Poor old Sean Bean. From The Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones, his characters die with startling regularity. The actor’s many filmic deaths have inspired their own website, dontkillseanbean.com, while a montage of his final scenes has racked up more than two million views on Youtube.

This week, in an interview with Radio Times, he admitted that he has lost track of his characters' deaths: “I have died quite a few times, to be fair. I've seen that reel of clips - it sounds a bit macabre, but I watched that back, and I'd forgotten some of the scenes I'd died in.”

It’s not the first time he has gone on record about his on-screen life expectancy. Speaking to the Daily Mail in 2014, Bean said he was proud of his dramatic range: “I've died a lot of different deaths. Maybe it’s the quality of my death people are fascinated by. I liked Lord Of The Rings. Big death.”

But Sean Bean may not be the be all and end all of on-screen mortality. A study by Kyle Hill, science editor of nerdist.com, leaves the Yorkshire actor in fourth place, after John Hurt, Bela Lugosi and Vincent Price. Bean’s 25 deaths pale in comparison with Price’s 33, Lugosi’s 36 and Hurt’s 43. As legends of gothic horror, Price and Lugosi are natural front-runners, but Hurt's place at the top of the list may raise a few eyebrows.

Credit: Kyle Hill/Nerdist.com

Unlucky: Sean Bean in Game of Thrones Credit: Copyright (c) 2011 Rex Features. No use without permission./HBO/Everett/REX Shutterstock

Nonetheless, Sean Bean still may have a claim to first place. Born in 1940, Hurt has a 19-year head start on the younger actor, and so has more credits to his name. When the playing-field is levelled, Hill suggests that Sean Bean and Bela Lugosi are neck-to-neck; both have an average of 0.32 deaths per film, while John Hurt and Micky Rourke have only 0.31.

These numbers have been hotly contested. A more recent study by Vocativ.com puts Rourke in the lead with a 29.9% chance of fatality, claiming that Bean is proportionately less likely to die than Tommy Flanagan or even Leonardo DiCaprio.

Misfortunate: John Hurt in The Last Panthers Credit: Â©2015 Sky UK Ltd

Iin terms of raw numbers, however, Hurt’s death-count is unparalleled. Vocativ.com credits him with 45 film deaths, even more than Nerdist.com’s 43. Crucially, Nerdist.com's rankings include Sean Bean’s TV appearances, but not Hurt’s.

When Hurt’s TV films are taken into account, the Telegraph found that his characters had died 47 times – not including A Man for All Seasons (where his death is announced in a post-film voiceover) or Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor, in which his body dies but his character survives, having regenerated into Chistopher Eccleston. Sean Bean has some catching up to do.