Personal Life and Death
Farnsworth was married to Margaret "Maggie" Hill for 38 years. She was the mother of his two children, Diamond and Missy. She died in 1985. Toward the end of his life, he met Jewly Van Valin on the bridle trail, a stewardess 35 years his junior. Farnsworth and Van Valin started riding together and were engaged. He was well liked and busy in his community of Lincoln, New Mexico, where he had a 60-acre (240,000 m2) ranch and moved after his wife's death.
Farnsworth was the spokesman for the Lincoln County Cowboy Symposium, an annual event in Ruidoso, New Mexico. He made a video with cowboy poet Waddie Mitchell called Buckaroo Bard. He also helped with the 'Last Great Cattle Drive of This Millennium' in 1999. Shortly before his death, he was presented with an award from the Governor of New Mexico for Excellence and Achievement in the Arts.
Farnsworth was diagnosed and treated for prostate cancer in the early 1990s. By 1999, he had been diagnosed as having terminal bone cancer. He made the movie The Straight Story while in considerable pain. Not wanting to live his life in pain, Farnsworth committed suicide by shooting himself at his ranch in Lincoln, New Mexico. He is interred with his wife Margaret in the Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.
Read more about this topic: Richard Farnsworth
Famous quotes containing the words life and death, personal, life and/or death:
“The wind sprang up at four o’clock
The wind sprang up and broke the bells
Swinging between life and death”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“The pursuit of Fashion is the attempt of the middle class to co-opt tragedy. In adopting the clothing, speech, and personal habits of those in straitened, dangerous, or pitiful circumstances, the middle class seeks to have what it feels to be the exigent and nonequivocal experiences had by those it emulates.”
—David Mamet (b. 1947)
“The businessman who assumes that his life is everything, and the mystic who asserts that it is nothing, fail, on this side and on that, to hit the truth.... No; truth, being alive ... was only to be found by continuous excursions into either realm, and though proportion is the final secret, to espouse it at the outset is to ensure sterility.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)