Jamie Lee Curtis credits Richard Lewis with her sobriety: ‘Rest in laughter’
By Marianne Garvey, CNN
(CNN) — Jamie Lee Curtis sent love to her late friend and former costar, comedian and actor Richard Lewis, who died at his home in Los Angeles on Tuesday.
The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star had been living with Parkinson’s disease.
Curtis took to Instagram with a series of pictures of herself with Lewis, writing about their time working together on the sitcom “Anything But Love,” which ran for four seasons from 1989 – 1992.
“I’ve just read that my friend Richard Lewis has died. I remember exactly where I was when I saw a billboard of him about a stand-up special on Sunset Boulevard when we were casting the ABC pilot Anything But Love and asked the casting people to bring him in to audition to play my best friend/maybe boyfriend, Marty Gold,” she wrote. “I thought he was handsome. He made me laugh, which is the one thing that a strong, capable woman, can’t really do for herself. He got the part when I snort laughed when he mispronounced the word Bundt cake.”
She continued: “He blew everyone else away. It was a love triangle show and they didn’t pick up that pilot but they came back to me and said that the chemistry with Richard was so great and could we revamp the original pilot which is the show we ended up making for a couple years.”
Curtis explained that Lewis hated working with a live audience even though he was a brilliant stand-up comic.
“He was also a stand-up comic and hated the live audience, where I, who had never done a play, loved it,” she wrote. “He used to hide his lines everywhere on the set, on props, door frames, on my face in a close up and was always carrying a clipboard with his lines on them. It turns out he was a wonderful actor. Deep and so freaking funny.”
She said the two supported each other through the death of friend and costar, Richard Frank, and also grieved the loss of the John Ritter, who appeared on the series in five episodes and was an executive producer.
“Richard’s last text to me was hoping that I could convince ABC/Disney to put out another boxed set of episodes of the show,” she said.
She concluded with an important note about Lewis.
“He also is the reason I am sober. He helped me,” she wrote. “I am forever grateful for him for that act of grace alone. He found love with Joyce and that, of course, besides his sobriety, is what mattered most to him. I’m weeping as I write this. Strange way of saying thank you to a sweet and funny man. Rest in laughter, Richard. My Marty, I love you, Hannah!”
The tributes keep pouring in for Lewis, known recently for playing himself on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” opposite Larry David, who called Lewis “a brother to me.”
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