Hollywood A-listers are lining up to train in a job that you have probably never heard of. From actress Nicole Kidman to Hamnet director Chloé Zhao, a growing number of Hollywood stars have announced their new career move.
You are a celebrity with private jets and yachts at your disposal, personal chefs, trainers and assistants at your luxury estate, agents, publicists, managers and lawyers at your beck and call – what more could you want? How about helping people die? No, the stars are not lining up to push people off tall buildings – this is Hollywood, not Iran. But a surprising number are devoting their spare time to guiding dying strangers through their final days and weeks on Earth.
Becoming a “death doula” is suddenly the hottest thing in Hollywood since the Brazilian butt lift. Oscar winner Nicole Kidman is among those training to guide the terminally ill toward the light. “Sounds a little weird,” she admits, with understatement.
Chloé Zhao, who directed last year’s grief-fest Hamnet and won an Oscar for helming 2020’s Nomadland, has also jumped on the bandwagon. “Death is no longer seen as a natural part of life,” says end-of-life doula Zhao, who recognises that in Hollywood, and beyond, the emphasis is on staying young for as long as possible by taking every supplement, peptide, stem-cell and exosome therapy, cellular repair and blood-cleansing plasma exchange procedure available to delay the inevitable. “Now it is about staying alive as long as we can – there is almost shame around death.”
It is as if Pilates and salmon sperm facials are no longer enough to fill the deep void in the heart of so many celebrities who were lured by Tinseltown’s false blandishments of fame. “I know of several celebrities who are quietly becoming death doulas, but want to keep it under wraps,” a Hollywood death doula tells me. “It is an amazing gift to be able to guide people through their final days. But for some stars who maybe feel they have everything in their life except meaning and purpose, being an end-of-life doula can give them a connection to the realities of life and death that their pampered, self-indulged world might lack.”
In Hollywood, Elvis Presley’s actress granddaughter Riley Keough, aged 36, who starred in Daisy and the Six, trained as a death doula after her brother Benjamin’s suicide in 2020. “It is so important to be educated on conscious dying and death the way we educate ourselves on birth and conscious birthing,” she says. After Gwyneth Paltrow popularised the concept of “conscious uncoupling” with her 2016 divorce from Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, perhaps it was only a matter of time before “conscious dying” entered the zeitgeist.
Meanwhile in Britain actress Ruby Wax has announced plans to become a death doula, and Davina McCall has said she will begin training once she retires. You may be familiar with a birthing doula, trained to help pregnant women with emotional and physical support through delivery, though unlike a midwife they cannot provide clinical care. Doulas, based on the Ancient Greek term for a female helper, have been assisting pregnant mothers since the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s.
Death doulas are a relatively recent phenomenon, however, helping the dying with emotional and family support, practical planning, death vigil support and grief counselling. But before you run to sign up at your nearest Art of Death doula class, hold on a moment. Working as a certified angel of death can be emotionally draining, cautions Alua Arthur, whose organisation Going With Grace has trained more than 3,000 end-of-life doulas.
“I grieve for my clients,” says Arthur, who naturally has her own TV agent and literary agent. “I grieve with my clients. I grieve for myself in that process.” The job also requires of the death doula an emotional balance and grounding that is, one suspects, in short supply amid Hollywood’s self-aggrandising narcissism.
Kidman, aged 58, decided to train as a death doula after experiencing a lack of support when her own mother, Janelle Ann, died in 2024, aged 84. “As my mother was passing, she was lonely, and there was only so much the family could provide,” she says. “Loneliness is a big part of our world now, particularly for people in that stage of life. I want to be there. It is helping people in the end stage of life. It is helping the families. It is being present, impartial. It is very beautiful and you have to be a certain personality to be able to do it, but I found out that I am actually that personality.”
The Oscar winning star of The Hours, whose films include Moulin Rouge, Rabbit Hole, Eyes Wide Shut and HBO series Big Little Lies adds that the work feels very important to her. “There is always suffering in life, right?” she says. “But if there are people there who can help with that and can help those final stages be less painful, you can feel the connection and the love, then that is a lovely thing to be able to do. So that is what I am exploring.”
Death doulas help clients navigate their fears, curate their end-of-life care, and encourage heartfelt conversations with their families. They can also help the dying fulfil wishes on their bucket list. California death doula Ken Breniman recalls renting a tandem bicycle to ride with a visually impaired man whose dying wish was to ride a bike. Dying can give people the chance to “suck the marrow out of life,” he says. And they help people come to terms with their own mortality. “To hear someone say, ‘I did not realise death could be so beautiful’ – I think that has been the most touching and meaningful thing,” says Chicago death doula Cari Rogers.
Director Chloé Zhao, aged 44, confesses that she trained as a death doula partly to confront her own fears, as much as to help the dying face theirs. “I have been terrified of death my whole life. I still am,” she told the New York Times. “And because I have been so afraid I have not been able to live fully… And because I am so scared of it, I have no choice but to start to develop a healthier relationship with it, or the second half of life would be too hard. It should not be this terrifying that I cannot even live.”
Of course, not everyone would be comfortable in their dying moments to have a major celebrity holding their hand as they head toward the Great Beyond. In your final moments, when your life flashes before your eyes, do you really want Nicole Kidman to have top billing as the credits roll? For some, like Kidman, the desire to become a death doula comes from experiencing the unmooring grief of great personal loss. But others may have not entirely altruistic incentives.
“Actors are vampires, sucking the life out of experiences to use as motivation in their roles on screen,” says a Hollywood acting coach to the stars. “It is hardly surprising that some might want to become end-of-life doulas, because while they are helping people they are also charging their emotional banks with high-octane psychological fuel. What could be more dramatic than the end of life? Movie death scenes can win Oscars.”
The chances of you becoming a Hollywood star are admittedly slim, but you too could become a death doula. Going With Grace, which has trained more than 3,000 end-of-life doulas, charges around £1,400 for group training sessions, “with three flexible payment options to choose from.” Death doulas charge up to £110 an hour for their services in Hollywood, and offer all-inclusive death packages from £3,725 and up, though that hardly competes with the £13 million per movie Kidman can command. Cynics might wonder how much comfort and empathy Kidman can bring to a client with one foot in the grave, while she has one foot in a Louboutin and the other stepping into her chauffeured limousine?
If you are dying to find out, you may have to die, to find out.
