Guillaume Apollinaire
Two years after being wounded in World War I, Apollinaire died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918; he was 38.
Émile Cohl
Cohl's financial situation deteriorated during the Great Depression and he endured years of severe poverty. While his peer, George Méliès was awarded the Legion of Honor medal in 1931, scant attention was given Cohl's pioneering work in animated film. In the spring of 1937, at the age of 80, his face was lightly burned when a candle on his desk set fire to his beard. During a couple of months stay at a charity hospital, the young film journalist René Jeanne helped organize a benefit screening of his work, which played at the Champs-Elysées Cinema on January 19, 1938, the day before Cohl's death, two weeks after his 81st birthday. Coincidentally, Georges Méliès died hours later. Cohl's ashes are kept in the columbarium of the Père-Lachaise Cemetery, in Paris.