Actress Suzanne Somers, star of Three’s Company, dies at 76

PALM SPRINGS, California – Suzanne Somers, who gained fame by playing a ditzy blonde on the sitcom Three’s Company and then by getting fired when she demanded equal pay with the series’ male star, died on Sunday at her home in Palm Springs, California.

She was one day from turning 77.

Somers had breast cancer for more than 20 years and died on Sunday morning, her family said in a statement provided by her long-time publicist R. Couri Hay.

Her husband Alan Hamel, her son Bruce and other immediate family were with her.

Three’s Company (1977 to 1984) told the story of two roommates – secretary Chrissy Snow, played by Somers; and florist Janet Wood, played by Joyce DeWitt – who rent the third room in their apartment to Jack Tripper, a culinary student played by John Ritter.

By the show’s fifth season, it was one of the nation’s most popular sitcoms.

During Somers’ contract negotiations with American broadcast station ABC in 1980, it was widely reported that she asked for a raise from US$30,000 to US$150,000 – equal pay with the series’ male star, Ritter.

Instead of getting the raise, she was fired.

“I’ve been playing what I think is one of the best dumb blondes that’s ever been done, but I never got any credit,” she told The New York Times that year. “I did it so well that everyone thought I really was a dumb blonde.”

In the years to come, she remained recognisable for frequent appearances in movies and on television, including the 1990s sitcom Step By Step and talk shows.

But her later reputation sprang just as much from her business acumen – which proved to be more formidable than ABC’s executives appreciated in 1980.

She and her husband made ThighMaster, a workout device, one of the most recognisable products in infomercial history, thanks in part to her many leggy appearances alongside the product.

She said that she and her husband had earned hundreds of millions of dollars from its sale.

Somers also wrote more than 25 books, several of them bestsellers, which tended to focus on issues related to the body and ageing.

Some of the methods she promoted – including bioidentical hormone replacement therapy, a treatment that she called “the juice of youth” for menopausal women – were criticised by doctors as unproven and possibly unsafe.

The foundation of her business efforts was the sex positivity that she had embodied since Three’s Company.

“A sexual person,” she told the Times in 2020, “is a healthy person”. NYTIMES