The Journey of John Ritter: Life Before, During, and After Three’s Company

His Enduring Popularity

Every now and then you hear about someone in Hollywood who everybody describes by saying, “Oh, he is such a nice guy,” and you usually roll your eyes in response. But one of those oft-mentioned guys virtually no one has a bad thing to say about is John Ritter. He delighted television viewers with his portrayal of Jack Tripper on Three’s Company, and while he may not have achieved that level of fame again, he was someone we watched evolve and grow as a performer over the course of the films he appeared in and his subsequent shows, whether it was Hooperman, Hearts Afire or 8 Simple Rules — and someone who still touches fans so many years later.

For Chris Mann, the secret of his enduring popularity very much has to do with that “silly, misunderstood-by-the-critics” show. “John really connected with people because he came across as a friend, maybe as a brother figure, and just as kind of an everyman,” says Chris. “Jack Tripper as a character as embodied by John was this guy always trying to do the right thing, despite all of these temptations, and bungling it comedically. Thanks to John’s talents, people connected with that character, and I don’t think anyone else could have pulled Jack Tripper off. So, ultimately, that character really made people relate to John and follow him. Even now, all these years since his passing. It’s similar to the relationship audiences had with Robin Williams. Robin, of course, rose to fame playing an otherworldly character as Mork, on Mork and Mindy, while John usually took the everyman role. But they both came across as lovable people who made the audience laugh and forget their worries — and God knows nowadays people want to go back to those times.”

“Because of his physical comedy,” Richard Kline points out, “he’s been compared to Dick Van Dyke. But with all due respect to Dick Van Dyke, I don’t think Dick Van Dyke had the chops to do the kind of dramatic work that John did. John’s a university-trained actor, and people did eventually start to recognize that and give him credit for it, but you can’t escape the worldwide notoriety of Three’s Company. Who knew that this show would still be being rerun 40-some-odd years later? It’s insane.”

Bob Myman, friend and John’s producing partner for many years, drives home the point that the actor’s appeal stemmed largely from the fact that success never changed him. “He just remained the same guy,” he says. “Just hilariously funny, sweet, kind, generous, thoughtful and interested in everybody. He had this politician’s mind for remembering people. He would see somebody that he hadn’t seen in 10 years and pick up right where he’d left off with them. He just really liked people and he liked knowing their stories. And he would say sometimes he would steal things from people in terms of mannerisms and stuff to use in a character. It was such a great gift. With John, he was John and then all of a sudden he was some other character. You never saw the agony of how to get into it. I’m sure he thought about things and what he was going to do and how it was going to work, but it always felt like he knew how to get to where he needed to be easily.”

“He never related to himself as a star,” observes Marty Davidson, “but he took comedy seriously. He wasn’t one of those guys who said, ‘I need to keep it spontaneous; I need it fresh.’ No, he approached comedy as an acting assignment where you find the reality, you find the truth. It was great fun to work with him, and he was such a giving guy.”

As for his own views on stardom, in an interview posted at the Authors Guild, John reflected, “I’m pretty much a very happy actor. I have my problems in my personal life, but in terms of my career, I have been so fortunate. I know there are hits and misses. I know that I won an Emmy and a Golden Globe and a couple of People’s Choice Awards. I may never win anything again, and that would be fine. To be obsessed with box-office ratings and all that stuff, I’ve been around for so long that I know if you do that, you just whip yourself into a frenzy … But it’s interesting to me to see how I do, to test myself. Sometimes I don’t think anybody’s watching, except maybe three people, so I do it for two people, or one person. Anyway, that’s me in a nutshell.”

Some Background

He was born Jonathan Southworth Ritter on September 17, 1948, in Burbank, California, and made it pretty clear at a young age what direction his life would be going. Even if he wasn’t aware of it — and despite his father’s best efforts to dissuade him.

John’s father, Tex, was an early pioneer of country music. Becoming intrigued by show business, in 1928 he began singing on the radio in a program that consisted of mostly cowboy songs. He moved to New York, where he ended up on Broadway in a few shows, including as a cowboy in 1931’s Green Grow the Lilacs. From there, he starred in The Lone Star Rangers, a radio broadcast where he would tell — and sing about — tales of the Old West. His radio career would continue to blossom, and then he would make the transition to movies as well as a recording career, becoming the first artist signed to Capitol Records. In 1970, he ran for (but lost) the U.S. Senate in Tennessee’s Republican primary election. He and wife Dorothy Fay had two children, Thomas Matthews and John. He passed away in 1974 of a heart attack just short of his 69th birthday.

“There was something about my father,” Ritter told the Authors Guild, “about the spirit of the West. He was a Civil War scholar — a very smart man. My mother was the glamorous one. She was the showstopper. She was like a cross between Auntie Mame and Glinda the Good Witch. My only brother is handicapped with cerebral palsy and went to a special school. I remember the first time I got a sense of my father’s fame. It was when I got to stay up late to watch him sing the theme song from High Noon on the Academy Awards. And it won Best Song.”

Despite his own success, Tex was resistant to the idea of John becoming an entertainer. Chris says, “His dad may have been considered a star, but he had really struggled to be in the entertainment industry throughout the Depression. He broke through, obviously, as the singing cowboy in films and with albums, but he knew how hard it was to make a go of it and he didn’t want John to do go down that road. But John, as a child, really captured his family’s attention by being a cut up and by bringing a certain lightness to seriousness that his family faced. John’s brother tells me that from an early age John was standing up on top of the family car pretending to be a preacher and saying, ‘I will heal you.’ Tex realized that his son had talent, but he didn’t want to encourage that career path. John, though, was always sort of, like, ‘Look at me, look at me. I want your attention. This is what I’m bringing to the table and I want to make you happy and make you laugh.’ That was essentially the dynamic.”

Majoring in Psychology Didn’t Work Out

John attended the University of Southern California, where he majored in psychology and intended to get into politics. But somewhere along the way, he decided to change his focus to theater arts, transferring over to the USC School of Dramatic Artists. Graduating in 1971, he was focused on stage performances, but pretty quickly found himself drawn to both film and television, where he began scoring jobs, among them a guest spot on the Burt Reynolds series Dan August and his movie debut, Disney’s live-action film The Barefoot Executive. In the latter he costarred alongside Kurt Russell, who plays a guy named Steven Post who takes credit for a chimp’s uncanny ability to pick what TV shows are going to work, which turns the United Broadcasting Corporation into the top network. John plays another young exec named Roger. A bit of a dopey concept, but it’s fun.

John would have small roles in several other films over the next few years, and make guest appearances on series like M*A*S*H, The Bob Newhart Show, and The Waltons. In fact, on the latter he would have the recurring role of Rev. Matthew Fordwick, playing the character a total of 18 times. “That character, who he would refer to as Reverend Foreplay behind the scenes to crack Richard Thomas up, was so pure and kind of rigid that he really sunk his dramatic teeth into it,” explains Chris. “That role and its wholesomeness also made his dad proud. His dad, like I said, didn’t want him to become an actor, but when he was cast in The Waltons, it gave him legitimacy in his dad’s eyes to see that he sort of rose to prominence in that role initially.”

The Lighter Side of John

Not surprisingly, while John did well on The Waltons, he was ready to cut loose and began a shift towards sitcoms. Points out Chris, “He started to appear on MTM comedies like The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, Rhoda and Phyllis, and that’s when people began to view him for who he really was: a little bit more of a wacky, fun-loving personality. Larry Gelbart cast him on M*A*S*H, and while he had great versatility and could do dramatic roles, it really was the MTM comedies that tilted him into primarily a sitcom star.”

Meet John’s First Wife, Nancy Morgan

Born April 1, 1949, Nancy Karen Morgan is an actress who starred with Ron Howard in his movie directorial debut, 1977’s Grand Theft Auto. She also starred in the European series Lucky Luke, based on the comic strip of the same name; and with John in the 1986 TV movie The Dream of Oz: The L. Frank Baum Story. She and John were married in 1977, eventually having three children: Jason, Carly, and Tyler. The couple divorced in 1996 following 19 years of marriage, but while they were together, they frequently co-hosted the United Cerebral Palsy Telethon, an event important to John as his brother Tom suffers from the neurological condition.

‘Three’s Company’ (1977-84)

People forget just how big this show was in the 1970s as it, along with Charlie’s Angels, ushered in the era of “jiggle TV.” The show, of course, is focused on a trio of roommates: Janet Wood (Joyce DeWitt), Chrissy Snow (Suzanne Somers), and Jack Tripper (John). All three live together platonically, pretending that Jack is gay to avoid the ire of their landlords, the Ropers (Norman Fell and Audra Lindley), and week to week the show is a combination of slapstick comedy and sexual confusion as an overheard conversation or something viewed is entirely misinterpreted. Sounds kind of thin, but they did an amazing job of milking it creatively and making Three’s Company one of the biggest comedy hits of the 1970s.

“If you look back to ’70s sitcoms,” explains Chris, “you had All in the Family, which was so huge, and political and raw and real. And the same people who did Three’s Company had been writers on that show and went on to create and produce The Jeffersons, which was a spinoff of All in the Family. But they put that show in a lighter, more whimsical manner, so the time was right for a show like Three’s Company. I think that Three’s Company initially resonated because it titillated viewers with sexual innuendos, sight gags, and really provocative banter about sex that had not been traversed so much in sitcoms.”

“At the same time,” he continues, “it became and stayed a Top 10 hit because it was an hysterical farce that made people laugh out loud. Once John Ritter’s physical comedy took over, and the show became more of a comedy misunderstanding — sexual and otherwise — it gave people a chance to feel liberated through laughter. The thing about Three’s Company is that people always assume the worse about others, and whether it was Mr. Roper fearing they were having orgies or whatever, it kind of showed us how we do jump to conclusions. Unless it’s a really sort of tragic situation, in general, there’s something innately funny about that.”

Emphasizes Richard Kline, “The show was called Three’s Company, but it might as well have been called The John Ritter Show, because he drove the physical comedy, the relationship comedy. He was a star of that show no matter how many blondes came and went. Through the years, people who had worked on that show who I may have run in to or read comments from, say what a friendly set it was. And the reason was there was no egomania at the top. John was very gracious to everyone who appeared on the show, and that burnished his reputation. He had this great persona of being a generally outgoing, down to Earth guy. You never got any sense of massive ego with John.”

The show was an American version of the British series Man About the House. After the show’s pilot had been filmed, there was actually talk of replacing John, as there was something about him that played to executives as somewhat effeminate (his first wife, Nancy, had said that he was not a guy’s guy; he was a gentle soul, and that actually did make some people think he was gay). Fred Silverman, the head of ABC at the time, is the one who ultimately decided that John would remain in the part.

Speaking to journalist Lisa Bernhard, John said of the series, “I loved the show back then, but I was embarrassed to say so, because a lot of my actor friends were like, ‘What are you doing in that piece of s–t!’ Slowly but surely, I met people who liked it. Lucy [Lucille Ball] endorsed it publicly and was so complimentary about me. And then Jon Voight, who is my idol of the dramatic actors, said that he and his daughter [Angelina Jolie] would watch it and laugh together. He said, ‘Don’t put yourself down, man. It’s hard to do what you do. The actors who put you down, let them be in a farce and see what they do.’ I was delirious hearing it, because I used to go, ‘Hi, I’m John Ritter, Three’s Company — I’m sorry.’”

Honestly, John never had anything to be sorry about. The show ran from 1977 to 1984 and survived a number of cast changes (including Suzanne Somers and the Ropers, the latter of whom went off for their own short-lived spin-off, with Don Knotts coming in as new landlord Ralph Furley). In all, 172 episodes were produced.

Proposes Richard, “I think what gave Three’s Company its longevity is the fact that it was never topical. I mean, kudos to Archie Bunker and All in the Family dealing with some sensitive issues. Norman Lear — that’s his MO, to take social issues and intertwine them with comedy (I sound like some sort of TV historian). For us, though, it was all about paying the rent and misunderstandings and is he gay, is he not gay, and falling over couches. Basically that’s hilarious stuff when it’s done well.”

‘Hero at Large’ (1980)

So basically, no one is going to say that Hero at Large is great art or heavy drama, OK? But what it is, is a wonderful little film that showcases John at his endearing best. Released in 1980, it casts him as struggling New York actor Steve Nichols, who is hired to help promote the new movie featuring Captain Avenger. One night, while hitting a local deli (and still in costume), he stops a robbery from taking place, inspiring those around him with his “everyman” heroism. Captain Avenger suddenly becomes something of a phenomenon, which leads a candidate for mayor to use him for political means. Not realizing what’s truly going on, Steve lets it happen, the results being that he has to eventually prove to a now-jaded public that there’s a little Captain Avenger in each of them.

“It’s underrated,” notes Chris, “and it definitely has a charm and heart to it. What’s interesting is that whereas Robin Williams made his movie debut as Popeye, another otherworldly character, John essentially debuted on the big screen as, again, an everyman. A struggling actor who suddenly becomes this media hero when he stops a robbery at a convenience store. Afterwards he realizes he likes protecting people; he likes having that sense of being a media hero and ultimately he becomes a real hero by the end of the film. It was also kind of a romantic comedy in a sense, but the journey of that character really resonated with audiences.”

For director Marty Davidson there’s a humorous, more personal story about Hero at Large. “My wife, Sandy, was costume designer on it,” he points out. “When the movie was finished, John was going on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show. At that time, his first wife, Nancy Morgan, had given birth to their son, Jason. So Sandy made a tiny little Captain Avenger suit — a small version of what John wore in the movie —and John was talking about Jason being born and he was showing the costume off to Johnny Carson. And then John turned to the camera and said, ‘Hey, Sandy. Thanks!’ And it was one of the happiest nights of my wife’s life.”

Lucy Loved ‘Three’s Company’

Lucille Ball, the true queen of TV slapstick comedy, was a massive fan of Three’s Company and John. In fact, in season 6, she served as hostess of a one-hour retrospective of the show. So appreciative of that and her kind words was John that he returned the favor by making an appearance on the former I Love Lucy star’s final sitcom, 1986’s Life With Lucy. He plays himself in episode two, “Lucy Makes a Hit With John Ritter,” which provides plenty of slapstick opportunities for both of them.

Michael Stern, a friend of Lucy’s, tells tvparty.com, “Lucy had more fun with John Ritter than with anybody. On that week, Lucy called it ‘Ritter-itis’ because he kept making her laugh. During the actual filming he broke her up. She had to say ‘cut!’ She said that was only the third time in her life while filming a show that she actually had to say ‘cut’ because she was laughing so hard. It was not like her.”

‘Three’s a Crowd’ (1984-85)

The British show that had inspired Three’s Company in the first place had spawned a sequel called Robin’s Nest, which set up the male character from that show in an apartment with the woman he’d fallen in love with, while dealing with her father who was constantly trying to break them up. That pretty much sums up the American version, Three’s a Crowd, as well. John reprised the role of Jack Tripper, with Mary Cadorette as Vicky Bradford and Robert Mandan as her father, James.

Incidentally, the reason the original series was being canceled was that NBC’s The A-Team had arrived and was decimating the ratings of anything that went up against it, resulting in the one-two casualty of Three’s Company and Happy Days on ABC. The network thought the spinoff would pump new life into the show, but it didn’t — which wasn’t a surprise to Chris.

While he believed John remained the energetic center, he needed “the right ensemble with him, as Jack Tripper, to make everything click. I think you had a case of going from the right ensemble to the wrong ensemble. They should have incorporated some of the characters from Three’s Company and treated it a little bit more like Frasier — but it just sort of, in a sense, killed off the characters from Three’s Company, which was a misfire.”

“John wasn’t pressing for Three’s a Crowd,” relates Bob Myman, “but he felt that if that’s what those guys who he owed a lot to wanted to do, he was game to try. It wouldn’t have been his first choice, I don’t think. He just felt it was fair to pay them back and try and make it work.”

There was also some serious behind-the-scenes drama that took place as ABC wasn’t telling anyone the first show was coming to an end; the cast thought they would be back for another season. During holiday hiatus, Joyce DeWitt unexpectedly arrived at the studio and walked in on auditions for the Mary character, and the powers that be had no choice but to explain what was going on. It definitely created a major rift between Joyce and John, but one that worked itself out by the end of the series. Both Richard Kline as Larry and Don Knotts as Mr. Furley were asked to make recurring appearances on the new show, but both refused (though Richard did show up once).

And the Winner Is…

John was nominated for a total of 17 awards throughout his career, and took home three. He won the 1984 Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical/Comedy and the 1984 Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Comedy Series for Three’s Company. In addition, he won the 1988 People’s Choice Award for Favorite Male Performer in a New TV program for Hooperman.

‘Hooperman’ (1987-89)

Coming off of their recent success of L.A. Law, writer/producers Steven Bochco and Terry Louise Fisher came up with the idea for this show that cast John as a San Francisco police inspector named Harry Hooperman. Harry has to balance his life as a cop and the fact that he’s just inherited a pretty rundown apartment building he lives in following the murder of his landlady. It’s trying to achieve that balance that filled much of the show’s two seasons of 42 episodes, running from 1987-89. Although there had been other comedy-dramas on TV before, this half-hour show was christened with the word “dramedy,” deftly walking a fine line between the two.

Opines Chris, “It was very appealing for John to leave Jack Tripper behind by 1987. At that point he had experienced a few years of probably great frustration that he couldn’t find the next vehicle for himself. The features hadn’t quite hit and by the early- to mid-’80s he couldn’t find the next TV vehicle. Now I think Hooperman worked very well as a dramedy, but dramedies as a whole didn’t work. And there were shows like Frank’s Place and Molly Dodd. The only one that really did survive was The Wonder Years, but that was more like a traditional sitcom setting.”