Gary Coleman

The business of eternal childhood

Gary Coleman stood just over four feet tall when he became a millionaire. His face appeared on lunch boxes all across the United States, while his body refused to grow due to a congenital kidney disease. That medical condition was precisely what allowed him to keep the eternal-child look that television needed to exploit.

The premiere of Diff’rent Strokes in 1978 changed the rules of the game for child actors. The series reached Spain under the title Arnold, and its success was immediate. Coleman played an orphan from Harlem adopted by a wealthy white man on Park Avenue. But the actor's charisma didn't come from a brilliant script. His strength lay in a cynical maturity that clashed head-on with his small stature.

Audiences adored that dissonance.

During the eight seasons the sitcom ran, Coleman went from earning fifteen hundred dollars to over one hundred thousand dollars per episode. It was an astronomical sum for the time. But the money never stayed in his hands, because his parents and advisors managed a fund that ended up evaporating through expense accounts and bad investments.

In 1986, the series was canceled, and the actor found himself with the body of an eight-year-old and the age of an eighteen-year-old. Job offers disappeared almost overnight. Producers didn't know what to do with an adult who still looked like an elementary school student. He tried his luck in film with On the Right Track in 1981, but audiences only wanted to watch him ask what the heck Willis was talking about.

Lawsuits, auctions and a security guard uniform

The 1990s were a very public descent into financial ruin. Coleman sued his parents and his manager over the loss of his fortune of nearly seven million dollars. He won the case in 1993, but after paying his lawyers he recovered only a tiny fraction of what had been taken.

Reality hit him with astonishing cruelty.

To survive, he had to take jobs that would have sunk any other Hollywood star. In 1998, he worked as a security guard at a shopping center in Los Angeles. There he got into an altercation with a woman who asked him for an autograph and ended up in court again. His temper became volatile and his health deteriorated sharply.

She sold her personal belongings on eBay to pay mounting medical bills from her failed kidney transplants. In 2003, he ran for governor of California in the election that also included Arnold Schwarzenegger. Coleman finished eighth out of more than one hundred candidates.

The final silence in Utah

His final on-screen appearances were self-parodying cameos in low-budget films or reality TV shows. In 2006, he took part in the comedy Church Ball and soon after moved to Santaquin, Utah, seeking a life away from the industry. But legal troubles over domestic violence and debt followed him there.

And his luck didn't improve.

On May 28, 2010, he died at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center after an accidental fall at his home that caused an intracranial hemorrhage. He was forty-two years old. His will sparked a legal battle between his ex-wife and a former business partner that dragged on for several years.

At the end of his life, his net worth was estimated at just seventy-five thousand dollars.