Top five John Belushi moments

A sketch that played on the growing public awareness of the comedian's fast-living ways, this found Belushi, in old age make-up, visiting a cemetery where his fellow SNL cast members have been buried. "They're all gone and I miss every one of them. Why me? Why'd I live so long?" he demands. "I'll tell you why," he adds, now becoming youthful and starting to prance over the graves. "Cause I'm a dancer!" Hilarious at the time, the sketch now seems tragic, given that Belushi would in fact be the first cast member to die, from a drug overdose at the Chateau Marmont on March 5, 1982.

3 The 'Where's the spirit?' scene (Animal House, 1978)

The original gross-out comedy Animal House starred Belushi as college reprobate John "Bluto" Blutarsky who, together with his fellow fun-loving Delta house brethren, wages war upon the disciplinarian Dean Wormer. Pretty much every moment with Belushi on screen is golden, but none surpasses the scene where he rallies the troops for one last attack. "What the f*** happened to the Delta house I used to know?" Belushi demands. "Where's the spirit? Where's the guts? `Ooh, we're afraid to go with you Bluto, we might get in trouble.' Well, just kiss my ass! Wormer, he's a dead man!" "Bluto's right," agrees another member of the fraternity. "Psychotic, but absolutely right."

4 The parachuting scene (1941, 1979)

Steven Spielberg's first attempt at a Second World War movie - and, mercifully, his last attempt at a comedy - this misbegotten box office turkey is almost made watchable by Belushi's turn as an insane cigar-chomping fighter pilot. Notably hilarious is the sequence where he mistakenly shoots down an American plane, crash-lands his own in downtown LA and then parachutes off the wing despite being only six inches off the ground.

5 The restaurant scene (The Blues Brothers, 1980)

A box office disaster-turned-cult classic, Belushi and Dan Aykroyd's homage to soul music found them playing a pair of bluesmen trying to get their band back together. In the film's funniest scene, our heroes try to blackmail their old horn-player Mr Fabulous (Alan Rubin) into leaving his job as maitre d' at an expensive restaurant by upsetting all the customers. "The women! I want to buy your women!" Belushi shouts at a nearby diner in a gutteral Middle Eastern accent. "The litle girl, your daughters. Sell them to me. Sell me your children!" Mr Fabulous returns to the fold.