Adam Wealthy, former ‘Eight Is Enough’ youngster star, dies at 54

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Adam Wealthy, the child actor with a pageboy mop-leading who charmed Tv audiences as “America’s very little brother” on “Eight is Adequate,” has died. He was 54.

Abundant died Saturday at his home in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles, stated Lt. Aimee Earl of the Los Angeles County Health-related-Examiner Coroner’s business. The trigger of death was under investigation but was not thought of to be suspicious.

Wealthy had a minimal performing profession immediately after starring at age 8 as Nicholas Bradford, the youngest of 8 kids, on the ABC hit dramedy that ran from from 1977 to 1981.

Betty Buckley, who played his stepmother on the display, stated on Instagram that she was stunned to discover of his demise Sunday and referred to Abundant as a “light,” her “young pal” on set and close friend at any time considering the fact that.

“I adored him and liked doing work with him,” claimed Buckley, who posted images from the present of the two of them with each other on a swing set, on horseback and with her arm close to him while he was sleeping. “He was so sweet, humorous, clean and natural. He brought a large amount of pleasure to all of us on the present and to our audiences.”

Rich’s general public daily life just after stardom was very similar to that other kid actors whose promising professions are later derailed by medications and liquor, and operate-ins with the legislation.

He was arrested for driving beneath the affect in 2002 right after approximately striking a parked California Highway Patrol cruiser in a freeway lane closed for servicing. He was arrested in April 1991 for making an attempt to break into a pharmacy and in October of that calendar year for allegedly thieving a drug-stuffed syringe at a healthcare facility exactly where he was becoming taken care of for a dislocated shoulder.

Prosperous experienced from a style of melancholy that defied cure and he had experimented with to erase the stigma of speaking about psychological sickness, explained publicist Danny Deraney. He unsuccessfully tried using experimental cures more than the a long time.

Deraney said he and other individuals shut to Wealthy ended up concerned in new weeks when they couldn’t get to him.

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“He was just a really kind, generous, loving soul,” Deraney instructed The Involved Push. “Being a popular actor is not essentially what he desired to be. … He experienced no ego, not an ounce of it.”

Rich talked about his mental wellbeing on Twitter and pointed out in October that he’d been sober for seven decades. He said he was not perfect — referring to arrests, many stints in rehab, quite a few overdoses and “countless detoxes (and) relapses” — and urged his approximately 19,000 followers to never ever give up.

“Human beings weren’t developed to endure psychological ailment,” Rich tweeted in September. “The mere point that some men and women take into account individuals to be weak, or have a deficiency of will is thoroughly laughable … due to the fact it’s the whole opposite! It is usually takes a very, very sturdy person … a warrior if you will … to fight these types of diseases.”

Rich posted a photograph of himself from his heyday with 1-time youngster star Mickey Rooney.

“Everyone utilized to say to me, ‘You are the fashionable working day Mickey Rooney,’” he tweeted. “But when Mickey Rooney instructed me that himself, it intended a helluva a good deal extra to me!”

Almost 27 many years ago, Rich participated in a hoax that May well journal created about the actor acquiring killed in a robbery exterior a Los Angeles nightclub in 1996. The post for the tiny-known journal was meant as a satire of America’s superstar obsession but fizzled when the spoof was unveiled.

“I assume we were being a very little far too subtle. Men and women had been not finding the joke,” Wealthy later informed the Chicago Tribune. “I never want to be useless.”

Prosperous was the tiny brother to a generation of Television viewers as the mop-prime son of a newspaper columnist played by Dick Van Patten, who has to elevate 8 kids by itself after his spouse in the display — and the actress who played her — died all through filming of the very first year.

Loaded starred in the series “Code Red” from 1981-82 and voiced the character of Presto the Magician on “Dungeons & Dragons” from 1983-85, in accordance to the IMDB.com. He reprised his very best-known position in two “Eight is Enough” Tv set movie reunions.

But the harmony of his performing career was in solitary-episode appearances on some of the most well-liked Tv set exhibits of the time: “The Enjoy Boat,” “The 6 Million Dollar Person,” “Silver Spoons,” and “Baywatch.” His most new credit score detailed on IMDB was enjoying Crocodile Dundee on “Reel Comedy” in 2003.