The most tragic case of this I know was Saturday Night Live star Phil Hartman, who — from everything I’ve read — was not only a very talented and funny man, but he was well-liked and respected by everyone who knew him. He made SNL very funny for many of its best years.
He seemed to have just one dark thread in his life: marrying troubled women. After being married and divorced a couple of times, he married a woman named Brynn Omdahl, who was later to kill him before committing suicide.
A case like this is just very sad all around.
After two divorces, Hartman married Brynn Omdahl in 1987, with whom he had two children. Their marriage was troubled due to Brynn’s drug use and domestic violence against Phil, who was frequently absent from home. In 1998, while Hartman was sleeping in his bed, his wife shot and killed him, and later committed suicide. In the weeks following his murder, Hartman was celebrated in a wave of tributes. Dan Snierson of Entertainment Weekly wrote that Hartman was “the last person you’d expect to read about in lurid headlines in your morning paper … a decidedly regular guy, beloved by everyone he worked with”. He was posthumously inducted into the Canada and Hollywood Walks of Fame in 2012 and 2014.