Candyman and Final Destination Star Tony Todd Dies at 69

Tonny Todd, an American actor widely known for leading the ‘Candyman’ horror franchise as its eponymous hook-wielding ghost, died Nov. 6 at his home in Marina Del Rey, California, at 69.  The father of two death’s was confirmed by a representative for the actor.

The actor is said to have died of natural causes at his home in Lose Angeles on Wednesday night. Todd continued as Candyman from the first film in 1992 through follow-ups in 1995 and 1999, and reprised the role in 2021 for a fourth film serving as a direct sequel to the original.

At a towering 6- foot-5, Todd played Daniel Robitaille, aka Candyman, the ghost of an African American artist and son of a slave who was murdered for this relationship with a white woman. The movie starred Virginia Madsen as a Chicago graduate student preparing a thesis on the legend of Candyman by investigating inner-city Chicago.

“My beloved, May you rest in power,” Madsen wrote in a post on Instagram. “The great actor Tonny Todd has left us and now is an angel. As he was in life. More later but I can’t right now. I love you.”

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Referencing the Candyman film, she said, ‘I will miss him so much and hope he haunts me once in a while. But I will not summon him in the mirror!” Todd’s manager Jeff Goldberg also paid tribute, saying . “What an amazing man and I will miss him every single day.”

Todd’s career spanned across 40 years, and in that time, he featured in a number of well-known films, such as Platoon, Transformers, The Crow and even appeared as Commander Kurn on the Starship Enterprise in a number of Star Trek series.

One of this earliest film performances came in his early thirties in Oliver Stone’s Oscar-winning war epic “Platoon.” On “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” Todd donned alien make-up to play Kurn, a Commander in the Kingdom Defense Force and the brother of Worf (played by series regular Michael Dorn).

Born Dec. 4, 1954, in Washington DC, Todd studied at the University of Connecticut for two years before shifting to the Eugene O’Neill National Theatre Institute. Todd never stopped working, often lending his gravitas and genre reputation to direct-to-video thrillers over recent years.

His profile in IMDb currently lists more than nine titles that have entered post-production. Todd is survived by his two children, Alex and Ariana.