US actor George Wendt, beloved barfly Norm on ‘Cheers,' dies aged 76
George Wendt, the American actor whose unassuming charm and impeccable comic timing made him a household name as the beer-loving Norm Peterson on the iconic 1980s sitcom Cheers, has died. He was 76.
His family said he died early Tuesday morning (20 May), peacefully in his sleep while at home, according to the publicity firm The Agency Group.
'George was a doting family man, a well-loved friend and confidant to all of those lucky enough to have known him,' the family said in a statement. 'He will be missed forever.'
Wendt earned six consecutive Emmy nominations for his role on Cheers, which began in 1982 and ran for 11 seasons. Set in a cozy basement bar in Boston, the show followed the lives of the bar's staff and its loyal regulars - a mismatched group of quirky, lovable characters.
The ensemble cast included Wendt, and the likes of Ted Danson, Shelley Long, Rhea Perlman, Kelsey Grammer, Woody Harrelson, and numerous special guest appearances from Boston Red Sox baseball legend Wade Boggs and Friends star Lisa Kudrow. Cheers spun off another megahit in 'Frasier' and was nominated for an astounding 117 Emmy Awards, winning 28 of them.
Wendt's Norm was the lovable, henpecked beer-loving accountant who took up the same barstool every episode. His entrances were greeted by a joyous call of 'Norm!' from those in the bar and he always had a dry quip ready when asked how he was doing.
The actor famously auditioned for Cheers with a single line: 'My agent said, 'It's a small role, honey. It's one line. Actually, it's one word.' The word was 'beer.' I was having a hard time believing I was right for the role of 'the guy who looked like he wanted a beer.' So I went in, and they said, 'It's too small a role. Why don't you read this other one?' And it was a guy who never left the bar,' Wendt told GQ in an oral history of Cheers.
'George Wendt's work showcased how comedy can create indelible characters that feel like family. Over the course of 11 seasons, he brought warmth and humor to one of television's most beloved roles,' National Comedy Center Executive Director Journey Gunderson said in a statement.
After Cheers, Wendt appeared on shows like Portlandia and The Ghost Whisperer, and even competed on The Masked Singer in 2023. On stage, he starred in Broadway productions of Hairspray, the Tony Award-winning Art, and Elf, and toured nationally in 12 Angry Men.
Following his guilty sentence in a Paris court for sexually assaulting two women during the film shoot in 2021 of Les Volets Verts, disgraced French actor Gérard Depardieu is facing a trial in Rome after allegedly punching a paparazzo.
The case is due to begin at a court in Rome on 17 June.
Depardieu, 76, is charged with causing personal injury to the Italian photographer Rino Barillari. He is accused of punching 'the king of paparazzi' as he is known in Italy outside Harry's Bar on Via Veneto in May last year.
Barillari, 80, went to the bar where Depardieu was eating with a friend, Magda Vavrusova. Barillari claims that Depardieu insulted him and Italians in general, threw an ice cube at him, and punched him three times. This caused Barillari to fall to the ground.
'I can forgive his punches, but not the insult against Italians,' Barillari told the Italian news agency Adnkronos on Tuesday.
Depardieu has denied the claims, telling La Repubblica that Barillari had pushed him.
Delphine Meillet, a lawyer for Vavrusova, said her client had been 'violently pushed' by Barillari and that Depardieu 'fell and slid' on to the paparazzo.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
LeMonde
10 hours ago
- LeMonde
How an American mom is now part of my (French mom's) life
The more I think about it, the more I realize one of Instagram's unique features is the way it brings public figures into our private lives. Not just as celebrities gracing glossy magazine covers. Of course, I remember historic paparazzi moments: François Hollande on his scooter date, Jacques Chirac naked on the balcony of the Brégançon presidential summer residence, Kate Middleton sunbathing topless on another balcony, Britney Spears with her shaved head. Those were all glimpses into the private lives of public figures, obviously, but they were rare instances. And the private sphere was blown into the public by the media, in the traditionnal sense of the term, as an intermediary. Instagram people are a bit different. They really are with us. For one thing, they live inside our phones, so they're here all the time. For another, because of the way the Meta platform algorithm works, when you scroll through the app, you get an endless feed of close friends, strangers with whom you have much in common, ads and, of course, public figures. All these people are part of our daily lives, creating a strange mirror effect that erases the media as an intermediary: they reveal their own private and sometimes mundane moments as we sit in our living rooms, in bed or even in the bathroom. These recurring characters can quickly create a kind of artificial familiarity. This is how, the other night, while brushing my teeth, I told my partner, almost as if I were talking about a coworker or a friend, "Hey, Isabelle Bertolami is pregnant!" He asked how old her eldest was and where she would give birth. In short, a typical parent conversation, except for one small detail: neither of us has ever met Isabelle Bertolami. She's an American living in Aix-en-Provence with her husband and daughter, documenting her family life for her 242,000 followers. The American myth of the French mom Bertolami is what we call an Instagram American mom: mothers who praise the French parenting model, without too much concern with avoiding generalizations or ensuring accuracy. It's a way of feeding the American myth of the French mom: the mother who is both gentle and strict, attentive but not indulgent with a tyrannical child, fulfilled in her career, always impeccably dressed and manicured (she writes, typing with chipped nails).
LeMonde
19 hours ago
- LeMonde
The promise of African soft power
"My music is not there for entertainment. It is there to spread a message," said Nigerian activist and afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti (1938-1997) in the 1970s. Half a century later, his distant heirs – descendants of the "Black President" – seem to have moved on from that mantra. In Nigeria, Africa's most populous nation, afrobeats (with an "s") now reigns supreme: a danceable, addictive genre that is unabashedly festive and commercial. Emerging from Lagos, Nigeria's chaotic megacity, this blend of R'n'B, electronic music, hip hop and traditional African rhythms has taken the world by storm. On April 18 in Paris, nearly 80,000 people packed the Stade de France to see Nigerian star Burna Boy, the first African headliner to perform solo in the stadium. The "African Giant" – also the title of his landmark 2019 album – draws massive crowds, as do fellow performers like Wizkid, Ayra Starr and Rema, whose hit " Calm Down," remixed with American pop star Selena Gomez, has over one billion views on YouTube. "The impact in terms of influence is enormous," said Yoel Kenan, founder and CEO of Africori, a music distribution company with offices in Johannesburg, London and Lagos, which supports nearly 7,000 African artists. "Fifteen years ago, Nigeria was seen as a country of crooks, but now people think first of culture and afrobeats."
LeMonde
a day ago
- LeMonde
The death of Edmund White, the American writer who put the 'gay novel' at the heart of his work
Susan Sontag described him as "one of the outstanding writers of prose in America." A trailblazer in gay literature, American novelist, biographer and literary critic Edmund White died at his New York home on Wednesday, June 4. He was 85 years old. Unflinching and without taboo, White made the "gay novel," as he called it, the epicenter of his body of work. "What I aim to do is explore facets of it that have not yet been addressed," he told Le Monde in 2013. At the time, he was in Paris for the French release of Jack Holmes and His Friend, the story of a friendship between a gay man and a straight man – a visit that delighted the renowned Francophile. From 1983 to 1990, he lived in France and often pointed out that he had "met everyone," from Yves Saint Laurent to Catherine Deneuve and Michel Foucault. He chronicled this cherished period in Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris (2014). Born on January 13, 1940, in Cincinnati, Ohio, White was the son of a Texas businessman and a psychologist. In A Boy's Own Story (1982), he recounted his childhood in the Midwest and described his father, "who'd been a Texas cowboy as a young man." As a teenager, he realized he was gay and confided in his mother, who sent him to a psychoanalyst claiming he could "cure" him. Isolation and self-loathing marked those years, as White described in the second volume of his autobiography, The Beautiful Room is Empty (1988). When he learned he had been admitted to Harvard, the young White chose not to attend so he wouldn't have to leave his therapist. Prolific body of work The 1960s marked a liberation for him. In New York, he discovered the antithesis of family values, haunted the underbelly of the Village, reveled in sex and became the great chronicler of the "life among men." He described it with a precision whose boldness fascinated some and repelled others. With a wealth of detail, he depicted the frenzy that consumed him, describing it like an itch: "The more we scratched the more we itched (...) For us, there was nothing more natural than wandering into a park, a parked truck or a plundering body after body," he wrote in The Farewell Symphony (1997). His writing blended rawness, violence, ugliness and beauty. About Lou, a character in The Beautiful Room is Empty, he wrote a line that summed up the essence of his approach: "But through some curious alchemy, he'd redeemed our illness by finding beauty in it. He loved Baudelaire and like Baudelaire he searched out beauty in whatever was foul, artificial, damned..." With more than 20 books to his name, White's body of work unfolded like a polyptych – a shifting tableau of what he called the social and sexual history of three decades of gay life in the United States. He sought to recount this history as a witness, as lived by his generation: "psychoanalyzed and oppressed in the '50s and liberated in the '60s and exalted in the '70s and wiped out [by AIDS] in the '80s." Also in 2013, and in perfect French, he told us how, in 1985, he learned he was HIV-positive and how he reacted. "I thought: I'm obviously going to die. So I challenged fate. I began writing a biography of [French writer] Jean Genet. Everyone thought I was crazy. In fact, I probably am." By chance, he was among those in whom the virus advanced slowly. Not only did White complete his biography (which came out in 1993), but he later turned his attention to Marcel Proust (1998), and above all to Arthur Rimbaud, whom he first discovered, dazzled, at age 14 in his Michigan boarding school (Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, 2008). At Princeton University in New Jersey, where he taught fiction writing, White was a colleague and friend of Joyce Carol Oates. The writer paid tribute to him on the social network X, praising his "boldly pioneering subject matter" and "astonishing stylistic versatility."
