Suzanne Somers, Star Of Three's Company And Step By Step, Has Died At 76
Only a couple of sitcoms can claim to be a true juggernaut of American television. You have "Seinfeld," "Friends," and the granddaddy of them all, "I Love Lucy." Amongst that group is without a doubt "Three's Company," a show that dominated in the late 1970s and early '80s, and sadly, one of the show's core trio has passed away. As reported by Page Six, Suzanne Somers, best known for playing the ditzy blonde Chrissy on "Three's Company," has died at the age of 76, just one day before her birthday. Somers had been battling with breast cancer since the early 2000s, often promoting alternative and controversial treatments for the condition.
Somers, who also was one of the stars of the long-running show "Step by Step," had a wild up-and-down career in the business after her exit from "Three's Company," but she always managed to find ways to stay in the game — be it on the short-lived sitcom "She's the Sheriff," co-hosting a late-90s revival of "Candid Camera," or being a spokesperson for the Thighmaster. But whether you were around back in the 1970s or grew up on a healthy diet of TV Land and Nick at Nite, Somers will always be Chrissy Snow, a role she probably never got the proper amount of respect for playing; the "dumb blonde" character rarely gets the respect they're due.
An early advocate for equal pay
"Three's Company" lasted eight seasons, but Suzanne Somers' time on the show ended after the fifth season due to a contract dispute. Given the fact that the show was a ratings behemoth, Somers pushed for a massive pay raise in her salary, and the network was not all that interested in giving her such a raise. Somers had been making $30,000 an episode and wanted that number bumped up to $150,000, as well as having a 10% stake in the show. That may seem like a drastic increase, but when you realize that her co-star John Ritter was already making that kind of money per episode, all she was doing was asking for equal pay.
The network refused to close the pay gap, and Somers was fired from the show. Her husband Alan Hamel, who handled the negotiation, told People of the penny-pinching:
"'Laverne & Shirley' had just negotiated a monster deal, and afterwards, they decided they needed to make an example of female actresses so that no other woman would ask to be paid what men were making."
Nearly 50 years after this, equal pay for women in the industry is still a major issue, and the fact that it wasn't blatantly obvious that the three stars of a show called "Three's Company" should all be paid equally is absurd. A show like "Friends" would run into this a little while later when the network tried to get away with only giving raises to David Schwimmer and Jennifer Aniston and not the other four core cast members. Suzanne Somers may have held a number of rather controversial views in her life, but her desire to be paid fairly for her work was not one of them. You can only admire that.