Candyman and Final Destination actor dies aged 69

Tony Todd, finest identified for starring within the Candyman horror movies, has died aged 69.

The American actor died at his residence in Los Angeles on Wednesday evening, in response to experiences.

He starred because the title character within the horror collection, depicting the ghostly Candyman character with a hook for a hand, summoned by saying his title 5 occasions in entrance of a mirror.

Todd continued as Candyman from the primary movie in 1992 via follow-ups in 1995 and 1999, and reprised the function in 2021 for a fourth movie serving as a direct sequel to the unique.

All through his 40-year profession, Todd additionally featured in a whole lot of movies, stage productions and tv dramas, together with roles within the Transformers and Ultimate Vacation spot movies.

In Candyman, Todd’s titular character is the ghost of artist Daniel Robitaille, a black man who was lynched within the nineteenth Century.

The 1992 movie sees Todd’s character by accident summoned to the true world by a graduate scholar in Chicago intrigued by the city legend of the Candyman, setting off a series of murderous occasions.

Talking to the Guardian in 2019, Todd recalled the movie’s well-known scene that sees Candyman swarmed with bees, throughout which he was stung 23 occasions and apparently paid a $1,000 bonus every time.

“All the pieces that’s value making has to contain some kind of ache,” he remarked.

On his Candyman character, he instructed the identical interview: “I’ve executed 200 films, that is the one which stays in individuals’s minds. It impacts individuals of all races. I’ve used it as an introductory device in gang-intervention work: what frightens you? What horrible issues have you ever skilled?”

Paying tribute, actor Virginia Madsen, who starred as scholar Helen Lyle in Candyman, mentioned Todd “now could be an angel. As he was in life”.

She known as him a “actually poetic man” with “a deep information of the humanities”.

“I’ll miss him a lot and hope he haunts me every now and then,” she added. “However I can’t summon him within the mirror!”

The unique movie’s sequel – Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh – set three years later sees Todd’s iconic lead seem once more in New Orleans, encountering a descendant of his daughter.

The third movie – Candyman: Day of the Lifeless – was launched in 1999, however set in 2020 Los Angeles.

Todd, and others from the 1992 movie, reprised their roles within the 2021 movie.

In 2020, Todd known as that model “good”, crediting the movie’s director Nia DaCosta as “a fan of physique horror”.

As a part of her tribute, Madsen praised the “present” that the movie’s co-writer Jordan Peele had given herself and Todd to “allow us to dwell once more as lovers”.

Earlier than Candyman, considered one of Todd’s earliest roles in movie was in 1986 as Sgt Warren in struggle drama Platoon.