Adam Rich, who played Nicholas Bradford, the youngest son on the 1970s-era ABC sitcom Eight Is Enough, has died. The actor was 54 years old.
A family member told TMZ that Rich died at home in the Los Angeles area, with a law enforcement source adding that the death was not a result of foul play. No cause of death has been announced.
Rich starred on Eight Is Enough for its entire five-season run between 1977 and 1981, sharing the screen with Dick Van Patten and Betty Buckley.
“I think [Rich is] why the show was a big success,” Van Patten said in a 2011 interview with the Television Academy Foundation. “People loved him! [Fans] named a child Nicholas and everything because of him. .. He was cute, and he was a good actor. He seemed very natural.”
During the 1980s, Rich played Danny Blake in the ABC action drama Code Red and voiced a character in the CBS animated series Dungeons & Dragons. He later guest-starred in St. Elsewhere, Silver Spoons, Small Wonder, and Baywatch.
Rich sought treatment at the Betty Ford Clinic for cocaine addiction in 1988, and he entered rehab in 1992 after pleading no contest to felony burglary and drug charges following allegations that he stole a syringe from a hospital and broke into a pharmacy, per CBS News. And in 2002, Rich was arrested after driving onto a closed highway lane and booked on suspicion of DUI, but he told reporters that he’d been sober for 10 years.
According to TMZ, Rich’s mantra was, “Life is for living, and I live my life to the fullest every day.”