Star of “Three’s Company” and “Step by Step,” Suzanne Somers, dies at age 76

Star of "Three's Company" and "Step by Step," Suzanne Somers, dies at age 76
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Suzanne Somers passed away on Sunday in Palm Springs, California. She made a personal fortune as a fitness and health pitchwoman and author by turning her TV celebrity in the successful sitcoms “Three’s Company” and “Step by Step” into a career. She was 76 years old.

“Suzanne Somers died quietly at home on October 15 in the early hours. She endured an aggressive form of breast cancer for almost 23 years, according to a statement released by Somers’ longtime publicist R. Couri Hay on behalf of the actress’ family.

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The statement went on to say, “Suzanne was surrounded by her loving husband Alan, her son Bruce, and her close family. She turned 77 on October 16 and her family came together to celebrate. As a substitute, they will honor her amazing life and express their gratitude to the countless number of people who adored her.

In George Lucas’ ’60s smash comedy-drama “American Graffiti” (1973), the leggy blonde first garnered attention for her brief but eye-catching performance as the nameless beauty in a white Thunderbird who seduces college freshman Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss) as he is about to leave for home.

Small roles on TV and in movies followed, but Somers finally struck it big in 1977 when, following a grueling development phase during which the producers couldn’t decide on a new female lead, she got the role as one of the two female leads in the third successful pilot for an indicative new ABC comedy centered (as were the earlier hits “All in the Family” and “Sanford & Son”) on a successful British show, “Man About the House.”

In “Three’s Company,” Somers played the stereotypical “dumb blonde” Chrissy Snow, Janet Wood’s (Joyce DeWitt’s) roommate in a modest Santa Monica apartment. The most well-known of the three actors, John Ritter, had the lead role as Jack Tripper, a culinary school student who jumped at the opportunity to live cheaply but was compelled to pretend to be gay in order to appease the girls’ landlord, who was against having tenants of the opposite sex.

“Three’s Company” surged to No. 3 in the national ratings during its first full season in 1977–1978 by providing audiences with a regular diet of impossible plotlines, Ritter gaffes, and double-entendre humor.

As stated in a Television Academy Foundation retrospective feature, “‘Three’s Company’ debuted on television during the ‘jiggle era’ of television, which began in 1976 with ABC’s ‘Charlie’s Angels,’ and was the medium’s answer to the sexual revolution and the swinging single. Three’s Company was the first sitcom to discuss the sexual ramifications and problems of co-ed living, which in 1977 was still somewhat controversial, despite the show’s largely apolitical content. Male-female cohabitation was thought by many to be anything but harmless and to inevitably result in premarital sex’s negative consequences.

Even though none of its main characters ever engaged in any sex, the program never stopped talking about it, and the titillation kept it in the Nielsen top five through the start of its 1980 season. However, a highly publicized business dispute that arose at the start of season five ended with Somers’ departure.

Somers sought a 10% portion of the show’s profits in addition to a five-fold increase in her pay to $150,000 for each episode. Chrissy’s brief sequences, framed as phone calls to her housemates, were shot separately. Ritter and DeWitt were furious, director Michael Ross balked, and Somers’ involvement was ultimately reduced to a weekly walk-on bit. After the ’80-’81 season, she was fully eliminated from the show, and Chrissy was replaced by other characters.

Somers never had much success making the switch to theatrical movies, and after “Three’s Company,” she focused on a singing career in Las Vegas. She appeared in two seasons of the nationally broadcast sitcom “She’s the Sheriff.” She made her ABC comeback in 1991 with a brand-new sitcom starring Patrick Duffy, who had previously starred in another hugely successful hit of the 1970s and 1980s called “Dallas.”

“Step By Step” followed a sitcom formula that was first popularized by “The Brady Bunch”: Duffy and Somers portrayed a widowed beauty salon owner and a divorced contractor who got married after a brief courtship and then had to deal with combining their two families, which included four children from each previous marriage, under one roof. The sitcom, described as “modestly amusing, occasionally heartwarming” by Variety’s Jean Rosenbluth, survived on charm for eight seasons before moving on ABC to CBS in 1997–1998 for its final season.

At that point, Somers was a very wealthy woman who had established her personal multi-million dollar business empire on her ubiquitous TV infomercials for the ThighMaster (managed by her husband, former game show host Alan Hamel). When she started working on “Step By Step,” Somers started using the straightforward muscle-toning device that was invented in Sweden, and she later became the product’s extremely visible national spokeswoman.

An instant hit, it was. It was dubbed “the dirty little secret for the ’90s” by Entertainment Weekly in 1992. Look at the legs it has given the career of its spokeswoman, Somers, to prove the influence of this blue foam-covered gadget with a red plastic center. Somers, 45, who has been promoting ThighMaster for a year, has reverted to the kitsch pantheon she held in the 1970s.

After Somers and Hamel bought out their financially precarious partners and took exclusive possession of the ThighMaster and a related fitness device called the ButtMaster, their profits continued to soar. Using figures provided by Somers, host Dax Holt of the podcast “Hollywood Raw” in 2022 calculated that she had gained $300 million from the sale of the original equipment alone.

Her writing of more than two dozen books on wellness, aging, weight loss, and sex let her establish herself as an industry unto herself, selling a variety of health and beauty items on her website and through the Home Shopping Network. (She furthermore released a book of poems.)

Professionals did not always agree with her views on medicine. After surviving stage II breast cancer in 2000, she advocated for alternative medical therapies in her book “Knockout,” receiving criticism from the American Cancer Society. She also came under fire for her support of bioidentical hormone replacement therapy as a treatment for menopause.

As co-host of the venerable “Candid Camera” in 1997, Somers continued to be active in the entertainment industry. She also served as the host of the 2012 Lifetime talk show “The Suzanne Show” and the 2012 online talk show “Breaking Through,” where she was able to patch things up with her estranged “Three’s Company” co-star DeWitt. (Before John Ritter passed away in 2003 from a heart condition, she had reconciled with him at his hospital bedside.) On “Dancing With the Stars” in 2015, she danced.

Somers’ well-known climb was somewhat of an implausible story because of how demanding, difficult, and troubled her early years were. She would describe her turbulent upbringing and family life in an unflinching 1988 autobiography called “Keeping Secrets,” which would serve as the inspiration for a 1991 ABC movie in which she starred as herself (with David Birney playing Hamel) and (using material from a second autobiographical volume, 1998’s “After the Fall”) a brief one-woman Broadway show called “The Blonde in the Thunderbird.”

On October 16, 1946, Suzanne Marie Mahoney was born in San Bruno, California. Her day laborer father was an aggressive alcoholic, and over time her siblings, brothers Daniel and Michael, and sister Maureen, would all develop alcoholism. She struggled academically in the Catholic schools she attended in the San Francisco Bay region as a dyslexic child growing up in a home that was always in upheaval.

After falling pregnant at age 19, she married her lover Bruce Somers; their only child, Bruce Jr., was born in 1965. Three years later, her husband divorced her after learning she had an affair with her acting coach.

Somers started a modeling career and met the show’s Canadian-born presenter Hamel, who was already married while serving as a prize model on the syndicated game show “The Anniversary Game,” which was produced in San Francisco.

She performed a test nude photo shoot for Playboy in 1971 after her son, who had emotional issues, was seriously hurt when he was struck by a car. Playboy eventually paid her after she filed a lawsuit regarding the photos’ unauthorized publication. To heal from their individual traumas, the mother and son started seeing the same therapist.

In the San Francisco-set action film “Bullitt” (1968), Somers made her cinematic debut in a minor role. She obtained TV parts on “The Rockford Files,” “Starsky & Hutch,” “The Love Boat,” and “One Day at a Time” after relocating to Hollywood. She appeared in “Magnum Force,” the second Dirty Harry movie starring Clint Eastwood, and “Billy Jack Goes to Washington,” the fourth and least successful Tom Laughlin movie, both of which were released in 1977.

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