Melanie Watson Bernhardt’s role on “Diff’rent Strokes” marked one of the first times a disabled actor played a disabled character on television.
Melanie Watson Bernhardt, the actress known as Kathy Gordon on “Diff’rent Strokes,” has died. She was 57.
Watson Bernhardt’s brother, Rob Watson, confirmed the actress died Friday, Dec. 26, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, per TMZ. She had been in the hospital recently, the outlet reports, for bleeding.
The actress was born with osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as brittle bone disorder, a genetic illness and collagen condition that leads to weak bones and related complications like short stature, bone deformities and fractures.
Watson Bernhardt used a wheelchair, and her role opposite Gary Coleman’s Arnold Jackson as his optimistic friend Kathy Gordon on the 1970s and ’80s sitcom provided genuine disability representation to television. She starred on “Diff’rent Strokes” for four episodes from 1981 to 1984.
According to IndieWire, the role was written specifically for her. Two of the episodes were named after her character. In one episode, the pair’s parents convince Arnold that he should encourage Kathy to walk with crutches, despite the character not wanting to.
“I did not want to do that,” she told the outlet, adding that a fall years prior made her fearful of walking. “I can remember saying, ‘This is somebody else’s dream.’ But they explained to me this was the premise of the episode.”
She said her mother told her to just do the scene, and though she did, it disillusioned her from acting, she said. But she added: “I didn’t realize what a gift it was to be the first one out there” as a disabled person playing a disabled character. “If I had to do it all over again I would have stayed in the business.”
Coleman himself suffered from an autoimmune kidney disease, which was treated with medication that led to his short stature at 4 feet 8 inches. He died in 2010 at age 42, after a fall down the stairs at his home.
