LOS ANGELES (AP) — Adam Rich, the child actor who captivated television audiences in the late 1970s as “America’s little brother” on “Eight is Enough,” has died. He was 54 years old.
Rich died Saturday in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, said Lt. Aimee Earl of the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office. The cause of death was investigated but was not considered suspicious.
Rich had a limited acting career after playing Nicholas Bradford, the youngest of eight children, on the hit ABC drama that ran from 1977 to 1981.
He had several drug and alcohol-related run-ins with the police and sought treatment at the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage.
Rich suffered from a type of depression that required treatment and tried to erase the stigma of talking about mental illness, publicist Danny Deraney said. He tried experimental treatments unsuccessfully over the years and remained sober.
Deraney said he and others close to Rich had been worried in recent weeks when they couldn’t reach him.
“He was just a very kind, generous, loving soul,” Deraney told The Associated Press. “Being a famous actor is not necessarily who he wanted to be… He had no ego, not an ounce of it.”
Rich frequently discussed his condition on Twitter and noted in October that he had been sober for seven years. He said he’s not perfect — citing arrests, multiple stints in rehab, multiple overdoses and “countless detoxes (and) relapses” — and urged his nearly 19,000 followers to never give up.
“People are not made to tolerate mental illness,” Rich tweeted in September. “The fact that some people think they are weak or lack willpower is absolutely ridiculous… because it is the exact opposite! It takes a very, very strong person…a warrior if you will…to fight diseases like this.”
Rich also tweeted a photo of himself from his heyday with child star Mickey Rooney.
“Everybody said, ‘You’re the modern day Mickey Rooney,'” she tweeted. “But when Mickey Rooney told me himself, it meant a lot more to me!”
Rich came to be known as the younger brother to a generation of viewers as the youngest son of a syndicated newspaper columnist played by Dick Van Patten, who must raise eight children on his own after the death of his wife in the show’s first season.
Rich starred in the series “Code Red” from 1981 to 1982 and voiced the character Presto the Magician in “Dungeons and Dragons” from 1983 to 1985. He also reprized his most famous role in two reunions from the TV movie “Eight is Enough”. .
But the balance of his acting career was in single-episode appearances on some of the most popular TV shows of the time: “The Love Boat,” “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “Silver Spoons” and “Baywatch.”
