Died on December 29, 2024, former American President Jimmy Carter brought joy to the DeathList community at the last minute. On this site, we bet each year on fifty names of personalities likely to pass the gun to the left during the coming year. Gold 39e President of the United States, born in 1924, was in first place on the list of predictions made for 2024. His death therefore brings the score achieved by DeathList to 6 out of 50, the worst performance achieved by the site in thirty years of existence – this is indeed very little compared to the 20 in 2020 and the 19 in 2023.
Remember that to establish their list of fifty names, DeathList contributors must respect a few rules: the people appearing there must be “well-known enough for their deaths to be reported by the mainstream British media”they must not be known only for their advanced age (Jeanne Calment would therefore have had no chance), and each list can only include a maximum of twenty-five names from the previous year's list.
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Jean-Marie Le Pen still there
Among the personalities who are making their comeback in this virtual waiting room, we find Jean-Marie Le Pen, 96 years old, presented by DeathList2025 under the title of «French Neo-Nazi»and which is in fifteenth position. But according to DeathList members, others have a greater probability of dying than him in 2025: this is, for example, the case of Dick van Dyke. The chimney sweep from the film Mary Poppinssecond behind Jimmy Carter last year, is at the top of the ranking this year.
They are Eva Marie Saint (actress of On the docks or Death in pursuit) and Pete Murray (former British radio host) who complete the podium of 2025 favorites. The rest of the top 10 is made up of names relatively unknown to the French public, apart from that of Mel Brooks, 98 years old, present in tenth position. Two other Hitchcockian heroines appear in the list of fifty: Tippi Hedren (The Birds) and Kim Novak (Cold sweats). Some actors accompany them, such as Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, and Robert Duvall.
The rest of the list is very disparate: we find the composer John Williams, the astronaut Buzz Aldrin, but also Giorgio Armani, Petula Clark, Yoko Ono, the billionaires Rupert Murdoch and Bernie Ecclestone… These celebrities are all over the age of 90 years old, but some personalities also stand out for their much younger age. This is particularly the case of Harvey Weinstein, 73, suffering from chronic myelogenous leukemia, and Asma al-Assad, 50: the former Syrian first lady indeed suffers from extremely aggressive cancer.
The DeathList game also has its French counterpart: in 2024, sixteen of the fifty personalities identified by the French-speaking community are dead (from Alain Delon to Françoise Hardy via Bernard Pivot and Micheline Presle), and the authors of the 2025 list , to be discovered on the French section of the forum, obviously hope to beat this score by December 31. We wish them good luck.
