"Being famous, that's a 24-hour job right there," actor Bill Murray once said . All those hours of work in the limelight might well take their toll in the long run.

A study by a team from Witten/Herdecke University in Germany suggests singers who reach celebrity status tend to die an average of around four-and-a-half years earlier than lesser-known individuals.

Publicly available data on 324 relatively famous mainstream music artists who were active between 1950 and 1990 were matched by gender, age, nationality, ethnicity, genre, and solo/band status with 324 'twins' who were much less well known.

Famous singers passed away aged 75 on average, the analysis showed, while for their more obscure and less successful counterparts, the average age of death was almost 80. Anonymity may not n

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