On this day: Corey Haim is born

His later life saw his earlier celebrity wane, as he found it difficult to move from teenage stardom to adult film and musical success. Scandal followed him; in 1993 he was arrested for threatening a friend and from his youth he struggled with a well-publicised drug problem in the form of a prescription drug addiction.

Despite regular stays in rehab, by the early noughties he was a virtual recluse and believed to be near penniless.

In 2004 he said publicly: “I'm clean, sober, humble and happy," and two years later began work on reality TV show The Two Coreys with his old friend, but the two seasons were marred by drama and argument, and his career and personal rehabilitation remained stalled.

In March 2010 his mother Judy found him lying dead in his Los Angeles apartment. A coroner later ruled that it was a natural death despite speculation that drugs were involved. He was just 38-years-old.

After his death, Corey Feldman told broadcaster Larry King: “He was his own enemy,” but added: “He’s been, honestly, in the best frame of mind that he's ever been in, in the past year.”

Later, director Joel Schumacher said: “He was so good-looking and so funny and so charming. There was no way in the world that that fantastic thirteen year-old kid's life could have turned out the way that it did. It's just horrible.”

Haim had a Jewish funeral service and was buried at Pardes Shalom Cemetery in Ontario.

What the JC said: The bad news from the Hollywood front is that Vietnam is being supplanted by vampires. And not good, old fashioned vampires either, with opera-cloaks and gentlemanly manners, but horrible young-punk vampires on motor-bikes, who corrupt nice kids.

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