One-time youngster actor Adam Rich, who starred within the Nineteen Seventies TV present Eight is Enough,” walks out of a sheriff’s station after posting bail in City of Industry, Calif., in 2002.

Jean-Marc Bouju/AP

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One-time youngster actor Adam Rich, who starred within the Nineteen Seventies TV present Eight is Enough,” walks out of a sheriff’s station after posting bail in City of Industry, Calif., in 2002.

Jean-Marc Bouju/AP

LOS ANGELES — Adam Rich, the kid actor with a pageboy mop-top who charmed TV audiences as “America’s little brother” on Eight Is Enough, has died. He was 54.

Rich died Saturday at his dwelling within the Brentwood part of Los Angeles, mentioned Lt. Aimee Earl of the Los Angeles County Medical-Examiner Coroner’s workplace. The reason behind loss of life was underneath investigation however was not thought-about to be suspicious.

Rich had a restricted appearing profession after starring at age 8 as Nicholas Bradford, the youngest of eight kids, on the ABC hit dramedy that ran from from 1977 to 1981.

He had a number of run-ins with police associated to medication and alcohol — and sought remedy on the Betty Ford Center in Rancho Mirage.

Rich suffered from a sort of despair that defied remedy and he had tried to erase the stigma of speaking about psychological sickness, mentioned publicist Danny Deraney. He unsuccessfully tried experimental cures over time.

Deraney mentioned he and others near Rich have been fearful in current weeks after they could not attain him.

Former Eight Is Enough youngster actor Adam Rich seems in a Van Nuys, Calif., courtroom on Aug. 20, 1991.

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Former Eight Is Enough youngster actor Adam Rich seems in a Van Nuys, Calif., courtroom on Aug. 20, 1991.

Nick Ut/AP

“He was just a very kind, generous, loving soul,” Deraney instructed The Associated Press. “Being a famous actor is not necessarily what he wanted to be. … He had no ego, not an ounce of it.”

Rich mentioned his psychological well being on Twitter and famous in October that he’d been sober for seven years. He mentioned he wasn’t excellent — referring to arrests, many stints in rehab, a number of overdoses and “countless detoxes (and) relapses” — and urged his practically 19,000 followers to by no means hand over.

“Human beings weren’t built to endure mental illness,” Rich tweeted in September. “The mere fact that some people consider those to be weak, or have a lack of will is totally laughable … because it’s the total opposite! It’s takes a very, very strong person … a warrior if you will … to battle such illnesses.”

Rich posted an image of himself from his heyday with one-time youngster star Mickey Rooney.

“Everyone used to say to me, ‘You are the modern day Mickey Rooney,'” he tweeted. “But when Mickey Rooney told me that himself, it meant a helluva a lot more to me!”

Nearly 27 years in the past, Rich participated in a hoax that Might journal revealed concerning the actor getting killed in a theft outdoors a Los Angeles nightclub in 1996. The article within the little-known journal was meant as a satire of America’s movie star obsession however fizzled when the spoof was revealed.

“I think we were a little too subtle. People were not getting the joke,” Rich later instructed the Chicago Tribune. “I don’t want to be dead.”

Rich was the little brother to a technology of TV viewers because the mop-top son of a newspaper columnist performed by Dick Van Patten, who has to lift eight kids alone after his spouse within the present — and the actress who performed her — died throughout filming of the primary season.

Rich starred within the collection Code Red from 1981-82 and voiced the character of Presto the Magician on Dungeons & Dragons from 1983-85, in line with IMDB.com. He reprised his best-known function in two Eight Is Enough TV film reunions.

But the steadiness of his appearing profession was in single-episode appearances on a number of the hottest TV reveals of the time: The Love Boat, The Six Million Dollar Man, Silver Spoons, and Baywatch. His most up-to-date credit score listed on IMDB was enjoying Crocodile Dundee on Reel Comedy in 2003.