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7 May (revised, 2 October 2020)
A legacy, for all that people like to use the word when someone famous dies, just means a type of gift – specifically, a gift made on death, i.e. by will, and, unlike a devise (q.v.), typically money (if not an item of personal property).
To that extent, it is right to think of a legacy as a gift that relates to a person’s death, but it would only, say, be a true legacy if Richard Attenborough died, and he had decided to leave millions to fund the future of The Royal Court (a general legacy), or some valuable artwork, which it hangs (or stands) in its foyer (a specific legacy (or specific bequest)).
As it is, with the death of Ray Harryhausen, we are being urged to remember – if we ever knew that he had anything to do with it – his work on Star Wars, for example, but calling that a legacy cannot be even a figurative way of talking about what he did in his life :
1. Self-evidently, Harryhausen made that contribution decades ago,
2. Equally self-evidently, people built on it in the following months and years, and
3. Harryhausen's death did not make a gift of this and all the other things that he did for cinema, but, rather, it is a tribute or a memorial to him for people to be made aware of them
And why else do I question talking about a legacy per se ? Well, unlike a person who is free to refuse to accept a legacy or to give it to someone else, the contribution made by this director is more or less in the past – we can restore his or her films and hold retrospectives to re-evaluate them, but we can even do so when that person is alive (e.g. Tony Garnett at the @BFI), without waiting for death.
That embodies another reason that X’s legacy is the wrong way to think about it. If X leaves a gift, X specifies what the gift is, for it to go to A, and what A receives is – bad will-drafting apart – what X intended. So-called legacies in cultural, scientific, artistic worlds aren’t like that, because A. A. Milne and Tove Jansson did not choose to be remembered for their work for children, and that is more like treasuring some contributions and forgetting others.
In summary, Harryhausen probably did not try to choose what will be remembered, and film buffs urging this or that on us is more like a bossy treasuring, a curatorship of his life and (perceived) achievements, rather than a legacy.
Has all that 'excitement' about the proper way to note #Thatcher's passing itself just passed off - as if it had been nothing ?
— THE AGENT APSLEY (@THEAGENTAPSLEY) May 7, 2013
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