposed crucifixion. The other source often mentioned is in the writings of Joseph of Arimathea, and that brief reference to Jesus is purportedly a fake inserted many years after Joseph’s death in an attempt to provide a somewhat contemporaneous reference to Jesus.

Actually not R44. There is not really any evidence that he existed till long after his death. Some trot out Josephus, whose history of the Jewish people was written in the first century--but the reference to Jesus was added a few hundred years later.

There are references to Christians that predate references to Jesus. But there is nothing that definitively proves his existence any more than there is anything to prove the existence of Moses, Abraham, Mithra, etc.

Shelly Miscavige

Lisa McPherson

Mrs. Rosen

Nick Drake. He was virtually unknown when he died in 1974, became admired by the connoisseurs in the next couple of decades and then finally became mainstream when one of his tracks was used in a car commercial in 2000.

Sally Ride

Sharon Tate

Lindbergh Baby

Sharon Tate

Judge Crater

Jonathan Larson

Pharaoh Tutankhamun

William Shakespeare?

R13, R40 I would say Salieri fits this list perfectly, who but musicologists knew his name before, now we all think of him as the man who murdered Mozart.

Sally Ride became famous in 1983 and died in 2012.

[quote]Well, some people could of been famous

Oh, dear.

I would say Sharon Tate became more infamous after her death. When she was alive she was famous as an actress and as Roman Polanski's wife- her level of fame during her lifetime is always debated. After her death she became famous as a murder victim, but I think now with the internet and that Tarntino movie, people know more about her than just being a victim.

R57 Yeah, Christy McAuliffe fits the bill better.

r55 Shakespeare was very successful during his lifetime

Lisa Steinberg

r61, Shakespeare was not one person.

One of the more recent ones is photographer Vivian Maier.

r63 Shakespeare was a Queer Woman of Color

Shakespeare collaborated on his earlier and later plays, but I don't indulge in Shakespearean conspiracy theories

r66 was for r63

r66, They aren't theories but widely believed to be true.

Elizabeth Short, The Black Dahlia.

Outsider or self taught artist Bill Traylor, but of course by definition almost all Outsider artists are only discovered after death.

r68 "Widely believed to be true." Is this related to "A lot of people are saying"?

David Drake was an enslaved man who made beautiful pottery which sold for fifty cents during his lifetime, but now commands prices up to $50,000.

Pat Tillman

Jennifer Levin

Tacitus also makes reference to "Yeshua Bar-Joseph" in his [italic]Annals,[/italic] book 15, chapter 44. It was written @116CE, which is ] after the death of the historical Jesus; but it still testifies to the numbers of people who believed in his life and his ministry just a few decades after his death.

I have yet to meet a professional academic scholar of ancient Christianity (most of whom are NOT Christians themselves) who doubts the existence of the historical Jesus as a rabbi/rebbe figure of a breakaway Jewish sect in 1st century Jerusalem. And I have known and worked with many such scholars during my career--I'm a tenured college professor myself.

The question among academic religion scholars is not so much whether there was a historical Yeshua Bar-Joseph; the question is really whether he advocated a new religion or just another variant form of Judaism (in a period when the Jewish religion was extremely fractured and there were multiple sects).

Amber of the Amber Alert fame.

Cashel Man, A.k.a. Bog Man.

[quote]Yeah, Christy McAuliffe fits the bill better.

Christa McAuliffe was EXTREMELY well-known nationally in the year before her death--she was going to be the first teacher in space, and it was widely publicized and celebrated across the country. Elementary school children across the nation watched the Challenger launch from their classrooms via TV when the explosion happened.

That's part of the reason why the Challenger disaster was so remembered as an era-defining tragedy (while the later Columbia disaster has pretty much been forgotten).

[quote] but of course by definition almost all Outsider artists are only discovered after death.

Grandma Moses was a national celebrity even before her death. Same with Sabato Rodia, who built the Watts Towers.

[quote]It's like Lana Del Ray. As her legacy endures she will become well known among the masses especially after death.

Right. As the millennial Stacey Q.

R78 You said it “known,” but in death she is the only other person I can name besides Sally Ride who flew in a space shuttle, or almost flew as the case might be. Of all those astronauts in the decades of the program how many people can name but a few if any but her?

Christa M. would have been famous anyway had she survived just because she was to be the first teacher in space. Like I said, classrooms were set up to watch her fly in the shuttle.

Mary Joe Kopechne

Vince Foster

[quote] Outsider or self taught artist Bill Traylor

Or is it BILL TRAYLOR?

R85 Why are you shouting?

Walter Benjamin.

Gaetan Dugas

Eleanor Rigby actually existed in Liverpool.

[quote] Gaetan Dugas —Flight Attenandt, Sky Mattress

Wasn’t he infamous before his death?

Nipsey Hu$$le. He may have been famous within his genre of music, but was he widely known?

The art world is always tricky. There were several artists who became popular in their small crowd, but weren't really well known until after their death.

Keith Haring

Basquait

[quote] Wasn’t he infamous before his death?

Only at the Everard Baths. (Which I though was a play on the phrase "ever hard" but it turns out that was the name of the owner. It really didn't turn gay until the 1920s).

No, he died in March 1984 and the CDC was at the time studying gay men, so he really only became known after he died.

Was Typhoid Mary really “known” in her life time? Wouldn’t people have stoned her?

Virginia Dare

Pocahontas

Jeff Buckley

Belva Ann Lockwood

R96 Pocahontas was the toast of London, before she died.

Jeff Sessums

Rose Hovick who inspired the musical Gypsy. She spent years trying to turn her daughters into stars when she really wanted to be famous herself and, in death, she finally got what she always wanted. She's the role every singing actress wants to play.

One could say the same about Jean Ross who was the inspiration for Sally Bowles in Cabaret and I Am Camera. Though, I think she might have lived to have seen herself immortalized.

R92 No, just no.

"James Dean was famous before he died."

He died less than 2 mos. after the release of his first film "East of Eden".

XXXTentacion

Serial killer Dean Corll.

Scott Joplin

Laura Palmer

World famous after being largely forgotten outside of Argentina? Eva Perón.

Casper F. Ghost

Emmett Till.

Bryan Hawn

MAGA Karen who ranted agains quarantine and the Dems only to die of COVID-19 two weeks later.

Olivia de Havilla...oh, never mind.

r112, Too soon. Too soon.

Azaria Chamberlain

R44, you are not a biblical or historical scholar. You are merely spouting the usual "assumptions" from Xtian apologetics from the last 1900 years.

Careful analyses, with sufficient Bayesian methods applied in a very conservative way, of all extant sources indicate strongly that existing new testament texts are not based on historical sources, but a conglomeration of legend, conflating stories and willful distortions to fit an emerging narrative. Outside these sources, which were in careful development over a 300-year period as other texts were suppressed and destroyed, do not support ANY evidence of anyone ever referring to a historical person matching the mythic Jesus of the new testament. The famous Josephus references are plainly an interpolation added by later Xtians. And a careful reading of purported Pauline texts, themselves overwritten by several later writers, clearly refer to a mythic figure only later associated with an imagined historical figure for whom gospel texts were constructed to support.

Don't claim something you believe on "faith" or a lazy acceptance of cultic bullshit. Just because the texts are old it does not follow that they are not fiction. The only differences between the new testament and the Book of Mormon are that the latter is still within the reach of actual history and the former is based on centuries-long forces among multiple cliques in which the Roman faction finally persevered.

Saying something is mythic does not deny its power or even a form of its truth. But there is no documentary source that supports the existence of a "real live" Jesus as described in the "bible."

Shoo.

Or as Hans Kung put forth, even if there was not a historical Jesus, that does not mean Christianity is not true.

You, OP