RIP, Robert Redford (1936-2025) and Claudia Cardinale (1938-2025): The Death of Beauty (plus mortality basics)
Looking at U.S. 2024 data for key ages in death age distributions
Recently, two actors died who were known best at their peak for their incredible good looks:
Mind you, both Cardinale and Redford acted well into old age, so it wasn’t solely their good looks that got them the parts… (there are plenty of good-looking people who can’t act worth crap. No, I’m not going to sully this post by linking to any of them.)
Cardinale was better known in her native Italy, but she did star in some Hollywood films, such as Once Upon a Time in the West.
Speaking of Westerns, I first saw Redford as a kid in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid… I think I found Paul Newman more attractive, but hey, both were very good-looking men.
Enough of that for right now, let’s take a look at the distribution of ages at death, for males and females separately, from 2024 for the U.S. (I do have data from Italy for 2022…. but given COVID was still hanging around then, I’m going to give that a miss for right now.)
Note that both Redford and Cardinale died in their late 80s.
Overall Death Distribution by Sex
These are the preliminary statistics (they should be finalized in a few months, pending updates).
I highlighted a few ages on each of these distributions that relate solely to numbers you can see:
Mean: this is the average age of death for the distribution
Median: 50th percentile for the distribution
Mode: Age where there is the highest number of people dying
Note: NONE OF THESE AGES HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH LIFE EXPECTANCY
(any sort of life expectancy)
However, they will have something to do with the ages you hear about people dying in the news — such as obituaries, reportage of various famous people dying (as above), and all sorts of idiot reporters grabbing data from CDC WONDER and attempting to do their own statistics and not knowing what the hell they’re doing.
The statistics above do incorporate population mortality rates, but what they mainly incorporate is the structure of the underlying population age structure.
Males
I highlighted three ages:
Mean age at death: 70.7 years (this is biased, but not much for males - I’ll explain with females)
Median age at death: 74 years
Modal age at death: 77 years
Note that there’s a large drop after the age of 77 in 2024, to the age of 78 in 2024.
You can see there’s another little spike at age 81 in 2024.
This is related to World War II.
Those aged 77 in 2024 were botn in 1947, and those aged 78 were born in 1946…. while GIs returning to the U.S. could get, -cough-, busy as soon as they got home from the war, most took a little while to get the next generation going.
More to the point, there was a baby dearth while younger men were away from the U.S. from 1942-1945, which affected the number of births in the U.S. for 1943-1946.
Which affects the number of people “available to die” at old ages in certain ages now.
Females
Mean age at death: 76.6 years (this is biased, explanation to come)
Median age at death: 80 years
Modal age at death: 81 years
What do I mean by the “mean age at death” is biased?
Check out that spike of deaths at the 100-year point on the graph — this is due to the data being “right-censored”, in that I don’t know what age those women actually died at. I just know they died at age 100+. The mean is higher than 76.6 years.
Things to notice about the female distribution of death ages is that not only are the ages older (duh, sorry not sorry), but that the various measures are all closer to each other.
I know what that means — do you?
Yes, I’m being a jerk about this right now. This is somewhat a run-up to Movember, but it really is a pointer to males, in general, dying at younger ages than females.
Life Expectancy: Period and Cohort
Here’s the deal:
I can estimate period life expectancy from the above data, but it’s still preliminary, the population estimates are a bit off.
For a longer explainer, here is a link:Mortality with Meep: Cohort vs. Period Mortality Tables
The short version:
Period life expectancy is when one is collapsing multidimensional mortality information over sex and age into a single number for a single year.
Period life expectancy is used so you can compare mortality trends for year-over-year purposes. It’s intended to capture high-level population trends.
However, it may be poor for untangling sex, race, age, and other interacting components in the trend.
PERIOD LIFE EXPECTANCY IS WHAT YOU HEAR REPORTED IN THE MEDIA
Cohort life expectancy is when one is projecting mortality information based on birth year. It has to do with how long you can expect to live, given when you were born. Usually, it’s a modeled entity, as it’s used for items such as retirement planning.
What Life Expectancy Do YOU Need to Know?
I talked with my grandma long ago (yes, really).
Mortality with Meep: Retrospective on Mortality Trends (and a wee bit about COVID)
As I mentioned in my prior post, for this week, as it looks like I have new readers, I want to give y’all a little taste of the themes on this blog.
What you specifically need to know is not period life expectancy, which is a population mortality metric, and is an extremely artificial metric to provide a time series for high-level comparisons.
That will not help you with retirement planning or life insurance/other insurance protection planning.
For a baseline planning, you want cohort life expectancy or survival probabilities… and hey! I did a video about that!
I will be doing more on this later!
But in working with these tools, you will find that dying in your late 80s is fairly common nowadays.
Outro: When Redford Played Death
16 Sept 2025, Alan Sepinwall: When the Sundance Kid played Death himself
Redford did a fair amount of TV work for the first few years of his career — an Alfred Hitchcock Presents here, a Maverick there. He and Serling only worked together one other time, on a Twilight Zone Season Three episode called “Nothing in the Dark.” Written by George Clayton Johnson and directed by Lamont Johnson (no relation), the episode focuses on an elderly woman, Wanda Dunn (played by Gladys Cooper), who lives in a tiny basement apartment and spends her every waking minute doing convinced that Death himself will come for her, and that she has to do everything possible to fend him off. A wounded police officer turns up at her door, pleading for help, and she reluctantly lets him in, even though she claims to have seen Death take on human form before. In this case — spoiler alert from 63 years ago — she turns out to have guessed wrong.
What a shocker for the Twilight Zone!
[Yes, I’m being wry]
I’m trying to find the post someone wrote about how Gladys Cooper helped influence the casting — she was looking through a book of headshots, because the point of the episode was the character needed to be someone who looked friendly. And she said something like… “I’d go if Death looked like that.”
Probably apocryphal. It’s a good story, though.
16 Sept 2025, People: Robert Redford’s ‘Bittersweet’ Twilight Zone Performance as ‘Mr. Death’ Resurfaces Following His Death at 89
In the final scene, the late actor’s calming version of the Grim Reaper tells Wanda, “Am I really so bad? Am I really so frightening? You’ve talked to me. You’ve confided in me. Have I tried to hurt you? It isn’t me you’re afraid of. You understand me. What you’re afraid of is the unknown. Don’t be afraid.”
You have a great argument for why men (especially) should take Social Security retirement benefits at age 62 instead of waiting until the "full retirement age" of 70.