John Ritter

The man who fell better than anyone

In 1977, a man who looked like he'd never broken a plate fell off a couch, and half of America laughed out loud. John Ritter wasn't looking to be the heartthrob who fills the covers of fashion magazines. He preferred the sharp fall to the floor and the absurd tangle that let him use his body like a spring.

John was born into a family that already knew what it meant to live under the brightest spotlight. His father was Tex Ritter, a country music star who taught him early that this business shows no mercy to those without rhythm. But John didn't want to sing ballads on horseback. He wanted people to forget their problems by watching his necktie get caught in a paper shredder.

Landing the role of Jack Tripper in Three's Company was no gift from above. He had to compete with some fifty other actors vying for that spot on 1970s television. The series lasted eight seasons on the air because Ritter could hold a visual gag for three minutes without saying a single word.

And the gamble paid off.

He earned an Emmy and a Golden Globe for playing a chef who pretended to be gay so he could share an apartment with two women. It was a risky premise for the time. But his physical style was so clean that censors couldn't find anything to attack in his movements on set.

The Weight of an Eternal Character

Leaving such a massive hit is often a deadly trap for any comedy actor. In 1984, the series ended, and Ritter found that casting directors only saw him as the clumsy roommate from the shared apartment. He tried his luck with drama in the film Sling Blade in 1996. There he proved that beneath the grimaces was a dry, restrained register that no one had bothered to exploit before.

Not everything was about making people laugh.

But the general public wanted something else. So he agreed to star in Problem Child in 1990. Critics tore the movie apart with almost personal venom. But the box office said otherwise, as it grossed more than $72 million in U.S. theaters alone.

Ritter then understood that his place was in the living rooms of middle-class America. He spent much of the 1990s jumping from one series to another and lending his voice to animated characters. In 2000, he began voicing Clifford the Big Red Dog, a job that allowed him to connect with a generation that wasn't even born when he was already a millionaire.

The collapse on the film set

In 2002 he returned to television with 8 Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter. The sitcom format was the same as always, but his energy seemed renewed. On September 11, 2003, while rehearsing a scene for the second season, he began to feel a sharp pain in his chest. His colleagues thought it was a common heart attack brought on by the strain of filming.

Doctors missed the initial diagnosis. It wasn't a heart attack but an aortic dissection, which killed him that same night at the hospital in Burbank. He was 54 years old and left a production unfinished, which had to improvise a fictional funeral for his character in episode four of that season.

The impact was so real that production was halted for weeks.

The autopsy confirmed a congenital defect that no one had detected in his previous checkups. The series continued without him for two more seasons, but ratings fell by half in less than a year. The production contract was officially closed in May 2005.