2025 has been another rough year for Hollywood. With all the political shakeups and social media meltdowns, it’s been easy to miss the quieter heartbreaks of the year. Yet, even while the world mourns big names like Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Ozzy Osbourne, a wave of well-known Hollywood actors also left us in September – some without even being noticed. These Hollywood actors died in September 2025 — and somehow, not many people noticed their passing.
Polly Holliday
Polly Holliday branded “Kiss my grits” into TV history. As Flo on CBS’s Alice, the Alabama-born actress turned sass and charm into an art form, winning awards and fans who still quote her today. At 88, her passing marks the end of the show’s original crew, but Holliday never stayed behind the counter. She took Flo on the road in her own spinoff, cracked up audiences in Private Benjamin and The Golden Girls, and gave Tim Allen a run for his money on Home Improvement.
Paula Shaw
Trained at the legendary Actors Studio, Paula Shaw turned up everywhere, including Starsky and Hutch, Little House on the Prairie, and even Hallmark’s Cedar Cove. Horror fans, though, know her best as the unnerving Mrs. Voorhees in Freddy vs. Jason (2003), a performance that still creeps people out two decades later.
Pat Crowley
At just 20, Pat Crowley nabbed a Golden Globe in 1953 as “New Star of the Year” and never looked back. She headlined NBC’s Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, stirred up trouble on Dynasty, Port Charles, and Falcon Crest, and still found time to guest-star in Friends, Columbo, Frasier, and Murder, She Wrote.
Brad Everett Young
The Boy Meets World and Grey’s Anatomy actor turned celebrity photographer was just 46 when he died in a car crash on California’s 134 Freeway on September 14. His publicist, Paul Christensen, said Young was driving home from a movie screening when a wrong-way driver hit him.
John Christopher Jones
Even after his Parkinson’s diagnosis, John Christopher Jones filled his life with theatre, which included 16 Broadway credits that ranged from Cogsworth in Beauty and the Beast to Beckett’s Endgame. Onscreen, he popped up in Moonstruck, Awakenings, The Hurricane, and The Sopranos.
Claudia Cardinale
After winning a beauty contest, Claudia Cardinale ended up at the Venice Film Festival where she was cast in Luchino Visconti’s Rocco and His Brothers (1960) and later The Leopard (1963). By the time she starred in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Cardinale was standing toe-to-toe with the biggest actors in Hollywood.
André Landzaat
Dutch-American actor André Landzaat jumped between continents and genres with ease, charming daytime audiences as Tony Cassadine on General Hospital in 1981 before heading home to play Rudolf Stikker in Medisch Centrum West. U.S. viewers also spotted him in The Six Million Dollar Man and Laverne & Shirley, proving he could move from soap opera drama to sitcom laughs.
Elaine Merk Binder
Elaine Merk Binder was only eight when she followed the yellow brick road. One of the last surviving Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz, she joined the 1938 MGM production after auditioning for what she later called “my first big call for girls from a major studio.” Cast as one of eight children in the Munchkin ensemble, she sang and danced through “Come Out, Come Out” and “Off to See the Wizard.”
Graham Greene
His Oscar-nominated role as Kicking Bird in Dances With Wolves (1990) made Hollywood and the entire world sit up and take notice, but Canadian actor Graham Greene never actually chased fame. He quietly showed up in movies like The Green Mile, The Twilight Saga, and HBO’s The Last of Us. Off camera, he also co-founded Toronto’s Native Theatre School, opening doors for Indigenous artists.
Robert Redford
Hollywood will never be the same without actor Robert Redford. His passing has hit celebrities the hardest. From Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to directing Ordinary People and launching the Sundance Film Festival, he was at the forefront of the industry both in front of and behind the camera. And yeah, that popular nodding meme that always gets used on social media? That’s actually him.
