Maybe it’s Twilight, but celebrity cemeteries are now firmly on the map for offbeat travel, from Sydney to Paris, via Los Angeles. So where should you look, and what’s the form?
SYDNEY’S MOST STUNNING CEMETERY
The Waverley Cemetery is on the cliffs at Bronte, not far from Bondi Beach. It has Victorian and Edwardian graves and Henry Lawson is buried here. Mel Gibson’s 1979 film Tim used this as a location. It’s stunning at sunset.
PARIS – FAREWELL JIM MORRISON
Paris’s oldest and largest cemetery, Père Lachaise is visited by one million people every year, looking around three hundred thousand graves. Jim Morrison’s memorial has graffiti, flowers and records placed as tributes and Oscar Wilde’s lipstick-smeared tomb is a cult destination. Chopin, Balzac, Gertrude Stein, Modigliani are also buried here.
INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE IN NEW ORLEANS
The Anne Rice film, Interview With a Vampire, was shot at Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 on Washington Avenue in the Garden District of New Orleans, Louisiana. Rice also set many of her books here. It’s possible to visit this as part of the Gray Line Garden District tour. The cemetery was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, and in 1996 it was placed on the World Monuments Fund Watch List.
LONDON’S PUNK AND SCI-FI GRAVEYARD
Don’t miss the memorials to Sex Pistols’ manager Malcolm McLaren and Science Fiction legend Douglas Adams at Highgate Cemetery.
It is divided into two parts, named the East and West cemetery. There are approximately 170,000 people buried in around 53,000 graves at Highgate Cemetery. And George Eliot, Karl Marx, Beryl Bainbridge, Lucian Freud, Stella Gibbons and Charles Dickens’ family are all remembered here.
KARIE BIBLE’S HOLLYWOOD CEMETERY TOUR
We hear really good things about Karie Bible’s Hollywood Forever Cemetery tour. Your tour guide has Goth credibility and Los Angeles respectability. She’s a horror movie expert as well as a popular historian. Earning a film degree from what is now the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, Bible discovered Vampira and Valentino, among nearly 90,000 memorials and never looked back.
Every August 23, on the anniversary of Valentino’s 1926 death, Bible dons a period costume in tribute, on the tour.
Among the stops on Bible’s standard two-hour tour are Florence Lawrence, the first movie star and David White from Bewitched.
People leave plastic fangs on Vampira’s headstone in the cemetery and sometimes real-life celebrities like Anjelica Huston have been known to show up, attending family graves.
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