FILE - Suzanne Somers is seen during the funeral services for Merv Griffin at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Beverly Hills, Calif., Aug. 17, 2007. Somers, the effervescent blonde actor known for playing Chrissy Snow on the television show Three’s Company, as well as her business endeavors, died early Sunday, Oct. 15, 2023, her family said in a statement provided by her longtime publicist R. Couri Hay. She was 76.
Somers was born in 1946 in San Bruno, California, to a gardener father and a medical secretary mother. Her childhood, she’d later say, was tumultuous. Her father was an alcoholic, and abusive. She married young, at 19, to Bruce Somers, after becoming pregnant with her son Bruce. The couple divorced three years later and she began modelling for The Anniversary Game to support herself. It was during this time that she met Hamel, who she married in 1977.
She appeared in many television shows in the 1970s, including The Rockford Files, Magnum Force and The Six Million Dollar Man, but her most famous part came with Three’s Company, which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1984 “The show’s response was, ‘Who do you think you are?’” Somers told People in 2020. “They said, ‘John Ritter is the star.’”