Ron Palillo, Arnold Horshack on 'Welcome Back, Kotter,' dies at age 63 in Palm Beach Gardens home
Ron Palillo, best known as mouthy classroom goofball Arnold Horshack on the 1970s TV series Welcome Back, Kotter, died at his Palm Beach Gardens home early this morning, according to Stacy Sacco, Palillo’s friend.
Sacco said Palillo passed away suddenly at 4:30 a.m.
He was 63...
...Palillo had been teaching acting classes at G-Star School of the Arts, a charter school in Palm Springs, for about three years.
Sacco said that no cause of death has been determined, but that Palillo had not been ill or in the hospital. Palillo was a Connecticut native who lived in New York for about 40 years before teaching at G-Star.
Born April 2, 1949 in Cheshire, Conn., Palillo is survived by his partner of 41 years, Joseph Gramm, a retired actor.
Palillo attended the University of Connecticut and had lectured in colleges and high schools all over the country before coming to Palm Beach County.
“From the moment I heard about G-Star … it sounded like everything I wanted as a student when I went to high school,” Palillo told The Palm Beach Post in 2009.
“To have this when I was a kid would’ve been astonishing and I knew I wanted to be part of it.”
“He was the greatest guy. He could have come in with an ego and he didn’t,” Greg Hauptner, founder and CEO of G-Star Academy, said today. “He was appreciative of working with the kids, and the kids love him.”
Palillo taught acting for film and camera...
...Palillo played Horshack on the popular sitcom Welcome Back Kotter. The show also starred Gabe Kaplan and a young John Travolta. It originally aired on ABC and ran from 1975-79.
The show focused on Kaplan’s character Gabe Kotter, who returned to his high school in Brooklyn — the fictional James Buchanan High — to teach a remedial class to which he once belonged, according to tv.com.
The main group of students were known as the Sweathogs, an unruly group who always got in trouble. Palillo played the sheepish Arnold Dingfelder Horshack, who would often yell “Ooh! Ooh, ooh!” when he thought he knew the answer to a question.
The cast also included Travolta, who played lady’s man Vinnie Barbarino, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, who played the always cool Freddie “Boom-Boom” Washington and Robert Hegyes, who played the tough Jewish Puerto Rican wheeler-dealer Juan (Luis Pedro Phillipo de Huevos) Epstein, according to tv.com...
Another great one passes. RIP Arnold!
No comments:
Post a Comment