The ups and downs of Gary Coleman’s life are being examined in the new documentary, GARY.
Diving deeper into the child actor’s success on Diff’rent Strokes and, ultimately, his titular Gary Coleman Show, the Peacock documentary offers a look into each era of his life leading up to his death.
“Even when I was 5, I was the ‘do or die, never say die,’ the tenacious, ‘I'll be back’ kind of person,” Coleman once described himself.
When he was just eight-years-old, Coleman was discovered by the late Norman Lear. His theatrical agent at the time, Victor Perulo, said he had never seen a child actor with such wit.
“Gary’s parents brought him into the agency — he was only about eight-years-old — and he wore a three piece suit,” Perulo recalled. “He had a great laugh, and I knew that he was a tremendous talent.”
Lear had sent out casting agents to different cities, and when Coleman went to his audition in his hometown of Zion, Illinois, he ended up staying for three hours “reading with everybody.”
The casting director then “insisted that Lear” see Coleman, and the rest is history.
Stunting his growth at just 4 feet and 8 inches, Coleman was born with a congenital kidney defect. Although he received a transplant when he was 5-years-old, by the time he reached 17, his body had “absorbed” the only kidney he had.
“From December 31 of 1985 until his death, Gary lived without a single kidney in his body,” his former manager Dion Mial said. “He then started on dialysis.”
“I can recall showing up to set one day and Gary was in the middle of the scene, completed the scene, bent over and threw up,” Dial shared. “He fundamentally never knew what it was to be fully healthy.”
His mother, Edmonia, said despite his health challenges, Coleman always had a “spirit” about him where he had the mindset that “I’m gonna do what I wanna do regardless.”
In addition to his physical health, Coleman also struggled with his mental health. Mial shared that one night around 10:30 p.m., several years after finding fame as a child actor, he received a concerning call from Coleman after he stopped getting roles due to his age.
“He said ‘Well, I just wanted to call you to say goodbye. I cant take this anymore, it’s not worth living, I’m going to kill myself,’” Mial claimed.
When he reached Coleman’s house, Mial recounted seeing him “sitting alone with a keyboard and he was just tapping single notes at a time.”
“If someone had told me that my life would be like this early enough where I could’ve gotten out, I would’ve got out,” Coleman said in a 1993 interview on Lamack & Company Live. “I would’ve had a normal life.”
