Haunting Photos Of Celebrities Who Had Open Casket Funerals

Billie Holiday

Jazz legend Billie Holiday will forever be remembered for her striking vocal style. Throughout the 1930s she achieved much success before facing massive struggles in the 1940s. Holiday struggled primarily with drug addiction and alcoholism which affected her voice in her later years. By 1959, she was diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver and attempted to stop drinking although she soon relapsed. That same year she was hospitalized, and while laying in bed was arrested by the police. Holiday had been targeted for many years by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and was handcuffed while she laid dying. Billie Holiday died at age 44, however, her legend lives on today.