Pat Loud, TV reality star on ‘Family,’ dies

Pat Loud, a California homemaker who became known to millions of television viewers in the 1970s as the matriarch of “An American Family,” a PBS documentary series that was by turns celebrated and blamed for ushering in the era of reality TV with its frank depiction of her private life, died Jan. 10 at her home in Los Angeles. She was 94.

Her family announced her death in a Facebook post that did not cite a specific cause.

Created by television producer Craig Gilbert, “An American Family” was a sensation when it aired over 12 one-hour installments in 1973. Decades before the Kardashians became famous for being famous, or the Gosselins of “Jon & Kate Plus 8” announced their divorce, Loud and her then-husband, Bill Loud, allowed a camera crew to film their daily lives with their five children for 300 hours over seven months in 1971.

“We asked the kids, and they all agreed,” she told The New York Times in 2013. “It seemed like a fun thing to do.”

At the time, many American viewers still turned on the television expecting the idyllic presentations of family life that they had reliably found in sitcoms such as “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” both of which ended in 1966.

“An American Family” was something else entirely. Filmed in a cinema verité style, it followed the Louds of Santa Barbara through events both ordinary and monumental, among them a wildfire that menaced their house, Loud’s decision to divorce her philandering husband, and the revelation that their oldest son, Lance, was gay.

Gilbert, who died in April, told The Times that he encountered no shortage of subjects willing to participate in his project to document the everyday life and struggles of an American family. He selected the Louds, he said, because they were an “attractive couple” with “attractive” children.

An enduring legacy of the show was its sympathetic presentation of Lance Loud, who, by coming out, became one of the first openly gay people to appear on television. Years later he contracted HIV and, over his mother’s initial objections, invited a camera crew to film “Lance Loud!: A Death in an American Family,” a TV documentary that aired on PBS in 2003, two years after he died of hepatitis C.

The Louds appeared in the 1983 HBO special “An American Family Revisited: The Louds 10 Years Later” and were depicted in the 2011 HBO movie “Cinema Verite,” a dramatization of the making of “An American Family” in which Diane Lane played Loud, Tim Robbins played her husband and James Gandolfini played Gilbert.