John Lawlor, Phyllis and The Facts of Life Star, Dead at 83
John Lawlor, known for his roles in the sitcoms Phyllis and The Facts of Life, has died at the age of 83.
Lawlor died on Feb. 13 at a veterans' hospice facility in Albuquerque, N.M., with his daughter Riel by his side, per an obituary posted by his family. A cause of death was not disclosed.
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Born in Troy, N.Y., Lawlor began his acting career in 1975 with The Rockford Files. While appearing in multiple guest roles throughout TV and movies, his most well-known role was as Leonard Marsh/Officer Hale in the 1976 sitcom Phyllis. He joined the sitcom during its second season and appeared in 25 episodes.
A few years later, in 1979, Lawlor played the role of Steven Bradley, the headmaster of an all-girls private school in the NBC's Diff'rent Strokes spinoff The Facts of Life. He played the role for 13 episodes during the sitcom's first season; the cast was then downsized/the series re-focused on the late Charlotte Rae's Edna Garrett. Roger Perry later was cast as new headmaster Charles Parker.
Lawlor's other TV credits include Highway to Heaven, The Bold and the Beautiful, Knots Landing, Scoundrels, Breaking Bad, Killer Women and Graves. More recently, he had a short run on Netflix's Godless, in 2017.
Lawlor is survived by five children, three grandchildren, a nephew, and two nieces.
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Perspective: Surprise! Married parents aren't miserable — they're America's happiest adults
'Steve! (martin) A Documentary in 2 Pieces' covers the eclectic career of one of the world's most successful comedians, Steve Martin. Comedy, acting, playwriting, art collecting, banjo playing — Martin's oeuvre encompassed an impressive array of interests and his friends, which included prominent actors, writers, artists and musicians. But Martin still found happiness elusive even at the heights of fame. Discovering a single empty table at one of his normally sold-out venues provoked enough insecurity to switch from comedy to movies, but the angst and loneliness persisted — until he married at 61 and had a child at 67. 'My whole life is backwards,' Martin observed in 2024. 'How did I go from riddled with anxiety in my 30s, to 75 and really happy? How did this happen?' The happiest group of Americans, according to leading marriage expert and researcher Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia, are people married with children — pushing back in his data-based book 'Get Married' on stereotypes of childless people as less stressed and more satisfied than parents. Wilcox's academic data challenges a popular narrative that emerged yet again when prominent pop singer Chappell Roan claimed 'all parents are miserable.' 'All of my friends who have kids are in hell,' Roan explained on the 'Call Her Daddy' podcast, setting off an explosion of commentary everywhere, from BuzzFeed to MSNBC to the Irish Independent, with many pushing back, but others agreeing that raising little kids in particular can be extremely difficult. 'Children are often a strain on marriage, and they seem to lead to a dip in marital quality,' Wilcox concedes, but 'the overall picture of marriage and parenthood is rosier than the popular press would suggest.' This familial contentment, however, depends on a selfless mindset, a 'we before me' approach crucial to making marriage meaningful and parenthood deeply fulfilling. 'When people get married, what do they do with their finances?' asked a recent caller to Dave Ramsey's financial advice podcast. She seemed taken aback by Ramsey's response that husbands and wives combine everything, asking, 'What if one person makes more than the other?' 'You're not a partnership, you're a marriage,' Ramsey pushed back. 'My wife doesn't have an income. I do not have an income. WE have an income.' Interestingly, couples with separate financial accounts are 20% more likely to divorce, according to a study conducted by the University of Colorado–Boulder. The same study also found that couples who shared their money were happier in their relationships than those who separated their accounts (including those who had both joint and separate accounts). An Indiana University study that randomly assigned newly married couples to joint accounts, separate accounts or any arrangement of the couple's choice found that, after two years, the joint-account couples 'exhibited significantly greater relationship quality' than the other couples. Wilcox brings up both studies to illustrate the effects a family-first approach has on marriage and family life — implications that are not minor. While marital advice today often emphasizes personal me-time, personal identity forging and the pursuit of personal ambitions, couples who end up sharing more in common are more likely to report happier marriages. And it's not just money. According to a YouGov survey, couples sharing the same last name not only held a stronger sense of family identity, but were more likely to be happily married and less likely to have plans to divorce than those who didn't. Sharing names, turning down job opportunities that detract from marital obligations and making personal sacrifices for each other reflects selfless attitudes that make a big difference in marriage, according to the State of Our Unions Survey of 2022. After controlling for education, income and race, the survey found 'we-before-me' couples much more likely to report being 'very happy' in marriage and also more likely to say divorce is 'not at all likely' in the future than couples with a 'my own needs first' attitude. Marriages in which only one spouse takes on most of the selflessness, however, 'can run aground' according to Wilcox. The sacrifices need to be mutual. Writer Julian Adorney shares that 'my marriage to my wife works because both of us practice a sort of self-emptying love.' 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Relationships, she writes, 'have become the primary mythology of the sacred in the collective tongue' of Western culture; however, mere mortals have difficulty providing the needs that religion and God formerly satisfied. Wilcox's 'Get Married' book delves into the ways religious affiliation meets the higher needs of couples while prioritizing values like selflessness, fidelity and the worth of child-raising, according to an impressive array of research and data. To summarize, church attenders are significantly happier in marriages, less likely to divorce and are more satisfied with their lives in general. Moreover, religious couples exhibit greater sexual fidelity and commitment, and higher levels of relationship quality, including greater sexual frequency and satisfaction. Not all religious couples are happy, Wilcox acknowledges, but those who regularly attend church, mosque or synagogue tap into social networks that encourage self-denial and healthy marital interaction while discouraging behaviors that derail relationships. Add to that a meaningful sense of the cosmos and rituals that help couples deal with suffering (shared prayer is a predictor of higher quality marriages), and even a good–enough marriage with family-first priorities may not need to spend 24/7 on self-actualization to reach higher levels of happiness. In the divorce drama 'Kramer vs. Kramer,' the highest-grossing film of 1979, Dustin Hoffman's character Ted, whose wife has left him, gradually trades his workaholism for a deep father-son bond forged through countless meals, chores, conversations, and a harrowing trip to the emergency room. Ted's trajectory also includes a growing selflessness born of sacrificing for another's growth. When Ted faces an uphill battle for child custody, he sits down with a legal pad one night to weigh the pros and cons of keeping Billy. As the con list lengthens with exhausting annoyances, the pro list remains vacant until Ted slips into Billy's room and holds his sleeping child. After that, Ted calls the lawyer and says he's willing to fight for custody. The intangible benefits of having kids are difficult to calculate in the short-term, day-to-day frenzy of meal-making, mess-cleaning, tantrum-throwing and adult-child boomeranging that is child-rearing. Maybe that's why society's advantages vs. disadvantages list of having kids circa 2025 looks similar to Ted's — minus the tender child-hugging that wipes out the cons in the end. Wilcox explains that, amid the divorce surges of the 1970s, fertility levels fell below the replacement rate for the first time in United States history, only to rise to replacement level until around 2009. After that came a decade of ambivalence about child-bearing that saw cultural forces of individualism, hedonism and workism take precedence over kids, who limit, says Wilcox, 'options, choices, and freedom — and force us to grow up.' The 'Childfree Life' depicted in the iconic 2013 Time cover story replete with a vacationing couple on the beach became more appealing, as did more time spent at the office building careers. Currently, childlessness has now risen to the point that 1 in 4 young women today will have no posterity. Contributing to the perception that children aren't worth it may have been a 2016 study reporting that parents are 13% less happy than their childless peers. However, 'there is only one problem with this handwringing about parenthood,' Wilcox points out. 'It no longer fits the data ... today, that is most definitely not true.' Current research backs up this reversal. 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'With the seven-year guy long gone, I struggled to find another,' she writes, and then 'was hit full force in the face,' as her 30s became 40s, that 'there was a club.' Motherhood. And she would never be in it, feeling ostracized as everyone's lives began and continued to revolve around their children. No one should be stereotyped as selfish or feel ostracized for not having children, but a societal narrative that 'all parents are miserable' is not only untrue, but dissuades young adults from participating in what many find the most rewarding part of life. George Bailey. What a life. First the longed for dream of travel and Europe postponed, actually demolished, to salvage the family business and keep Bedford Falls from falling prey to Mr. Potter's evil machinations. Then marriage to Mary followed by multiple children — further imploding dreams of architecture, explorations and making it big. 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