1949 - 1982
The son of an Albanian immigrant
restaurant owner, Adam Belushi, and his wife, Agnes, John was born in Chicago. He grew up
in suburban Wheaton. John became the perfect all-American boy during his high-school
years. The co-captain of the Weaton Central High School football team, he was elected his
school's homecoming king his senior year. He also developed an interest in acting and
appeared in the high school variety show.
Encouraged by his drama coach, John put aside his plans to become a football
coach and decided to pursue acting. After graduation in 1967, he joined a summer stock
theatre troupe in Indiana. That summer John played a variety of roles from Cardinal Wolsey
in Anne of a Thousand Days to a hipster jazz man in The tender trip.
In the fall John started his freshman year at the University of Wisconsin at
Whitewater. He grew his hair long and started attending more anti-Vietnam rallies than
classes. Dropping out of Wisconsin, John spent the next two years at the College of
DuPage, a junior college a few miles away from his parents' home.
While he was attending DuPage, John helped found the West Compass Players, an
improvisational comedt troupe patterned after Chicago's famous Second City ensemble. By
1971 he made the leap to Second City itself, where he joined a cast that included Harold
Ramis (Ghostbusters), Joe Flaherty (SCTV), and Brian Doyle-Murray (Saturday
Night Live).
Within a year John and his high-school sweetheart, Judy Jacklin, were living
in New York. John had joined the cast of National Lampoon's Lemmings, an
off-Broadway rock musical revue that was originally booked for a six-week run but played
to capacity audiences for 10 months. John's performance was singled out by a reviewer for
the New Yorker, who labeled him "a real discovery."
In 1973 John was hired as a writer and actor for the syndicated National
Lampoon Radio Hour. Along with the National Lampoon show, staged the
following year, the radio show was a prototype fot the Not Ready For Prime Time Players on
Saturday Night live.
The Lampoon spinoffs brought John many fans, but in 1975 the ground-breaking
television series Saturday Night Live made him a star.
In 1978 John had a small part in the movie Goin' South, directed by
and starring Jack Nicholson. That part was just a warmup for his classic role as the
beer-swilling Bluto in National Lampoon's Animal House, the year's top
grossing comedy. That year, he also had a smaller and more serious role in another movie, Old
Boyfriends.
In 1979, after four years in the cast, John quit SNL to devote himself to
making movies. He and his best friend, Dan Aykroyd, appeared as pilots in Steven
Speilberg's unsuccessful 1941. Around this time John's drug use escalated.
Cocaine. which was ubiquitous in show-business circles in the late 1970's, was John's drug
of choice. His recurrent cocaine binges became a source of friction between John and Judy,
whom he had married in 1977.
John's love of blues and soul music inspired the Blues Brothers. he and
Aykroyd first appeared as Joliet Jake and Elwood Blues in a sketch on SNL. Backed by some
of the best musicians in the business, their recreations of 1960s soul classics rocketed
the first Blues Brothers album, A Briefcase Full of Blues, to the top of
the record charts in 1980.
Building on the success of the album, John made the movie The Blues
Brothers, directed by John Landis. Filmed on location in John's home territory,
Chicago, the movie gave him a chance to feature some of his musical heroes, including Ray
Charles, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown. Belushi also opened a private club, the Blues
Bar, for the duration of the shooting. This gave him, Aykroyd, and the rest of the cast a
place to blow off steam at the end of a long day of shooting. Landis said of John at the
time, "if he doesn't burn himself out, his potential is unlimited."
John's reputation as an off-screen party animal is legendry, but his generous
side is less well known. He bought his father a ranch outside San Diego, where the senior
Belushi could realize his life long dream to be a cowboy. John helped set up some of his
Chicago buddies in their own businesses and kept a close eye on younger brother Jim, who
had followed his path through both Second City and Saturday Night Live.
John got good reviews in his next two movies, but neither one did great
business at the box office. In Continental Divide he played a hard-boiled Chicago
newspaper colomnist who finds romance in Colorado with eagle expert Blair Brown. He
and Aykroyd appeared together once again in the 1981 movie Neighbors, which gave
them a chance to reverse roles: John was the stable family man whose life is turned upside
down when wild man Aykroyd moves in next door.
In 1982 John began work on the screenplay for his next movie, Noble Rot.
In early March he checked into a bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, a popular celebrity
hotel in Los Angeles. His steady use of cocaine in recent weeks had alarmed his family and
friends, but he continued to promise his wife that he would quit drugs once and for all.
John Belushi was found dead in his room on March 5, 1982. The Los Angeles
coroner's office gave the cause of death as a lethal injection of both heroin and cocaine.
Several years later, his companion during his last few days, Cathy Smith, was sentenced to
three years in prison for injecting him with the drugs. Close friend James Taylor sang
"That Lonesome Road" at a service at the Marth's Vineyard cemetary where John is
buried. He was 33 years old.
