- Date Of Birth: September 17, 1948
- Date Of Death: September 11, 2003
- Resting Place: Forest Lawn Memorial Park, Hollywood Hills, California, U.S.
- Occupation: Actor
Jonathan Southworth Ritter (September 17, 1948 – September 11, 2003) was an American actor. The son of the singing cowboy star Tex Ritter and the father of actors Jason and Tyler Ritter, Ritter is known for playing Jack Tripper on the ABC sitcom Three’s Company (1977–1984), for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award and a Golden Globe Award in 1984. He briefly reprised the role on the spin-off Three’s a Crowd, which aired for one season, producing 22 episodes before its cancellation in 1985.
Ritter appeared in over 100 films and television series combined and performed on Broadway, with roles including adult Ben Hanscom in It (1990), Problem Child (1990), Problem Child 2 (1991), a dramatic turn in Sling Blade (1996), and Bad Santa in 2003 (his final live action film, which was dedicated to his memory). In 2002, Don Knotts called Ritter the “greatest physical comedian on the planet”. His final roles include voicing the title character on the PBS children’s program Clifford the Big Red Dog (2000–2003), for which he received four Daytime Emmy Award nominations, as Paul Hennessy on the ABC sitcom 8 Simple Rules (2002–2003) and an uncredited role for providing the normal voice as Three in Seven Little Monsters (2000–2003).
Ritter was born at Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank, California, on September 17, 1948. Ritter had a birth defect known as a coloboma in his right eye. His father, Tex Ritter, was a singing cowboy and matinee star, and his mother, Dorothy Fay (née Southworth), was an actress. He had an older brother, Thomas “Tom” Matthews. Ritter attended Hollywood High School, where he was student body president. He attended the University of Southern California and majored in psychology with plans to have a career in politics. He later changed his major to theater arts and attended the USC School of Dramatic Arts (formerly School of Theatre). Ritter was a member of Phi Gamma Delta fraternity at USC. While still in college, Ritter traveled to the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and West Germany to perform in plays. Ritter graduated in 1970.
On October 16, 1977, Ritter married actress Nancy Morgan, with whom he had three children: Jason (who first appeared in the opening credits of Three’s Company), Carly, and Tyler. They divorced on September 1, 1996. He married actress Amy Yasbeck on September 18, 1999, at the Murphy Theatre in Wilmington, Ohio. They had a daughter, Stella, born in September 1998. Yasbeck played his love interest in the first two Problem Child movies, though as two different characters. Yasbeck also played Ritter’s wife in two sitcom appearances. In 1991, both were guest stars on The Cosby Show, in which Yasbeck played the in-labor wife of Ritter’s basketball coach character. In 1996, Ritter guest-starred on Yasbeck’s sitcom, Wings, as the estranged husband of Yasbeck’s character, Casey.
On September 11, 2003, while he was rehearsing for 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter on the Walt Disney Studio lot in Burbank, California, Ritter fell ill and began to experience problems with his heart. Sweating profusely, vomiting and complaining of chest pain, he was taken to the Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center across the street (the same hospital in which he was born) at 6 p.m. that evening. Ritter was initially treated by emergency room physicians for a heart attack; however, his condition quickly worsened. Physicians then identified that Ritter had an aortic dissection, so he underwent surgery to repair the dissection, but was pronounced dead at 10:48 pm. A private funeral was held on September 15, 2003, in Los Angeles, after which Ritter was interred at Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills Cemetery, in the Hollywood Hills of Los Angeles.
In 2008, Ritter’s widow, Amy Yasbeck, on behalf of herself and Ritter’s children, filed lawsuits against doctors involved in Ritter’s treatment and Providence St. Joseph Medical Center. The lawsuits against Providence St. Joseph were settled out of court for $9.4 million. A $67 million wrongful-death lawsuit against two of the physicians, radiologist Matthew Lotysch and cardiologist Joseph Lee, went to trial. Yasbeck accused Lee, who treated Ritter on the day of his death, of misdiagnosing his condition as a heart attack, and Lotysch, who had given him a full-body scan two years earlier, of failing at that time to detect an enlargement of Ritter’s aorta. In 2008, at the Los Angeles County Superior Court, the jury concluded that the doctors who treated Ritter the day he died were not negligent, and thus were not responsible for his death. – Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License from Wikipedia.
