Suzanne Somers, best known for Three’s Company and Step by Step, will be remembered for her iconic onscreen characters. But the trailblazing actress, who died on Sunday after a decades-long battle with cancer, will also be remembered for breaking down barriers for women behind the scenes in the entertainment industry.
In 1980, Somers was fired from Three’s Company amid a pay equity dispute. She played Chrissy Snow for four seasons on ABC’s Emmy-winning comedy series. She was forced into briefly appearing during the fifth season as the network auditioned other actresses. The stunning move came at a time when both the show and Somers were at the height of their popularity.
“Being fired from Three’s Company took [a lot of] work from me … to not be angry,” Somers told Yahoo Entertainment in a 2018 interview.
Somers initially signed on for the show for $3,500 a week — “I was thrilled,” she recalled — but as her co-star John Ritter received a hefty raise she wanted one, too. When Somers’s husband, Alan Hamel, tried to renegotiate her contract for the fifth season, they asked the network for $150,000, which was what Ritter was making. Unbeknownst to Hamel and Somers, ABC was recently forced to give raises to the female leads of Laverne & Shirley, Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams, and had no desire to pay Somers what she wanted.
“You can’t really fire Laverne or Shirley on Laverne & Shirley,” Somers shared. Instead, they fired her.
“[Alan] said, ‘You’re out, they’re making an example out of you,'” she recalled about the “devastating” news.
“I was fired from the No. 1 show at the height of my success, and I couldn’t get a job in television,” she continued. “I couldn’t get an interview, I was considered trouble.”
Somers remembered negative media coverage at the time over the dispute. “The smear campaign they put out on me was ‘She’s greedy,’ and ‘Who does she think she is?'” she exclaimed.
Somers went on to build a successful lifestyle empire, and eventually, found work again in Hollywood. However, she said ABC’s decision to fire her had a rippling effect through the industry.
“Not one woman asked for a raise for eight years,” she claimed, noting Roseanne Barr was the first woman to change that.
Somers didn’t let that taint her view of Three’s Company, though.
“Man did I love being Chrissy Snow. I am really proud of creating that dumb blonde because she had a moral code. She was lovable. Most people don’t realize that Chrissy Snow, from Three’s Company, was the first feminist,” the actress told Yahoo in a 2021 interview. “I was the first one in television who asked to be paid commensurate with the men because I was on the number one show and had the highest demographics of any woman in television and yet all the men were being paid 10 to 15 times more than me. So my contract was up, I renegotiated and I was fired for asking, essentially.”
Amid the drama at the outset of Season 5, Somers’s role was ultimately reduced to a once-a-week appearance. Many appearances were staged as phone calls to her roommates and were shot separately, per Variety.
“They fired me for midseason but in order to get paid for the rest of that season, I had to turn up once a week and as Chrissy I would say, ‘I know, she’s still sick. I’m sorry! I can’t wait to see you too. Alright, I love you bye!'” Somers recalled to Yahoo. “It was humiliating and depressing and they used me to be able to perpetuate the fact that Suzanne Somers was still on the show while they were trying out other girls. I don’t know how much money they lost when they broke up that chemistry but I think it was in the billions. I hear all the time, to this day, ‘I never watched again when you weren’t there.'”
Somers was written completely out of the show after that season and was replaced by other characters.
“The day that I was fired, my husband said, ‘You’re out. They’re going to make an example out of you and you’re out,'” she shared. “He said, ‘We’re going to make this work for us. We’re only going to work for ourselves going forward. And so that’s pretty much how we became the entrepreneurs that we are.”
Somers called the situation a blessing in disguise for her and Hamel. She launched a beauty line, infamously promoted products like the Thigh Master and wrote a dozen books.
“I kind of smiled to myself, like, you know, I didn’t wallow in anger and darkness and negativity. I don’t hate any of them. I just feel indifferent,” she added to Yahoo. “You’re not worth my expending emotion on it. I just try to keep my thoughts in such a healthy place.”
Somers “passed away peacefully at home” on Sunday, just one day shy of her 77th birthday. “She survived an aggressive form of breast cancer for over 23 years,” Somers’s longtime publicist R. Couri Hay said in a statement on behalf of the family.
“Suzanne was surrounded by her loving husband Alan, her son Bruce, and her immediate family,” the statement continued. “Her family was gathered to celebrate her 77th birthday on October 16th. Instead, they will celebrate her extraordinary life, and want to thank her millions of fans and followers who loved her dearly.”
Joyce DeWitt, who starred alongside Somers on Three’s Company, released a statement after news broke.
“My heart goes out to Suzanne’s family,” DeWitt, who fell out with Somers in the ’80s amid the drama, said. “They are a very close family — deeply connected and caring one to the other. I can only imagine how difficult this time is for all of them.”
Although the financial disagreement caused a rift in Somers and DeWitt’s friendship for years, they reconciled prior to her death.
“I’m sure Suzanne was greeted by Angels into the loving wisdom waiting for all of us on the other side, and I hope that will assist her family’s hearts in healing as they travel through this difficult time,” DeWitt added.
