h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In the h2g2 spirit of slightly warping existing subject lines... who lived altogether too long? Who could the world have got on perfectly well, and indeed better, if they'd died when they were 28?

Let's get Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and so on out of the way early. I'm not aiming here for grand political statements, more a sort of petty vindictiveness.

To kick us off... I don't believe the world would have been a poorer place with less of Bernard Manning or Henry Kissinger.

Benny Hill.

Here's another, perhaps less nasty-sounding take on it:

Jimi Hendrix died at 28. He'd done enough by that time that we're still talking about him. Who'd done enough by 28 to still be influential... but made the mistake of going on living and polluted what would have been a beautiful memory along the lines of James Dean?

Arbitrarily let's pick 28 as an age to have them dead by.

The most obvious picks to me are:
Michael Jackson. We still get "Off The Wall" and "Thriller", we don't get him turning white, doing "We Are The World" or turning out to be a paedo.

Elvis: no overlaps with the Beatles, no "Suspicious Minds", no comeback, no Viva Las Vegas, but we still get all the great songs and some of the earlier, not-terrible movies.

I didn't know that Elvis made not-terrible movies!

Elliot Carter was an extreme example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Carter

His most iconic music was written by 1973. I heard a few of the pieces he wrote at the age of 102, and was very unimpressed. Yes, he was productive for a very long time, but if he had died in 1961 at a youthful [for him] age of 57, his footprint on the sands of time would have been largely the same as it was in 2008.

But to stay within the 28-year-old assumption, Laurence Olivier in 1945 would have already filmed "Wuthering heights," "Rebecca" and "Henry V." "Hamlet" and "Richard III" were still a few years off. The regrettable movies that he filmed late in life to pay for his medical expenses would have had to be filmed with someone else, or ditched entirely.

Judy Garland would have been 28 in 1950. Had she died then [which was possible, as she attempted suicide more than once], the world would not have had "A Star is Born" [1954] or "Judgment at Nuremberg" [1961] or her TV series or Carnegie Hall concert, but to my mind these pale beside her earlier work.

Good one on Garland.

Liza Minelli was 26 when she made Cabaret. Jus sayin.

I just had a thought related to how mean-spirited it is to talk about people in terms of how it would be better if they'd died younger.

What occurred to me was that these people - Liza Minelli, Michael Jackson, Elvis and so on - did world-changing work before they were 28, and the point of this question is largely to point out that their later work was less worthwhile.

What further occurred to me was that in my life, everything I've done that I'm in any way proud of happened AFTER I was 28. I'm not sure what that says about me, if anything. What did YOU do before you were 28? What have YOU done since?