Different Strokes Star Gary Coleman has had a difficult and tragic life and in a new documentary he reveals that for years he wanted to “quit” acting before he became famous and live a “normal life” with friends.
Coleman, who died in 2010 aged just 42 from an intracranial haemorrhage following a fall, had struggled for years to sustain an acting career since the show that made him famous was cancelled in 1986.
Peacock Documentary Gary In a 1993 interview, Coleman, then 25, said he wished he had never become an actor.
“If someone had told me my life would be like this and that I could get out quickly, I would have gotten out. I would have had a normal life and I would have had friends,” he said. saidaccording to Entertainment Weekly.
He added that not becoming an actor in the first place was “a dream come true, because it's 1993, I'm 25 and I'm a world-famous celebrity. There's nowhere where no one knows me. I'm a public figure so I should be polite and enjoy my job. I love my job. I really love making people laugh. But of course there are aspects of the job that I don't like so much.”
In 1978, at just 10 years old, Coleman shot to worldwide fame with his precocious character “Arnold Jackson,” earning $100,000 an episode and becoming the highest-paid child actor at the time. And wherever the young actor went, people wanted to hear his ubiquitous line, “Willis, what's up?”
But the fame, the money and the catchphrase became a bane of Colman's life: he was followed wherever he went, had his money stolen by unscrupulous family members and criminal managers, and he was never able to surpass the catchphrase for the rest of his acting career.
As the actor's ex-girlfriend said in the documentary, “People didn't want Gary, they wanted Arnold Jackson.”
Coleman hated the catchphrase, but nearly every acting job he got after that Different Strokes He was forced to say the line at some point during the live broadcast because it had gone off the air.
The actor started life with disadvantages: kidney disease slowed his growth – he never grew taller than 4ft 8in – and he battled illness throughout his life, as well as depression and substance abuse.
In 1989, he sued his parents and manager, accusing them of stealing approximately $18 million from his estate, and although he won the case, he was forced to file for bankruptcy in 1999.
Coleman tried to leave acting and became a security guard in 1997, but that dream ended in 1998 when he assaulted a fan who had followed him asking for his autograph after he had refused. For the incident, he received a 90-day suspended sentence and a $400 fine.
“He always called himself God's punching bag,” Coleman's friend Dion Miall said of the actor. “He felt like he was one of life's jokes, and he was never destined to be one of the lucky ones.”
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