Jamie Lee Curtis Pays Tribute to ‘My Friend’ Richard Lewis: ‘Deep and So Freaking Funny’
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Jamie Lee Curtis remembered Richard Lewis, her co-star on the late-Eighties sitcom Anything But Love, and credited the stand-up legend as “the reason I am sober” in a tribute following the Curb Your Enthusiasm actor’s death.
“I’ve just read that my friend Richard Lewis has died,” Curtis wrote on social media. “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.”
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Curtis continued, “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. He blew everyone else away.”
Anything But Love first aired on ABC in March 1989 with an abbreviated first season, after which most of the sitcom — except for Curtis and Lewis, who developed an on-screen chemistry — was overhauled. “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 added; Anything But Love ran for four seasons, ceasing production in 1992.
Outside of Curb, Anything But Love, and films like Robin Hood: Men in Tights and Leaving Las Vegas, Lewis was a beloved comedian. “He was also a stand-up comic and hated the live audience, where I, who had never done a play, loved it,” Curtis wrote, noting how Lewis “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.” Curtis added that Lewis’ last text to her was lobbying for her to convince Disney/ABC to put a second volume of Anything But Love episodes on DVD.
Curtis also credited Lewis, who was open about his own struggles with addiction, as “the reason I am sober.” “He helped me. I am forever grateful for him for that act of grace alone,” Curtis said. “I’m weeping as I write this. Strange way of saying thank you to a sweet and funny man. Rest in laughter, Richard.”
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