Actor Gary Coleman is dead at 42:
Gary Coleman , the former child actor and star of the 1980s TV sitcom “Diff’rent Strokes,” has died after an intracranial hemorrhage suffered earlier this week left him unconscious and on life support at a Utah hospital. He was 42.
“Child actor Gary Coleman died at approximately 12:05 p.m. Mountain Standard Time at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center,” hospital spokeswoman Janet Frank said in an e-mailed statement. “Family members and close friends were at his side when life support was terminated.”
After reaching TV superstardom playing Arnold Jackson on “Diff’rent Strokes” in the late 1970s and early ’80s, Coleman’s life after the show included years of financial, legal and health troubles, including a congenital kidney condition, leading up to his death.
Coleman suffered the intracranial hemorrhage at his home in Utah Wednesday, possibly from a fall, though the exact circumstances have not been confirmed.
“He was immediately taken to a local hospital for treatment,” Coleman’s publicist, John Alcantar, said in an e-mail to ABC News.
See our earlier post about his troubled life and recent injury HERE.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.