Gary Coleman | Life, TV Series, Facts, & Death | Britannica (2025)

Gary Coleman (born February 8, 1968, Zion, Illinois, U.S.—died May 28, 2010, Provo, Utah) was an American child star known for his small stature. He was best known for starring in the situation comedy television series Diff’rent Strokes (1978–86).

Coleman was adopted as a baby by Edmonia Sue Coleman, a nurse practitioner, and W.G. Coleman, a pharmaceutical company representative. He had been diagnosed with various medical issues at birth, including a potentially fatal form of the kidney disorder nephritis. As a result of treatment for that condition, he attained an adult height of only 4 feet 8 inches (1.4 metres). Because of his small stature, he often played characters who were much younger than he was.

When Coleman was a young boy, he appeared in a television commercial for a bank in Chicago. That commercial brought him to the attention of agents in Hollywood, and he was subsequently cast in Diff’rent Strokes. He portrayed the younger of two impoverished African American brothers adopted by a wealthy white businessman after their mother dies. As the precocious chubby-cheeked Arnold Jackson, Coleman was usually at the centre of the show’s comic capers, many of which also involved his on-screen brother, Willis (Todd Bridges), and the businessman’s daughter, Kimberly (Dana Plato). “Whatchoo talkin’ ’bout, Willis?,” spoken often by Coleman’s character, became a popular catchphrase in the 1970s and ’80s.

At the age of 10, Coleman formed the company Gary Coleman Productions. His parents wrote themselves into his contract as paid employees. After Diff’rent Strokes was canceled in 1986, Coleman appeared only occasionally on television series and in movies, either as himself or as a minor character. When Coleman was nearly 18, he turned to his trust fund but found that his earnings, which had once totaled almost $18 million, had been depleted to $220,000. He sued his parents and his business manager for allegedly stealing from his earnings and won a settlement of $1.3 million, a fraction of the fund’s anticipated balance.

Coleman supplemented his income with odd jobs, including work as a security guard, when he struggled to find acting roles. He later admitted that he had attempted suicide multiple times following the court fight with his parents. Coleman was also known for his hot temper, and in the 1990s he was involved in multiple high-profile court cases centring on assault. In 2007 he was arrested for disorderly conduct involving a public argument with his then wife, Shannon Price. The following year Coleman and Price appeared on the reality TV show Divorce Court. In 2022 American comic actress Molly Shannon alleged that Coleman had sexually harassed her in a meeting when she was younger.

In 2010 Coleman suffered a seizure on the set of the television show The Insider. After falling and hitting his head in May of that year, he was admitted to the Utah Valley Regional Medical Center (now Utah Valley Hospital) in Provo, Utah, where he died of a brain hemorrhage.