'Cheers' star George Wendt dead at 76: 'He will be missed forever'
George Wendt, who was best known for playing Norm Peterson on NBC's long-running sitcom Cheers, died Tuesday at the age of 76.
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Wendt's publicist Melissa Nathan and family confirmed his death in a statement to The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, telling the outlets he died early Tuesday morning, peacefully in his sleep while at home.
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'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.'
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After getting his start with Chicago's Second City troupe in the 1970s, the father of three caught his big break as Norm on Cheers in 1982.
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The role earned him six Emmy nominations, from 1984-89, and ran for 11 seasons, from 1982 to 1993. It was a character he played in other NBC shows during its run, including Wings and St. Elsewhere. He later reprised the role opposite Kelsey Grammer in his Frasier spinoff.
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Wendt, who was uncle to Ted Lasso star Jason Sudeikis, also had a recurring part on Saturday Night Live as Bob Swerski, a Chicago Bears superfan.
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Following Cheers' end, Wendt landed his own short-lived sitcom, The George Wendt Show, which cast him as a co-owner of a garage shop in Wisconsin. But despite his much-ballyhooed return to TV, the show was a flop, lasting only six episodes.
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He later found a renewed career onstage, appearing in Broadway productions of Art, Hairspray and Elf.
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In 2017, he checked off a bucket-list part when he took on the tragic Willy Loman in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman at the St. Jacobs Country Playhouse in Waterloo, Ont.
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'If I can manage to pull this off it should be quite a capper in a career in the theatre,' Wendt told Postmedia in an interview. 'It's considered one of the classics and I'd say that's spot-on. It's got classic themes — fathers and sons, big picture operatic themes.'
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Initially when he auditioned for Cheers, Wendt said Norm only had one line — 'Beer.'
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'The casting director, the late Stephen Kolzak, I was in his office and he said, 'There's this role, but it's too small. You can't just say beer.' So he handed me the part of Norm,' Wendt recalled in a 2017 interview. 'It wasn't that big, but it was the guy who always wanted another beer and didn't want to leave. So I read for that and they were interested but I wasn't available, oddly. I was doing a different show. So they had me on the pilot as a guest star and then my other show got cancelled, so then they made Norm a regular role.'
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