TV star Chandler Bing aka Matthew Perry has died aged 54 of an apparent drowning in his home.
Perry is best known for his role as Chandler Bing of the NBC hit comedy “Friends.” which earned him a Screen Actors Guild Award for the role.
LA Police say he was found unresponsive in his Pacific Palisades home around 4 pm Saturday, Oct 28. Foul play is not suspected and investigations have been launched.
Perry was cast in Friends, the sitcom that shot him to fame, at age 24. He starred as Chandler for the sitcom's entire 10-season run, a sarcastic yet affable commitment-phobe who later found love with the Type-A Monica Geller (Courteney Cox).
Perry was open about his struggles with alcohol and other substances. He extensively spoke of it in his memoir Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing.
According to NPR.org, Perry dedicated the book to fellow sufferers of addiction, where he detailed his painful struggle with drug use and his related health problems: He said he'd spent half of his life in treatment, detoxed an estimated 65 times, and underwent 14 surgeries.
"Whenever I bumped into something that I didn't really want to share, I would think of the people that I would be helping, and it would keep me going," the actor told The New York Times last year.
While on set, Perry said he tried to keep his addiction hidden and described his unhealthy relationship with his work.
"I felt like I was gonna die if the live audience didn't laugh, and that's not healthy for sure," Perry wrote in the memoir. "But I could sometimes say a line and the audience wouldn't laugh and I would sweat and sometimes go into convulsions. If I didn't get the laugh I was supposed to get I would freak out. I felt that every single night. This pressure left me in a bad place. I also knew of the six people making that show, only one of them was sick."
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