The child actor Adam Rich has died at the age of 54, TMZ reported on Sunday, January 8, 2023, citing a family member.
He died at his home in the Los Angeles area, the outlet added, although its report does not contain any information relating to Rich’s cause of death.
However, it adds that a law enforcement source said there is not, at least at present, any suspicions of foul play.
Adam Rich never married – he did not have a wife or a husband – and kept his dating life out of the media spotlight.
What do we know about Adam Rich’s family and home life, growing up?
Born on October 12, 1968 to Francine and Rob Rich, Adam’s family was Jewish.
Rob and Francine – or Fran, for short – were teenage sweethearts, according to a The Jewish Mothers’ Hall Of Fame, a book of interviews published in 2011.
They were at high school together in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, and moved to California six months after Adam’s birth.
Adam has a brother five years his junior, called Wayne. Wayne was an actor too, the boys’ mother told Fred Bernstein for the book mentioned above, “from the time he was six.”
“We wanted to give him the same opportunity that we gave Adam,” she said. “But he didn’t enjoy it. So he retired at seven.”
His successes brought his parents even closer than they were before
When Adam Rich was five, according to The Jewish Mothers’ Hall Of Fame, his mother Francine asked him if he wanted to “be on TV.”
“Okay,” he reportedly replied. “But how do I get in the box?”
Around 2010, when Bernstein met Adam’s parents for his book, they were giving in Chatsworth, in the northern San Fernando Valley. Rob told him he had been jealous of his son’s financial successes, at first. “Here I was, a mechanic,” he said. “I’d been working 20 years,” and making $150 a day. “Then Adam comes along,” he continued, “does a commercial that takes half an hour, and he gets $25,000. You can imagine how that felt.”
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But Adam Rich’s parents eventually came to terms with their son’s success, and may have even grown closer because of it. And despite it, they did all they could to give him a “regular” childhood. He got the same allowance as his brother; his parents invested his earnings so that he couldn’t spend them all as soon as he hit 18.
Francine would accompany her son to set every morning – he was only five when he appeared in his first commercial. Again, according to the book mentioned above, a 1978 report in TV Guide noted that Adam’s mother would win popularity contests on set for being “cooperative, agreeable and good company.”
Did Adam Rich ever marry?
No, Adam Rich never married – never had a wife or husband. Nor does he appear to have had any children, or high profile romantic relationships.
His mother told Fred Bernstein that, following his acting success as a young child actor, Adam sometimes found it hard to discern who his real friends were.
“It’s hard for him,” she said. “Once he came home and said, ‘I don’t know who my true friends are.’ It’s confusing.”
But that didn’t stop him from enjoying it “when gorgeous blondes come up to him,” she added. For his bar mitzvah, he had a private tutor. The family managed to keep it private, Francine said, which was “wonderful.”
Rich’s part in A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius
Author Dave Eggers’ memoir, A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius, details the time his magazine published a death hoax story about Adam Rich.
With Rich’s consent, San Francisco-based magazine Might, which Eggers co-founded, kicked off a media hoax that Adam Rich had been murdered. The article’s intention was to satirise America’s obsession with celebrity. But when the fact that it was a spoof came to light, the furore fizzled out.
Rich suffered from a type of depression that defied treatment, according to NPR’s writeup on his death at the age of 54. The outlet quotes his publicist Danny Deraney as saying he had tried to erase the stigma associated with talking about mental illness.
Deraney reportedly told the Associated Press that Rich was “just a very kind, generous, loving soul. … He had no ego, not an ounce of it.”
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