Louie Anderson, a beloved stand-up comic, TV host, and Emmy-winning actor, died on Friday morning at the age of 68. Anderson passed away in a Las Vegas hospital where he had been receiving treatment for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, a form of cancer, his longtime publicist, Glenn Schwartz, confirmed to Deadline.
Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, Anderson was the second youngest of 11 children. He broke out into the comedy scene in 1984 with an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. That was followed by parts in mainstream 1980s comedies including Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Quicksilver, and Coming to America. Anderson would reprise his role as the ambitious McDowell’s employee Maurice in the 2021 sequel and for two episodes of Lena Waithe’s series Twenties.
Anderson channeled his boisterous childhood into the Fox animated series Life With Louie, which he created and starred in from 1995 to 1998. The actor played both a fictionalized version of his 8-year-old self and his father, winning two acting Daytime Emmys for the performance. In 1996, Anderson created and headlined The Louie Show, a CBS sitcom that was canceled after just six episodes. But he rebounded in 1999, hosting a revival of the syndicated game show Family Feud until 2002.
Baskets, an FX comedy created by Zach Galifianakis, Louis C.K., and Jonathan Krisel, would offer Anderson his most memorable character. He was cast as Christine, the mother of Galifianakis’s twins, Chip and Dale Baskets. Anderson’s performance was inspired by his own mother, who died in 1990. He would win an Emmy for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series in 2016 and earn nominations for three years in a row.
“Maybe I’ll sound silly with this, but it seemed like I was made to play this part,” Anderson told Vanity Fair of Christine in 2016. “You know? That sounds so crazy. I think everybody knows their feminine side. I think, whether they’ve thought about it or not—I’m really making these too complicated. I didn’t add one thing that wasn’t real about me to Christine.”
Anderson was also an accomplished author, writing Dear Dad: Letters From an Adult Child, a series of letters to his late father published in 1989, 1993’s Goodbye Jumbo…Hello Cruel World, 2002’s The F Word: How to Survive Your Family, and 2018’s Hey Mom: Stories for My Mother, but You Can Read Them Too. His survivors include two sisters, Lisa and Shanna Anderson.
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