Actor Gary Coleman may have lived a life of strange and often sad twists, but in death his legacy seems to have taken even stranger turns. Reports of death photos for sale, multiple wills, and a canceled funeral due to family bickering have added to the drama of a once promising child star on Diff’rent Strokes who peaked too soon and was never able to stage a successful comeback.
Coleman’s ex-wife filed a petition on Thursday in court to be appointed as the special administrator of the former child actor’s estate.
The petition said even though Coleman and Shannon Price were divorced in August 2008, she is still his common law wife and that she should be the one to make funeral arrangements. It wasn’t publicly known that the two were divorced until after his death. The divorce papers were sealed in Utah courts.
Price referred to Coleman as her husband when she called for help on May 26, saying the actor had fallen and was bleeding severely from the back of his head.
Coleman died on May 28 after suffering a brain hemorrhage and his last-known will names friend and former manager Dion Mial as his estate’s executor.
Coleman said in the 1999 will that
he wanted to be remembered in a wake conducted by people who had
no financial ties to the star of the
sitcom Diff’rent Strokes. However, documents filed by Price’s attorneys say they have an unsigned will drawn up in 2005 that names Price as the conservator of his estate.
Among the exhibits attached to Price’s affidavit is a 2007 handwritten note with Coleman’s signature that’s intended to amend any earlier wills
and name Price as the sole heir of
his earnings, home, toy trains and
other property.
Coleman met Price in 2005 on the set of the movie Church Ball. The documents said Price and Coleman lived together at his Santaquin home south of Salt Lake City until his death, maintained joint bank accounts and had sexual relations.
The couple “assumed all marital rights, duties and obligations consistent with a marital relationship after the decree was entered,” including filing taxes as a married couple.
Kent Alderman, Mial’s attorney, said he had not read Price’s filing, which seeks to block Mial from making any burial or financial decisions related to the estate.
He called the argument that Price is still Coleman’s common law wife “an interesting theory.” “I just don’t know how a court would find on that question,” he said.
Coleman was still conscious when he was taken to a hospital in Provo, Utah, but slipped into unconsciousness the next day and was placed on life support. It was Price — named in an advanced health care directive — who ordered that he be taken off it.
Coleman starred for eight seasons on the sitcom Diff’rent Strokes, starting in 1978. The tiny 10-year-old’s “Whachu talkin’ ‘bout?” became a catchphrase in the show about two African American brothers adopted by a wealthy white man. He played Arnold Jackson, the younger of the two brothers.
In news of a separate dispute involving a celebrity, the family of a 17-year-old teenager has accused Oscar winner Jodie Foster of being rough with the boy after he snapped photographs of the actress and her sons outside a movie theater.
Foster’s spokeswoman fired back on Friday that the “young man was most definitely a professional paparazzo.”
“She did touch him on the arm to try to take him aside to talk to him and tell him to stop” taking pictures, the actress’ spokeswoman, Jennifer Allen, said.
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