Post by mexicanjunior on Aug 14, 2012 10:55:23 GMT -6
www.wptv.com/dpp/entertainment/ron-palillo-arnold-horshack-on-welcome-back-kotter-dies-at-age-63
IN!
Ron Palillo, best known as mouthy classroom goofball Arnold Horshack on the 1970s TV series Welcome Back, Kotter, died at his Palm Beach Gardens home early this morning, according to Stacy Sacco, Palillo’s friend.
Sacco said Palillo passed away suddenly at 4:30 a.m. He was 62.
“He just couldn’t have been more fun and intelligent or talented. He was an amazing human being,” said Sacco of Palm Beach Gardens, who met Palillo 20 years ago when he was a guest on Ellen DeGeneres’ sitcom in Los Angeles, on which Sacco was a script supervisor.
“I had been a fan. We all knew who he was. He was a shining star,” Sacco said.
Palillo taught acting classes at G-Star Academy, a charter school in Palm Springs.
Sacco said that no cause of death has been determined, but that Palillo had not been ill or in the hospital. Palillo was a Connecticut native who lived in New York for about 40 years before starting teaching at G-Star a little over three years ago.
He is survived by his partner of 41 years, Joseph Gramm, a retired actor.
Before being hired by the charter school, Palillo had lectured in colleges and high schools all over the country.
“From the moment I heard about G-Star seven, eight years ago, it sounded like everything I wanted as a student when I went to high school,” Palillo told The Palm Beach Post in 2009.
“To have this when I was a kid would’ve been astonishing and I knew I wanted to be part of it.”
Greg Hauptner, founder and CEO of G-Star Academy, said in 2009 that Palillo asked to join the school after working with the students on the film Dog Gone Tale: Destiny’s Stand.
“I almost fell out of my chair,” Hauptner recalled. “I didn’t think he was serious.”
Palillo, a University of Connecticut graduate, played Horshack on the popular sitcom Welcome Back Kotter. The show also starred Gabe Kaplan and a young John Travolta. It originally aired on ABC and ran from 1975-79.
The show focused on Kaplan’s character Gabe Kotter, who returned to his high school in Brooklyn — the fictional James Buchanan High — to teach a remedial class to which he once belonged, according to tv.com.
The main group of students were known as the Sweathogs, an unruly group who always got in trouble. Palillo played the sheepish Arnold Dingfelder Horshack, who would often yell “Ooh! Ooh, ooh!” when he thought he knew the answer to a question.
The cast also included Travolta, who played lady’s man Vinnie Barbarino, Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs, who played the always cool Freddie “Boom-Boom” Washington and Robert Hegyes, who played the tough Jewish Puerto Rican wheeler-dealer Juan (Luis Pedro Phillipo de Huevos) Epstein, according to tv.com.
Hegyes died in January from an apparent heart attack. He was 60.
Read more: www.wptv.com/dpp/entertainment/ron-palillo-arnold-horshack-on-welcome-back-kotter-dies-at-age-63#ixzz23XZ7TmIK
IN!
