Television actor John Ritter achieved his greatest success playing bumbling characters decades apart, but he was remembered Friday for the grace with which he handled his celebrity and his work.
The star of the 1970s hit “Three’s Company” collapsed Thursday night on the set of his current ABC sitcom, “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter,” which had transformed him from a respected, working actor back into a front-line television star.
Surgeons at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, Calif., were unable to save him. The cause of death was an aortic dissection, according to his publicist, a rare tear in the main artery carrying blood to the heart.
Ritter was to have turned 55 on Wednesday.
The actor’s death throws into question the future of “8 Simple Rules,” a moderate hit and key rebuilding block for troubled ABC that was to have begun its second season Sept. 23.
Three episodes of the broad comedy about a dad trying to handle his teen girls had already been shot, but representatives at ABC and Touchstone Television, the show’s producers, said Friday the shock and grief were too fresh to have even begun talking about if and how they would air.
“It-‘s just stunning, unbelievable,” his longtime assistant, Susan Wilcox, told The Associated Press. “Everybody loved John Ritter. Everybody loved working with him.”
“His endless talents and unparalleled human spirit were a gift to us all that we will cherish,” Stephen McPherson, president of Touchstone Television, said in a statement. “While he had the uncommon gift of making everyone he came in contact with feel special, he was the truly special one.”
Many tributes on television were in the works Friday, but probably the most thorough were coming from sister cable stations Nickelodeon and TV Land, which celebrate classic TV.
From 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, TV Land will show “Three’s Company” episodes selected to highlight Ritter’s best work. The same concept will be repeated Monday on Nick at Nite from 8 p.m. to 5 a.m.
Still to be determined was whether there even would be future episodes of “8 Simple Rules,” which drew its modest charm from Ritter’s accomplished performance as its centerpiece, the moderately unsteady father who remembers all too well what boys want.
“The thing [the father] hates about the guys is the stuff that he sees in himself about how he was,” Ritter said in a promotional session last year at which he lit up the room with his mischievous humor. “He is familiar with the tricks.”
In the nearly three decades between “Three’s Company” and “8 Simple Rules,” Ritter worked steadily, trying to launch new series, including “Hooperman” and “Hearts Afire,” landing many guest-starring TV roles, and acting in films including “Tadpole,” “Sling Blade” and “Manhood.”
He is also co-starring with Billy Bob Thornton in the forthcoming big-screen release “Bad Santa.” But Ritter’s real mark was made early in his career, with Jack Tripper, the klutzy swinger who roomed platonically with two young women in “Three’s Company.”
“When you look at the great comic characters in American television history, Jack Tripper was really one of those,” said Robert J. Thompson, director of Syracuse University’s Center for the Study of Popular Television. “The guy was kind of the epitome of the sitcom character.”
And Ritter turned out to be the lasting star of the ensemble, despite the early attention turned on blond bombshell Suzanne Somers.
“John Ritter is the one who grounded that show deeply in the traditions of the ’50s sitcom,” Thompson said. “This was a guy who was at his best when he was stumbling over an ottoman. He very much vibrated with the traditions of a Lucille Ball or a Jackie Gleason.”
Ritter was the son of legendary Western film star Tex Ritter and a Southern Californian. He graduated from Hollywood High School and the University of Southern California.
With the actor when he died, according to news reports, were his wife, actress Amy Yasbeck; his son from his first marriage, actor Jason Ritter, 23; and numerous representatives from the ABC show.
He is also survived by two other grown children and his and Yasbeck’s young daughter.
