American-Canadian actor Matthew Perry, known for his role as Chandler Bing Friends died from an apparent drowning at his Los Angeles home from 1994 to 2004, according to reports. Perry was 54.
Born in Plymouth, Massachusetts, to an American actor father and Canadian journalist mother, Perry spent his early years in Ottawa after his parents’ divorce while in his infancy, before moving to Moved to LA to pursue a career in show business. After graduating from high school, Perry booked a series of supporting roles on television and in films before being cast as a series regular on the 1990 CBS sitcom. Sydney, starring Valerie Bertinelli. He would continue to make appearances 90210 and the short duration Home Free before you audition Friends. (Perry had previously worked with creators Marta Kauffman and David Crane on the HBO sitcom Dream On.)
For the next ten years and ten seasons, Perry, the youngest person on the series, was the youngest person on the series Friends‘s main cast (he was only 25 when the first episode aired) – would play the dryly funny Chandler Bing opposite Jennifer Aniston’s Rachel Green, David Schwimmer’s Ross Geller, Courtney Cox’s Monica Geller, Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe Buffay and Joey Tribbiani by Matt LeBlanc. The show’s enormous success was a dream come true for Perry: as he recalled in his 2022 memoir Friends, lovers and the big terrible thingshortly before landing his cut Friends, Perry prayed, “God, you can do whatever you want to me. Please make me famous.”
Indeed, Friends did make him famous and wealthy — in 2002, he and his castmates each earned more than $1 million per episode — but those years were also colored by health problems and Perry’s struggles with both alcoholism and opioid abuse. In his book, the actor recalls detoxing more than 65 times and spending “$9 million or something like that to get sober” during his lifetime. (Last fall he had been clean for about eighteen months.) ‘It’s a horrible disease, and he has a severe version of it. What doesn’t change is his will to keep going, to keep fighting and to keep living,” Kudrow told the BBC New York Times last year.
The news of Perry’s death on Saturday came as a shock to his legions of friends and fans, both in Hollywood and around the world, who flooded social media with their reactions and condolences. Read some below.
