On October 15, 2023, the day before her 77th birthday, fans were heartbroken to learn that film and television personality Suzanne Somers had passed away after a multi-year battle with breast cancer. Here, we’re taking a look back at a storied career spanning five decades, and some of the best received projects in her catalog of work.

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American Graffiti 

Four years before everyone watched Star Wars and three years after nobody saw THX-1138, a young George Lucas directed American Graffiti, a feel-good nostalgia flashback to the early ‘60s that you absolutely watched if you took a filmmaking class at a community college. Showered with Academy Award nominations and a perennial American Film Institute favorite, it holds a special place in cinema history.

Somers’ contributions to American Graffiti weren’t earth-shaking. Her character is credited as “Blonde in T-Bird,” so she wasn’t exactly blowing up the 1962 Americana Death Star. Even so, the film had a profound effect on cinema, and the blonde in the T-Bird had a profound effect on Richard Dreyfus’ Curt. In equal part, the role had an effect on Somers herself, who named her 2005 one-woman show The Blonde in the Thunderbird.

Three’s Company

You know how times change, and tastes change, and sensibilities change over time? Three’s Company, the American adaptation of the British sitcom Man About the House, was, at its core, a show about a guy pretending to be gay so that his landlord would let him live with two women. It’s a tough sell by contemporary standards.

It was also one of the biggest, most successful, and beloved sitcoms of its time when it premiered in 1977, and it turned its stars into celebrities almost overnight. Somers became impossible to separate from the character of Chrissy Snow, a role which she landed the day before shooting the show’s pilot episode.

The fame Somers accumulated in her time on Three’s Company was only equaled by her infamous exit from the show following its fifth season. After her demands for a 500 percent pay increase weren’t met, she was met with a precipitous drop in screen time, then let go.

Step by Step

It was the 1990s, and ABC’s block of T.G.I.F. programming was the best place to pull up a hypercolor bean bag chair and sip a Surge Cola on a Friday night. In a field populated with a thousand predominantly white TV families, few shows offered quite the same cable knit sweater density as Step by Step.

Premiering in 1991, Step by Step lasted 160 episodes, and told the story of two single parents blending their families into a cohesive unit. The mom, Carol Foster, was played by Somers for six seasons at ABC and a seventh when the show moved to CBS.

Serial Mom

John Waters movies sort of fit into two rough categories: the ones you can watch on a date after you’ve been seeing someone for a couple of months, and the ones that you never watch on any date, ever. Serial Mom is part of the first group – a campy, bizarre piece of Burton-adjacent violence and depravity, a posthumous Divine cameo short of being as weird as it could have been. At this point in her career, Suzanne Somers was arguably most famous for either her bevy of TV movies, or for being Suzanne Somers. It only makes sense, therefore, that she plays herself in the film, recently cast as the TV movie version of the story’s main character. Waters, you scamp.

The Suzanne Show

In 2012, Somers made the jump to daytime TV, hosting a talk show named after her very own self: The Suzanne Show. The series only lasted a year, and it wasn’t met with universal acclaim — Somers’ hot takes on issues of health and medicine were singled out as particularly problematic — but it earned its host a Daytime Emmy nomination for “Outstanding Host in a Lifestyle/Travel Program,” and that’s not nothing.