Connecticut native Norman Lear dies at 101
Television producer and writer Norman Lear, a native of New Haven, has died at 101, according to a post by his family on his website.
Lear is known for producing some of the most iconic sitcoms in television history, including “All in the Family” and its spinoff, “The Jeffersons,” “One Day At A Time” and “Good Times,” among others.
As an executive producer, Lear was also involved in films like “This is Spinal Tap,” “Stand By Me,” “The Princess Bride” and “Fried Green Tomatoes,” among many others.
Born in 1922 in New Haven, Lear said in his 2014 memoir that he lived in “a small two-bedroom, fourth-floor walk-up with patterned oilcloth on the kitchen table and on the floor” on York Street.
His grandfather, Shia Seicol, who had immigrated to New Haven from Russia in 1904, owned a dress shop in the city, Seicol's.
“My cousin Elaine and I used to take the black cardboard marked ‘Seicol's' and fold it into boxes for which we were paid a penny apiece,” Lear wrote in the memoir. “Ten pennies each got us into a movie — actually two movies, a double feature. A hot dog or corned beef sandwich cost another nickel. With 20 cents, you were rich for the day.”
Lear watched those movies at New Haven's Roger Sherman Theater.
Lear later graduated from Weaver High School in Hartford and attended Emerson College in Boston, before dropping out in 1942 to join the United States Army Air Force.
In a statement on his website, Lear's family said he “lived a life of curiosity, tenacity, and empathy.”
“He deeply loved our country and spent a lifetime helping to preserve its founding ideals of justice and equality for all,” the statement says. “He began his career in the earliest days of live television and discovered a passion for writing about the real lives of Americans, not a glossy ideal.”
Rich Hanley, a Quinnipiac University professor, television writer and documentary filmmaker, said Lear “had an eye and an ear for what would what would do well on television, even at tremendous risk to himself and his career, and to the television executives who green-lit his work.”
“All in the Family,” for example, was subtle social commentary, in the form of a sitcom.
“The show certainly challenged conventional thinking in the way TV was presented, the nuclear family getting into some high jinks, but harmless high jinks,” Hanley said. “That was his greatest legacy. He put the sitcom in a contemporary moment that people related to more so than the conventional sitcom of its era that was very cautious and tread very lightly on topical matters. Lear put contemporary events right in the middle and made them funny.”
Joe Meyers, Norwalk Community College film professor and former Hearst Connecticut Media Group film critic, said Lear “helped to push television on a mature track.”
“I would say ‘All in the Family,' in particular, was a landmark in terms of television dealing with subject matter, and dealing with language and content that hadn't been done before,” Meyers said.
Lear founded the civil liberties advocacy organization People For the American Way in 1981. He was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1975. In 1999, then-President Bill Clinton awarded him the Presidential Medal for the Arts. In 1984, Lear was among the first group inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame.
Lear was active in the film and television industry even after his 100th birthday. Recently he was involved in an animated version of “Good Times” for Netflix, and a continuation of the series “Who's The Boss” that reunites original cast members Tony Danza and Alyssa Milano.
Lear is survived by his wife Lyn Davis Lear; six children — Ellen Lear, Kate Lear, Maggie Lear, Ben Lear, Madeline Lear, Brianna Lear; and four grandchildren.