Dana Plato

The Contract That Devoured the Child Prodigy

Dana Plato sealed her professional death sentence the day she got pregnant. It was 1984, and Arnold was the most-watched show on American television. The producers never forgave the good girl of the house for becoming a single mother.

They dropped her from the show without a second thought. By age fourteen she was earning thousands of dollars a week, but her adoptive mother controlled every last penny. When the series ended, she was left with nothing.

No one told her that spotlights burn if you get too close.

She tried to relaunch her film career with low-quality projects. She appeared in B-movies and, in 1992, filmed Different Strokes: The Story of Jack and Jill… and Jill in an attempt to cash in on the buzz from her former hit. It was a total disaster.

The Video Store and the Freefall

In 1991, real life outdid fiction in the rawest way possible. The actress walked into a video store in Las Vegas with a air pistol and demanded the money from the register. She stole less than 200 dollars, and police arrested her just minutes after she left the store.

The business owner said he thought it was a hidden camera prank. But there were no cameras and no script. There was only a desperate woman who no longer remembered what it was like to live without the safety net of the big Hollywood studios.

Trying to live a normal life was never an option for her.

That arrest was the first of several incidents involving forged prescriptions. Dana Plato sought in drugs the silence the outside world refused to give her. Her press appearances were limited to trials and police mugshots.

Her Last Interview in Oklahoma

On May 7, 1999, she appeared on Howard Stern's radio show to try to convince the public she was clean. The listeners were merciless. They called her a junkie and a failure live on air, while she begged for a chance to act again.

The next day her body was found lifeless inside a camper parked in Moore, Oklahoma. She had ingested a lethal mix of painkillers and muscle relaxants. The medical examiner's office ruled it a suicide at age 34.

Her son Tyler Lambert never got over the loss and took his own life in 2010 with a gunshot to the head. He was 25 years old and died exactly eleven years after his mother.

The Oklahoma police report closed the family's case for good, with no investigations still pending.