NPR:
Actor Matthew Perry, best known for playing Chandler Bing on the hit TV show Friends, has died, according to multiple media outlets. He was 54 years old.
Perry was found dead of an apparent drowning at his Los Angeles home on Saturday, according to the Los Angeles Times, celebrity outlet TMZ and other reports.
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).
"I loved Chandler, I loved the show, and I also knew: Remember this, because it's going to be the best time of your life," Perry said in an ABC News Nightline interview with Diane Sawyer last year.
But behind the scenes, Perry struggled with addiction. He opened up about his decades-long excessive use of alcohol and pills in his memoir published last year, Friends, Lovers and the Big Terrible Thing. In the book, which he dedicated to fellow sufferers of addiction, 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
I first saw the report on Al Jazeera. They had one sentence. There are so many other deaths in the world right now, and each individual, whether known or unknown, left a mark in this life.
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