The woman signing an autograph outside the Sunset Room in Hollywood on September 12 had a short, feathered crop of bright white hair, and it took some fans a second look to place her. It was Joyce DeWitt, Janet Wood herself, out for a rare public evening at the John Ritter Foundation for Aortic Health’s Evening from the Heart gala. Hello! described her orange satin top and matching floor-length skirt, and Getty photographer Joe Scarnici caught her on the carpet, as Entertainment Now also reported. The dark brunette bob from Three’s Company is long gone. DeWitt was born April 23, 1949, in Wheeling, West Virginia, which makes her 77, and she is the last surviving member of the show’s original trio.
Those photos are only the doorway, though. Joyce DeWitt now lives a quieter life than almost anyone who once headlined a top-rated sitcom, and that was her choice. She has explained why more than once, and her reasons have a lot to do with a man who was being honored in that room.
Why Did Janet Wood Disappear When the Show Ended?
Three’s Company signed off in 1984, and after one guest spot on Finder of Lost Loves that year, DeWitt stepped out of sight. “I was going to take six months off just to chill out,” she said in a 2009 interview, as Best Life reported. The reason went deeper than fatigue. “I saw Hollywood and the way it behaved, and it was not a moral code that was natural to me,” she said in the same conversation, a line AmoMama also quoted from that interview.
She spent those years traveling and studying with spiritual teachers around the world, according to both outlets, and she eventually settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which IMDb and Remind magazine both list as her home for most of the year. The six months turned into roughly seven years before she acted again. Her name, meanwhile, stayed tied to a falling out that would follow her for three decades.
What Really Happened Between Joyce DeWitt and Suzanne Somers?
In 1980, Suzanne Somers asked to be paid on par with John Ritter, and producers fired her rather than meet the demand, as People and Biography have both reported. She finished her contract filming her scenes as phone calls on a separate set, kept apart from the cast. For 31 years the two women never spoke, and DeWitt has said the silence was not her doing. In remarks from 2009 quoted on her IMDb biography page, she said she had left Somers messages, notes and letters over some 20 years, even giving her the number of her bedside phone, without ever getting a call back.
The thaw finally came in February 2012, when Somers invited her onto the online talk show Breaking Through. Asked why now, DeWitt answered, “It’s time,” ABC News reported. Somers apologized on camera. “In a group of serious actors, I probably pissed you all off. And if I did, I’m really sorry,” she said. DeWitt was generous in return. “I didn’t have a business head. So I didn’t understand someone who did,” she told her, and she added, as Biography and AOL both quoted, “You went up against ruthlessness, and it came down.”
That peace lasted. Somers died at home on October 15, 2023, one day before her 77th birthday, after more than two decades with breast cancer, as NBC and People reported. DeWitt sent People a statement for the family, writing, “I’m sure Suzanne was greeted by Angels into the loving wisdom waiting for all of us on the other side.” By then she had been back on a stage for more than 30 years.
What Is Joyce DeWitt Doing Today?
Her return came in 1991 in Noises Off at the Cherry County Playhouse in Michigan, and theater has been her home ever since. She toured in Love Letters opposite Tab Hunter and, separately, Tony Dow in 2012, and she played Mother Superior in Nunsense in New Jersey in 2018. On screen, she turned up in Cybill in 1995 and co-produced and hosted the 2003 NBC film Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Three’s Company, according to Wikipedia and BroadwayWorld.
She still has opinions about Janet, too. In 2024, she told Fox News Digital she was “a bit offended” that the writers chose to “marry her off” when the show ended. “I would have sent her to law school or medical school or to the Peace Corps,” she said. Her next appearance is a much bigger one, and it brings her straight back to Jack Tripper.
What Did John Ritter Mean to Her?
Ritter died on September 11, 2003, at 54, after an aortic dissection struck on the set of 8 Simple Rules, a loss we looked at in our story on how John Ritter’s death changed that show. His widow, Amy Yasbeck, started the foundation that hosted September’s gala. “It doesn’t get any better than to do something for Jonathan,” DeWitt told PauseRewind that night, using the name she still calls him.
On November 2, she and Yasbeck co-host a staged reading of the original pilot at Joe’s Pub in New York, with Jason Biggs as Jack, to open the show’s 50th anniversary celebrations, as Fox 5 New York reported. The series premiered March 15, 1977, and the foundation plans more readings in 2027.
What she will be missing on that stage is the partner she never had to rehearse with. “My body knew if he went down, I went up. If he swung high, I ducked low,” she told PauseRewind. Back in 2017, she told Fox News, “I miss the presence, I miss his smile, I miss the gift that he was.” And at the gala, 23 years after losing him, she said the thing that explains why a woman who walked away from Hollywood keeps coming back for this one cause: “I don’t expect ever to have that again, and certainly not with someone as spectacular as Jonathan.”
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