Why you should experience Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.
Hollywood Forever Cemetery is a historic burial ground where Hollywood's film heritage meets landscaped memorial grounds, elaborate mausoleums and the graves of artists who shaped American popular culture.
Set along Santa Monica Boulevard near Gower Street and just steps from the Hollywood Palladium, the cemetery occupies 62 acres of lawns, mature trees, reflecting water and memorial architecture across the eastern reaches of Hollywood. Individual monuments rise among broad burial lawns, and the Hollywood Cathedral Mausoleum anchors an architectural collection extending through garden crypts, columbaria and the Egyptian Revival Abbey of the Psalms, begun during the 1930s and enlarged across several decades. Beth Olam forms a distinct Jewish burial ground within the property, adding another spatial and religious layer to a cemetery serving Hollywood communities across generations. The Fairbanks Memorial Reflecting Pool creates a central landscape feature beside the Cathedral complex, joining water, greenery and memorial sculpture within grounds that retain the scale of an early twentieth-century cemetery despite the dense city surrounding them. The result is an expansive memorial landscape whose lawns, mausoleums, religious precincts, water and funerary architecture preserve an unusually direct physical connection between Hollywood and the people who built its cultural reputation.
What you should know about Hollywood Forever Cemetery.
Hollywood Forever Cemetery is best known for becoming the burial place of major figures from Hollywood cinema, music and entertainment after its founding in 1899, decades before the surrounding district emerged as the center of the American motion-picture industry. Cecil B. DeMille, among the foundational directors of Hollywood filmmaking, rests there alongside silent-screen star Rudolph Valentino, whose death in 1926 produced mass public mourning and enduring attention around his crypt. Douglas Fairbanks joined the cemetery after a career that helped define silent adventure cinema and included the creation of United Artists with Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin and D. W. Griffith in 1919. Tyrone Power, Mickey Rooney and Peter Lorre extended its association with successive generations of studio-era performers, and Judy Garland's remains were transferred there in 2017, placing one of twentieth-century American entertainment's most consequential performers within the same grounds. Musicians subsequently broadened the cultural range of the cemetery, including Johnny Ramone, Dee Dee Ramone and Chris Cornell. Hattie McDaniel occupies a particularly consequential place in its history: the first Black performer to win an Academy Award had requested burial at the cemetery, yet racial restrictions prevented her interment there after her death in 1952; a cenotaph beside the lake now honors her. The cemetery entered the National Register in 1999, one century after its founding, securing federal recognition for a property whose development paralleled the rise of Hollywood itself.
A dramatic revival began in 1998 after years of financial decline, physical deterioration and additional damage from the 1994 Northridge earthquake left Hollywood Memorial Park near closure. Tyler Cassity purchased the bankrupt property for $375,000, renamed it Hollywood Forever and began extensive repairs to deteriorated buildings, crypts, roads and landscaping. The renewed institution expanded beyond funerary use through a cultural program that eventually made the cemetery an active Los Angeles gathering place. Cinespia began its summer screenings there in 2002, projecting films onto the white exterior wall of the Cathedral Mausoleum as audiences assembled on Fairbanks Lawn, establishing a direct connection between Hollywood cinema and the burial ground of filmmakers and performers from its history. The former Masonic Lodge, first opened in 1927, developed another cultural role through concerts, literary programs, live podcast tapings and screenings. Hollywood Forever also became an important American setting for Dia de Los Muertos, filling the grounds with more than 100 community-created altars, Aztec ritual dancers, art and multiple music stages during its annual observance. Los Angeles cultural authorities trace the event's development to Cassity and Daisy Marquez and place attendance 35,000, connecting the cemetery's late twentieth-century restoration with a major contemporary tradition rooted in the communities surrounding it. The revived Hollywood Forever consequently joined cemetery preservation with film exhibition, live performance and communal remembrance, creating a cultural program inseparable from the historic purpose of the grounds.
How to fold Hollywood Forever Cemetery into your trip.
Hollywood Forever Cemetery works as the anchor for a Hollywood outing connecting the origins of studio filmmaking, the great movie-palace era and the civic infrastructure built around a rapidly expanding entertainment district.
Begin at Hollywood Heritage Museum, housed in the Lasky-DeMille Barn, a 1901 structure that became part of the Burns-Revier Studio in 1912 before Jesse L. Lasky and Cecil B. DeMille used it for their new film enterprise. DeMille and Lasky came west in 1913 to make The Squaw Man, and the company developed into Famous Players-Lasky after a 1916 merger involving Adolph Zukor's Famous Players operation, an important corporate predecessor of Paramount Pictures. Hollywood Heritage rescued the barn, restored it and opened its museum in 1985; the building entered the National Register in 2014. Its collection includes silent-era photographs, film props, historic papers and a reconstruction of DeMille's office containing furniture from Paramount and personal objects associated with the director. Continue to Hollywood Pantages Theatre, Alexander Pantages's final movie palace, designed by B. Marcus Priteca and opened June 4, 1930 with The Florodora Girl starring Marion Davies and a Fanchon and Marco stage production. Fox West Coast Theatres acquired the building during the Great Depression, followed by Howard Hughes through RKO Pictures in 1949; Hughes maintained offices and living quarters on its second floor. The Academy Awards occupied the theater from 1950 through 1960, including the first televised ceremony in 1953, hosted by Bob Hope and transmitted by NBC from ceremonies in Hollywood and New York. Conclude at Los Angeles Fire Department Hollywood Museum, housed in Old Fire Station 27, where Engine Company 27 and four additional units moved on July 1, 1930. The station was then the largest firehouse west of the Mississippi and spent decades protecting Hollywood's studios, residences and commercial district before suffering serious damage during the 1994 Northridge earthquake. A replacement station opened next door in 2001, and the Los Angeles Fire Department Historical Society subsequently restored the old building as a museum containing three apparatus bays, firefighting equipment dating to the early twentieth century and artifacts extending back to the 1880s. The progression moves from the surviving barn where DeMille and Lasky helped build the studio system through Priteca's palace of cinema and the Academy Awards and culminates in the fire station constructed to protect the expanding entertainment capital, connecting production, exhibition and municipal growth across Hollywood.
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