LOS ANGELES — Adam Wealthy, the kid actor with a pageboy mop-top who charmed TV audiences within the late Seventies as “America’s little brother” on “Eight is Sufficient,” has died. He was 54.
Wealthy died Saturday within the Brentwood part of Los Angeles, stated Lt. Aimee Earl of the Los Angeles County Medical-Examiner Coroner’s workplace. The reason for dying was underneath investigation however was not thought of to be suspicious.
Wealthy had a restricted performing profession after enjoying Nicholas Bradford, the youngest of eight kids, on the ABC hit dramedy that ran from from 1977 to 1981.
He had a number of run-ins with police associated to medication and alcohol – and sought remedy on the Betty Ford Heart in Rancho Mirage.
Wealthy suffered from a sort of despair that defied remedy and he had tried to erase the stigma of speaking about psychological sickness, stated publicist Danny Deraney. He unsuccessfully tried experimental cures over time and had remained sober.
Deraney stated he and others near Wealthy had been anxious in latest weeks once they couldn’t attain him.
“He was only a very type, beneficiant, loving soul,” Deraney informed The Related Press. “Being a well-known actor isn’t essentially what he wished to be … He had no ego, not an oz. of it.”
Wealthy ceaselessly mentioned his situation on Twitter and famous in October that he’d been sober for seven years. He stated he wasn’t excellent – referring to arrests, many stints in rehab, a number of overdoses and “numerous detoxes (and) relapses” – and urged his practically 19,000 followers to by no means quit.
“Human beings weren’t constructed to endure psychological sickness,” Wealthy had tweeted in September. “The mere proven fact that some folks take into account these to be weak, or have an absence of will is completely laughable … as a result of it’s the entire reverse! It’s takes a really, very sturdy individual … a warrior if you’ll … to battle such diseases.”
Wealthy additionally tweeted an image of himself from his heyday with one-time youngster star Mickey Rooney.
“Everybody used to say to me, ‘You’re the modern-day Mickey Rooney,’” he tweeted. “However when Mickey Rooney informed me that himself, it meant a helluva much more to me!”
Wealthy turned often called the little brother to a technology of TV viewers because the youngest youngster to a syndicated newspaper columnist performed by Dick Van Patten, who has to lift eight kids alone after the dying of his spouse within the first season of the present.
Wealthy starred within the sequence “Code Crimson” from 1981-82 and voiced the character of Presto the Magician on “Dungeons and Dragons” from 1983-85. He additionally reprised his most well-known function in two “Eight is Sufficient” TV film reunions.
However the stability of his performing profession was in single-episode appearances on among the hottest TV exhibits of the time: “The Love Boat,” “The Six Million Greenback Man,” “Silver Spoons,” and “Baywatch.”
