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The star, who played Chandler in the massive TV hit, was found dead on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He had apparently drowned in a hot tub, according to the showbusiness website TMZ.
The police were called at 4pm local time and attended the star’s Pacific Palisades home where the incident was treated as a water rescue, a police source said.
The Los Angeles Police Department confirmed that officers had attended an address on the block where Perry is listed as living “for a death investigation of a male in his fifties”.
There was no apparent foul play and no confirmed cause of death. An investigation is ongoing.
Maggie Wheeler, who played Chandler’s on-again-off-again girlfriend Janice Litman-Goralnik, was among the former castmates and fans paying tributes.
Posting on social media, she wrote: “What a loss.The world will miss you Mathew Perry. The joy you brought to so many in your too short lifetime will live on. I feel so very blessed by every creative moment we shared.”
Morgan Fairchild, who played Chandler’s mother Nora Bing, said: “I’m heartbroken about the untimely death of my ‘son’ … The loss of such a brilliant young actor is a shock.”
Paget Brewster, who played Chandler’s girlfriend Kathy in season four of Friends, wrote: “He was lovely to me on Friends and every time I saw him in the decades after. Please read his book. It was his legacy to help. He won’t rest in peace though. He’s already too busy making everyone laugh up there.”
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, who knew Perry as a boy when Perry’s mother worked as an aide to his father, Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, described his death was “shocking and saddening.”
Although Trudeau and Perry were known to have had at least one fistfight during their schooldays, the Canadian prime minister said: “I’ll never forget the schoolyard games we used to play, and I know people around the world are never going to forget the joy he brought them. Thanks for all the laughs, Matthew. You were loved – and you will be missed,” he said.
In a statement, NBC Entertainment, which aired Friends, said: “We are incredibly saddened by the too soon passing of Matthew Perry. He brought so much joy to hundreds of millions of people around the world with his pitch-perfect comedic timing and wry wit. His legacy will live on through countless generations.”
Perry’s 10 seasons on Friends made him one of Hollywood’s most recognizable actors, starring opposite Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Matt LeBlanc, Lisa Kudrow and David Schwimmer as a close-knit group of twentysomethings living in New York.
Friends, which ran from 1994 until 2004, became one of the most successful TV shows of all time.
The atmosphere on set was electric and the decade of filming was his happiest, Perry recalled.
His character, Chandler Bing, who was known for his sarcastic wit, cynicism and poor luck with women was remarkably close to his own character.
When he first read the script for Friends in 1994, he said it was as if somebody had followed him around for a year, stolen his jokes and aped his “world-weary yet witty view of life”.
“It wasn’t that I thought I could play Chandler, I was Chandler,” he said of the character known for such one-liners as: “Hi, I’m Chandler, I make jokes when I’m uncomfortable” and “I’m not great at advice, can I interest you in a sarcastic comment?”
The likeness was so striking that Perry’s actor friends, who were auditioning for the role at the time, had also spotted the similarities and flocked to his apartment to seek his advice.
Perry gave them some techniques which most of his friends copied but when it came to his own audition he “broke all the rules”, ditching the script and landing jokes on odd emphases, a trick which would come to define his role and influence a generation of comedy actors.
Perry went on to have the funniest lines in the show, which he would pitch to the producers each morning.
He told Good Morning America in 2017 that his favorite line from the 200-plus episodes of Friends was in response to a typically stupid ramble from Joey.
Chandler quips: “Okay. You have to stop the Q-tip when there’s resistance.”
He was even given the last word in the final episode as the cast head out of the apartment and Rachel suggests grabbing a coffee. “Sure. Where?” jokes Chandler.
The series was one of television’s biggest hits and has taken on a new life – and found surprising popularity with younger fans – in recent years on streaming services.
But Perry also struggled with a decades-long, high profile battle with addiction to alcohol and prescription pills.
He was open about his problems, writing at the beginning of his 2022 million-selling memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing, he said: “Hi, my name is Matthew, although you may know me by another name. My friends call me Matty. And I should be dead.”
The ‘Big Terrible Thing’ referenced in the title is his addiction. Perry had been drinking since the age of 14, starting with Budweiser and Baby Duck wine, but his addiction worsened under the “white-hot flame of fame”.
He was heavily drinking during the first two seasons of Friends, although never on set he insisted.
He was also plagued by a relentless desire to please his audiences and to make people laugh. “I felt like I was gonna die if the live audience didn’t laugh, and that’s not healthy for sure. But I could sometimes say a line and the audience wouldn’t laugh and I would sweat and sometimes go into convulsions,” Perry wrote.
“If I didn’t get the laugh I was supposed to get I would freak out. I felt that every single night. This pressure left me in a bad place. I also knew of the six people making that show, only one of them was sick.”
Three seasons in he had a jet ski incident while filming for Fools Rush In with Salma Hayek in 1996, his first big screen lead after Friends, and became addicted to Vicodin, an opiate pain medication.
By the end of the year, he was ingesting 55 pills a day and faking migraines and back injuries to secure prescriptions from doctors.
On Sundays, he would sometimes attend open-house events to search for drugs in the bathrooms. By the age of 49 he had gone to rehab 15 times, attended 6,000 AA meetings and had taken so many opioids that in 2019 his colon exploded from chronic constipation.
But he never lost his humour. Reflecting on his exploded colon, he said: “I’ve been accused of being full of s–t, but this time I really was.”
He spent two weeks in a coma, five months in hospital and almost a year with a colostomy bag. His Friends co-stars supported him through his darkest moments.
“In nature, when a penguin is injured, the other penguins group around it and prop it up until it’s better,” said Perry. “This is what my co-stars on Friends did for me. There were times on set when I was extremely hungover, and Jen and Courteney Cox, being devoted to cardio as a cure-all, had a Lifecycle exercise bike installed backstage.”
In the foreword to Perry’s memoir, Lisa Kudrow described him as “whip smart, charming, sweet, sensitive, very reasonable, and rational.” She added, “That guy, with everything he was battling, was still there.”
Perry also had several notable film roles, starring opposite Salma Hayek in the rom-com “Fools Rush In” and Bruce Willis in the the crime comedy “The Whole Nine Yards.”
In 2015, he played Oscar for a CBS reboot of “The Odd Couple” that aired for two seasons. He said at the time that playing Oscar Madison, the character originally made famous in the 1960s series by Walter Matthau, was a “dream role.”
Perry was born August 19, 1969, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. His father John Bennett Perry is an actor best known for playing a rugged sailor in the Old Spice adverts and his mother, Suzanne, served as press secretary of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and is married to “Dateline” correspondent Keith Morrison.
They divorced before he turned one and he grew up with his mother in Ottowa while his father moved to LA.
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Source: NewsFinale
