Matthew Perry was best known for his portrayal of the wise-cracking Chandler Bing on the wildly popular ‘Friends,’ which ran for 10 seasons from 1994 to 2004
Matthew Perry, the troubled star of the smash hit TV sitcom Friends, was found dead at his home in Los Angeles on Saturday, U.S. media reported. He was 54-years-old.
First responders found Perry unconscious in a hot tub at his house and were unable to revive him, law enforcement sources told the Los Angeles Times.
“We responded at 4:10 pm... It is a death investigation for a male in his 50s,” a Los Angeles Police Department spokesman told AFP, without confirming the deceased’s name.
A fire department spokesman confirmed it had responded to a “water emergency,” which could refer to a “pool, spa, bathtub or fountain,” but could not confirm reports that Perry had drowned
"I loved Chandler, I loved the show, and I also knew: Remember this, because it's going to be the best time of your life," Perry said in an ABC News Nightline interview with Diane Sawyer last year.
But behind the scenes, Perry struggled with addiction. He opened up about his decades-long excessive use of alcohol and pills in his memoir published last year, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing. In the book, which he dedicated to fellow sufferers of addiction, he detailed his painful struggle with drug use and his related health problems: He said he'd spent half of his life in treatment, detoxed an estimated 65 times and underwent 14 surgeries.
"Whenever I bumped into something that I didn't really want to share, I would think of the people that I would be helping, and it would keep me going," the actor told The New York Times last year.
While on set, Perry said he tried to keep his addiction hidden and described his unhealthy relationship with his work.
"I felt like I was gonna die if the live audience didn't laugh, and that's not healthy for sure," Perry wrote in the memoir. "But I could sometimes say a line and the audience wouldn't laugh and I would sweat and sometimes go into convulsions. 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."
Last year he told The Times: "At my audition I broke all the rules. For a start, I didn't carry any pages of the script (you're supposed to carry the script with you when you read, because that way you're acknowledging to the writers that it's just a work in progress). But I knew the script so well by this point. Of course, I nailed it...
"I read the words in an unexpected fashion, hitting emphases that no one else had hit..."I didn't know it yet, but my way of speaking would filter into the culture across the next few decades.
"For now, though, I was just trying to find interesting ways into lines that were already funny, but that I thought I could truly make dance. (I was once told that the writers would underline the word not usually emphasised in a sentence just to see what I would do with it)."
When he proposes to Monica, played by Courtney Cox, he says:
"You make me happier than I ever thought I could be and if you let me, I will spend the rest of my life trying to make you feel the same way."
At their wedding ceremony, he says: "I thought this was going to be the most difficult thing I had to do, but when I saw you walking down the aisle, I realised how simple it was.
"I love you."
By the time the show ended in 2004, after 10 seasons and countless awards and nominations, his troubled character had finally found some closure and happiness.
In the end, being on Friends gave Perry a degree of happiness as well.
He told the New York Times in 2002: "If I hadn't had the experience of being famous, I would have searched for it my whole life.
"I would have just gone on and on trying to find it."
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