The Funeral and Casket Details of Luke Perry

Introduction

Luke Perry was 52 and still working when he died on Monday 4 March 2019, days after a massive stroke at his home in Los Angeles. He had been famous since he was 24, first as Dylan McKay on Beverly Hills, 90210 and then, to a second generation, as Archie's father on Riverdale. The news reached people who had never met him and felt like they had.

What happened next was almost entirely private. There was no public funeral, no memorial service and no photographs. One detail did come out two months later, it came from his daughter, and it is one of the most unusual burial choices a public figure has ever made.

The Life and Legacy of Luke Perry

Coy Luther Perry III was born on 11 October 1966 in Mansfield, Ohio, and grew up in Fredericktown, a farming town of a couple of thousand people. He moved to New York after school and said he was turned down 216 times before anyone cast him, the first job being a part on the ABC soap Loving in the late 1980s, followed by a short run on Another World. He went back to Los Angeles in 1990 and was cast as Dylan McKay, the rich, damaged loner on Beverly Hills, 90210, a part that put him on magazine covers within a year.

The series ran until 2000. He stepped away partway through to make films, among them 8 Seconds, The Fifth Element and American Strays, then returned for its final seasons, and later took a long run on HBO's prison drama Oz. From 2017 he played Fred Andrews on the CW's Riverdale, 47 episodes across three seasons, and that was the job he was in the middle of when he died. His last completed film role was the real-life western actor Wayne Maunder in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which reached cinemas four months after his death.

The News of Luke Perry's Passing

Paramedics were called to his house in Sherman Oaks on the Wednesday morning of the week before he died. He had suffered what was described as a massive stroke, and he stayed in a Los Angeles hospital until he died on the following Monday, 4 March 2019. His publicist, Arnold Robinson, announced it in a statement that listed the people in the room with him: his children Jack and Sophie, his fiancée Wendy Madison Bauer, his former wife Minnie Sharp, his mother Ann Bennett and his stepfather Steve Bennett, his brother Tom and his sister Amy.

That statement also closed the subject. The family "respectfully request privacy in this time of great mourning", it said, and no further details would be released. The cause was put in writing a week later. His California death certificate, obtained by USA TODAY and by E! News when it was issued, recorded an ischemic cerebrovascular accident, which is the clinical term for a stroke caused by a blocked blood vessel. The American Stroke Association puts that type at roughly 87 percent of all strokes.

The Funeral Arrangements for Luke Perry

No public funeral or memorial service for Luke Perry was ever announced, and none has been reported since. The only reason anything at all is known about the burial is that a death certificate becomes a public document. It recorded that he was laid to rest on Monday 11 March 2019, a week after he died, in Dickson County, Tennessee, about fifty miles west of Nashville, with Taylor Funeral Home named as handling the arrangements and his fiancée Wendy Madison Bauer listed as next of kin.

Perry had bought a 380-acre farm at Vanleer, in that same county, back in the 1990s, and he spent long stretches of every year there, away from Los Angeles. Whether the grave is on his own land has never been confirmed by the family, and no attendance figure, order of service or officiant has been reported. That is a short public record for a famous man, and it is short because he and his family had settled what they wanted in advance rather than leaving it to be worked out in a bad week. The same quiet pattern runs through our pieces on Eddie Van Halen, who also died of a stroke, and Patrick Swayze.

The Casket Details of Luke Perry

No casket maker, model, timber or interior has ever been released, and there is a real question as to whether a casket was used at all. On 3 May 2019, two months after the burial, his daughter Sophie Perry posted a photograph of mushrooms on Instagram and explained what it had come to mean to her. "My dad discovered it, and was more excited by this than I have ever seen him," she wrote. "He was buried in this suit, one of his final wishes. They are truly a beautiful thing for this beautiful planet, and I want to share it with all of you."

The garment she was describing is a biodegradable burial suit made by a company called Coeio, founded by the artist and MIT graduate Jae Rhim Lee, and selling at the time for about 1,500 dollars. It is seeded with mushroom spores and other microorganisms that break the body down and, the maker says, draw contaminants out of it as they go. Nothing is sealed, nothing is preserved, and nothing is meant to last, which is close to the opposite of every option set out in our guide to celebrity casket types. The striking part is not the suit itself but the fact that he found it, chose it and told his family about it while he was perfectly well, the same thing Elizabeth Taylor and Alan Rickman both did in their own very different ways.

Attendees and Eulogies

No eulogy for Luke Perry has ever been published and no guest list exists, because the burial in Tennessee was for family. Nothing was said publicly afterwards about who travelled, who spoke or what was read. In that respect he sits alongside Toby Keith and Alex Trebek, two more send-offs where the family released the fact of the death and then stopped.

What stood in for a eulogy was the volume of tribute from people who had worked with him across thirty years. Molly Ringwald, who played his wife on Riverdale, called him one of the kindest and most caring souls she had worked with. Quentin Tarantino, who directed him last, remembered a complete professional who loved westerns and could ride, and told a story about offering to mark Perry's landing spot on the ground, only for Perry to say he could land on a dime thrown in the dirt.

The Impact on Fans and the Industry

Riverdale stopped filming. Production shut down the day the news broke, and the studio put out a joint statement from executive producers Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Greg Berlanti, Sarah Schechter and Jon Goldwater, together with Warner Bros. Television and The CW, calling him "a beloved member of the Riverdale, Warner Bros. and CW family" and a father figure and mentor to the young cast. His co-stars Lili Reinhart, Mädchen Amick, Marisol Nichols and Robin Givens all posted within hours, and so did his Beverly Hills, 90210 castmates.

There was a second effect, less visible but more useful. Perry was 52, visibly fit and working, and his death put the word stroke in front of an audience that assumed it was something that happened to much older people. His death prompted coverage about strokes in younger adults, a subject that rarely gets a hearing alongside a celebrity obituary.

Legacy and Remembering Luke Perry

The memorial that exists for Luke Perry is an hour of television. Riverdale returned on 9 October 2019 with "Chapter Fifty-Eight: In Memoriam", a standalone season premiere built entirely around the death of Fred Andrews, who is killed in a hit-and-run after stopping on a highway to help a stranded driver. Perry's family read the script before it was shot and supplied photographs and footage for it. The episode drew 1.14 million viewers, the show's largest audience in more than a season, and holds a 100 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes from fourteen reviews.

The driver he stops to help is played by Shannen Doherty, who had been Brenda Walsh to his Dylan McKay thirty years earlier and who took the part only after Perry's family and his manager agreed to it. It was her last television role before her own death in 2024. The episode closes with Archie delivering a eulogy for his father and the friends setting off fireworks in the backyard, which is as near as anyone outside that family in Tennessee ever got to a service. Among the actors in our celebrity caskets and funerals collection, his is the clearest case of a man who had already made the decision himself.

Conclusion

Luke Perry died of an ischemic stroke on 4 March 2019 at 52, and was buried a week later in Dickson County, Tennessee, in a mushroom suit he had chosen for himself. There is no casket to describe, no public grave to visit and no service anybody filmed. For an actor who had been on television for most of his adult life, the exit was remarkably quiet, and it was quiet because he had decided it should be.

That is the part worth holding on to. A burial suit is an unusual choice, but choosing it in advance, out loud, in front of your children is not unusual at all, and it spares the people left behind from guessing. Whether the answer is a casket, a coffin or something stranger, planning a funeral in advance and writing the choice down turns the hardest week of a family's life into one less thing they have to work out.

Sources

• Associated Press, "Luke Perry dead at 52 after suffering stroke, publicist says", 4 March 2019
• The Globe and Mail, "Actor Luke Perry dies at 52 after suffering stroke", 4 March 2019
• NBC News, "Luke Perry, of '90210' fame, dead at age 52", 4 March 2019
• Newsweek, "What Was Luke Perry's Cause of Death? '90210' and 'Riverdale' Star Dies Aged 52", 4 March 2019
• USA TODAY and The Tennessean, "Luke Perry laid to rest Monday near Tennessee home, death certificate says", March 2019
• E! News, "Luke Perry Laid to Rest in Private Tennessee Burial", March 2019
• Cox Media Group, "Luke Perry buried in private funeral near his Tennessee farm, reports say", 13 March 2019
• Newsweek, "What Is A Mushroom Burial Suit? Luke Perry's Final Wishes Included Being Buried In One, His Daughter Says", May 2019
• TODAY, "Luke Perry's daughter reveals his unusual burial request", May 2019
• HuffPost, "Luke Perry Was Buried In An 'Eco-Friendly' Mushroom Suit, His Daughter Says", May 2019
• Entertainment Tonight, "Riverdale Stars React to Luke Perry's Death as Show Production Shuts Down", March 2019
• Deadline, "Riverdale Season 4 Premiere: A Final Farewell To Luke Perry With Shannen Doherty", October 2019
• Yahoo Entertainment, "Quentin Tarantino remembers working with the late Luke Perry on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood", 23 July 2019
• American Stroke Association, "Ischemic Stroke (Clots)"

Image credits

Luke Perry at the 43rd Primetime Emmy Awards, 25 August 1991. Photo by Alan Light, published on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic licence (CC BY 2.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/