Story Created:
May 28, 2010 at 12:08 PM PST
Story Updated:
May 31, 2010 at 10:47 AM PST
Actor Gary Coleman, who had suffered from intracranial brain bleeding and was on life support in the intensive care unit of a Utah hospital, has died, a hospital spokeswoman said Friday.
Family members and close friends were at his side when life support was terminated, Janet Frank said.
Coleman, 42, fell ill at his Santaquin, Utah, home Wednesday evening and was rushed by ambulance to a hospital, a Coleman spokesman said in a statement released Friday.
Later Wednesday night he was taken to another hospital — Utah Valley Regional Medical Center in Provo — where he had been listed in critical condition, the spokesman said.
Coleman is best known as the wisecracking youngster Arnold Drummond on TV’s “Diff’rent Strokes” from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s.
Coleman was the personality around which the show was built. His natural charm and way with a line — the frequently uttered “Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?”, directed at his older brother (played by Todd Bridges), became a catchphrase — helped make the show a breakout hit, a mainstay of the NBC schedule from 1978 to 1985 (and on ABC for a year afterward).
But in later years Coleman’s name became a punch line. He was denigrated because of his short stature — he never grew taller than 4 feet 8 inches because of nephritis, a kidney condition. He sued his parents over mismanagement of his finances; though he won a $1.3 million settlement in 1993, he had to file for bankruptcy six years later. He was occasionally in the news for scuffles.
Indeed, the 2003 Broadway musical “Avenue Q” featured a character named Gary Coleman who was identified as the former star of “Diff’rent Strokes,” and was now the superintendent of an apartment building. (Coleman himself had once been a security guard after “Diff’rent Strokes” went off the air.) The character joined the cast in singing a song called “It Sucks to Be Me.”
Coleman was born on Feb. 8, 1968, and raised in Zion, Ill., near Chicago. He was adopted as an infant by Willie Coleman, a representative for a pharmaceutical company, and Sue Coleman, a nurse. By age 5, Coleman was modeling for retailer Montgomery Ward, a job that was followed by appearances in commercials for McDonald’s and Hallmark, according to a 1979 profile in People magazine.
After Norman Lear cast him in an unsuccessful pilot for a new version of “The Little Rascals” — Coleman played Stymie — he got the role of Arnold in “Diff’rent Strokes.”
“Pudgy cheeks, twinking eyes, and flawless timing made him seem like an old pro packed into the body of a small child,” wrote Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh in “The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present.”
“I liked ‘Diff’rent Strokes’ up until about the last three or four years. I was bored,” he told CNN’s Larry King in 1999. “I was disinterested, and I was jealous because I was missing my childhood and I was missing normalcy. I knew what normalcy was, and I wasn’t having it.”
But after the show went off the air, the actor — by then 18 — struggled to find a place in show business. He had occasional guest spots on game shows and other sitcoms but rarely regular work. (His youthful co-stars fared no better — Bridges struggled with drug addiction before turning his life around, and Dana Plato, who played Kimberly Drummond, engaged in porn and crime. She died in 1999.)
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