Twenty-three years after John Ritter died, Amy Yasbeck still has conversations with him, and she says so without a trace of embarrassment. The actress, 64, opened up in an on-camera interview with Page Six published on Halloween, in remarks that were picked up by People and Parade, and her answer to one simple question has had Three’s Company fans reaching for the tissues all weekend.
The timing was no accident. Tonight, November 2, at 8 p.m. ET, Yasbeck and Joyce DeWitt are co-hosting a 50th-anniversary celebrity reading of Three’s Company at Joe’s Pub in New York City to benefit the John Ritter Foundation for Aortic Health, with Jason Biggs, Christine Taylor, Richard Kind, Susie Essman and original cast member Richard Kline taking part. DeWitt has been sharing a memory of her own this week, and it turns out to be one of the last nights anyone from the show spent with him.
How Did Amy Yasbeck And John Ritter Meet?
Yasbeck met Ritter on the set of Problem Child, the 1990 comedy in which she played his love interest, and she did it again in the sequel. They were married in 1999 at the Murphy Theatre in Wilmington, Ohio, a theater named for her great-great-grandfather, according to a Dayton Daily News report cited on Ritter’s Wikipedia biography. Their child, Noah, was born the year before.
By 2003 Ritter was starring as the harried dad on ABC’s 8 Simple Rules, and he was as busy as he had been since his Jack Tripper days. On September 11 of that year he fell ill while rehearsing on the set. Doctors first treated him for a heart attack. In fact he had an aortic dissection, a tear in the body’s main artery, and he died that night at Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank. He was 54. We looked at how his death changed the show in how ‘8 Simple Rules’ carried on without him.
Yasbeck did not let it end there, and what she built from her grief still saves lives.
What Did Amy Yasbeck Do After John Ritter’s Death?
Within weeks she had founded the John Ritter Foundation for Aortic Health, which went on to publish the “Ritter Rules,” a plain-language guide to the warning signs of aortic dissection, and to support the John Ritter Research Program at UTHealth in Houston. The foundation’s mission, laid out on its website, is to keep other families from getting the misdiagnosis hers did.
She also went to court. The family’s wrongful-death suit, filed in 2004, produced settlements of about $14 million, including $9.4 million from the hospital. The claims against two of the doctors went to trial, and on March 14, 2008, a jury cleared them by a 9-3 vote, as Reuters and E! News reported. Yasbeck kept the foundation going anyway, and tonight’s reading in New York is the latest chapter.
The reading also brought Joyce DeWitt back to a memory she has rarely shared in such detail.
What Was Joyce DeWitt’s Last Night With John Ritter?
In August 2003, DeWitt heard from photographers that Ritter was in New York, so she picked up the phone. He invited her to dinner with Jim Belushi at an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village. “If he had called one minute later, I would have been out walking to Lincoln Center on my way to a movie,” DeWitt, 77, told Page Six. “Not knowing that it would be the last time we would hang out together, it was extraordinarily special.”
She has come to see the timing as something more than luck. “I mean, it’s like there was divine assistance in allowing us that time together,” she said. A month later he was gone. DeWitt has spent much of her life since then away from Hollywood, as we wrote in Joyce DeWitt’s life now, but she has never stopped showing up for him.
What Does Amy Yasbeck Still Do Every Day?
Asked whether she still feels close to her late husband, Yasbeck did not hesitate. “I still talk to John,” she told Page Six. “I check in all the time. … I talk to him every day.”
She feels him most, she said, when Ritter’s children get together and laugh, especially when “a new comic comes on the scene, or there’s physical comedy.” In those moments it is as if he “is with us or beside us.” Ritter, who could fall over a couch better than anyone on television, would surely approve.
When she was asked what she misses most, Yasbeck did not name a role or a red carpet. She named fatherhood. “That encompasses everything… His humanity, his comedy, his empathy, his frustration at the world. So him as a father encompassed everything about him.” Twenty-three years on, that is still the John Ritter she talks to every day.
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