Later Life and Death
In 1961, Conway provided his voice for Disney's 101 Dalmatians as a Collie who offers the dalmatians shelter in a barn, later guiding them home. His wife at the time, Queenie Leonard, voiced a cow in the barn.
Despite having made millions in his twenty-four-year film career, Conway later struggled to make ends meet. Failing eyesight and prolonged bouts with alcohol took their toll on him in his last years. His second wife (Leonard) divorced him in 1963, owing to his drinking problem, and his brother Sanders broke off all contact with him because of it.
Conway underwent cataract surgery during the winter of 1964–65. In September 1965, he briefly returned to the headlines, having been discovered living in a $2-a-day room in a Venice, California flophouse. Gifts, contributions and offers of aid poured in for a time.
His last years were marked with hospitalizations. It was there that former sister-in-law Zsa Zsa Gabor paid Conway a visit and gave him $200. "Tip the nurses a little bit so they'll be good to you," she told him. The following day, the hospital called her to say that Conway had left with the $200, gone to his girlfriend's house, and became gravely sick in her bed. It was 22 April 1967, and he died from cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 62 due to alcoholism. His funeral was held in London.
Read more about this topic: Tom Conway
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or death:
“I, with other Americans, have perhaps unduly resented the stream of criticism of American life ... more particularly have I resented the sneers at Main Street. For I have known that in the cottages that lay behind the street rested the strength of our national character.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one’s own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.”
—Sherwin B. Nuland (b. 1930)