He played the Big Ragu on ‘Laverne & Shirley,’ featured in many popular TV shows and movies
Longtime “Laverne & Shirley” actor Eddie Mekka was reportedly discovered dead last Saturday at his California home.
He was 69.
Mekka, who portrayed Carmine Ragusa on the popular sitcom, had battled blood clots recently, his brother told TMZ.
Authorities went to Mekka’s home in Newhall after receiving reports that Mekka had been out of contact for multiple days.
Mekka appeared on 150 episodes of “Laverne & Shirley” between 1976 and 1983, playing the character known as the Big Ragu on the series, which was a spinoff of “Happy Days.”
His character, who dated
Shirley on the show, was a boxer who aspired to be a professional singer and dancer. Mekka also portrayed Carmine on multiple episodes of “Happy Days.”
Mekka acted in dozens of TV shows and films over the course of an entertainment career that spanned four decades.
He portrayed multiple characters on popular series “The Love Boat,” “Fantasy Island” and “Family Matters,” and appeared in high-profile movies such as “A League of Their Own” and “Dreamgirls.”
His final acting credit came in the 2018 football comedy flick “Hail Mary!”
Mekka had recently gone to the hospital and was struggling to walk due to the blood clots, his brother,
She received further acclaim for “A Season in the Life of Emmanuel” (1965), perhaps her bestknown novel, about a rural French Canadian family and the birth of their 16th child. The family is so large that one unlucky boy is known simply as Number Seven, for his birth order. His siblings include Heloise, who joins a brothel; Pomme, who loses three fingers at a shoe factory; and the brilliant but consumptive Jean-Le Maigre, who writes poetry on sheets that his grandmother repurposes as toilet paper.
Although Blais said she struggled to finish the novel, feeling “completely defeated, broken” at times while trying to bring her characters to life, “Emmanuel” earned the Prix Médicis in France and was translated into a dozen languages.
“Somehow Blais manages
Warren Mekjian, told TMZ, which reports there was no evidence of foul play.
“A sad goodbye to Eddie Mekka this morning,” Michael McKean, who played Lenny Kosnowski on “Laverne & Shirley,” tweeted Thursday.
“A genuinely good guy and purveyor of cheer whenever things got cheerless. Value these people. RIP, Eddie.” to oppose and offset an unyielding realism with imagination, humor and a carnal innocence,” a Kirkus reviewer wrote. “Her book succeeds, incomparably, in capturing not only an existence but a sense of life.”
The oldest of five children, Marie-Claire Blais was born into a workingclass family in Quebec
City on Oct. 5, 1939. She was educated at a convent before leaving school at 15 to work as a clerk and typist.
On the side, she took classes at Université Laval, where her literary talent was noticed by Jeanne Lapointe, a professor and literary critic, and Georges-Henri Lévesque, a priest and sociologist. Their support helped her publish her first novel and obtain a Canada Council for the Arts grant, allowing her to begin writing full-time.
Blais soon moved to Paris and then the United States, where Wilson introduced her to a circle of writers and artists on Cape Cod, including painter and writer Mary Meigs and feminist Barbara Deming. The three women lived together for six years, and Blais remained a longtime partner of Meigs, who died in 2002.
Survivors include two brothers and two sisters, according to her agent, Patrick Leimgruber.
Blais’s other novels included “The Manuscripts of Pauline Archange” (1968) and “Deaf to the City” (1979), which both won the Governor
General’s Prize. She was also honored for “Soifs” (1995), which was translated into English as “These Festive Nights” and kicked off her 10volume series, set in an island town reminiscent of Key West.
The “Soifs” novels featured hundreds of characters, many of whom were modeled after drag queens, barflies, writers and painters that Blais met on the island, where she was part of a community of authors that included poet James Merrill and journalist John Hersey. Near the center of the cycle is a recurring character named Daniel, a middle-aged writer working on a multivolume series of his own.
The books were written in long, meandering sentences that became a trademark of Blais’s work in recent decades, inspired partly by what she described as “the acceleration of our lives.” The technique also served to bring her characters closer together, as Blais stitched together snatches of dialogue and internal monologues, moving freely between points of view.
“I became more and more in the habit of this kind of inner song that goes from you and I to them,” she told the Globe and Mail. “It gives a feeling of a complete humanity, that we know we are all alike because we are all living dramas.” She added, “It seems important to me in these books to go in the direction that we are all so collective.”