Just over a year later, on May 28, 2010, Gary Coleman died, two days after suffering a head injury in a fall down the stairs at his home in Utah. Plato was married to Lanny Lambert, the father of her son Tyler Lambert, for seven years before they divorced in 1991. (It also wasn't a bad career move for Jodi Foster, who was nominated for an Oscar for 1976's Taxi Driver and has since won two.) She also could've been Regan in The Exorcist, but Plato's mother didn't think it would've been an appropriate working environment for a child. Ironically, she had been offered the role of a teen prostitute that eventually went to a 13-year-old Brooke Shields in 1978's Pretty Baby, but turned it down because she didn't want to be typecast. Plato posed nude for Playboy in 1989 and dabbled in soft-core adult entertainment, anything perhaps to reboot her career. (Against all odds, Bridges, author of Killing Willis: From Diff'rent Strokes to the Mean Streets to the Life I Always Wanted, managed to overcome being a victim of sexual abuse as a kid, drug addiction and going on trial for attempted murder-he was acquitted-and press on in life and his career.)

'If I hadn't gotten caught, it could have been the worst thing that happened to me because I could have died of a drug overdose,' she said in an interview.įrom 1978 until 1984, when she got pregnant and was written out of the show, Plato starred on Diff'rent Strokes as Kimberly Drummond, the big sister to adopted brothers Willis and Arnold, played by Todd Bridges and Gary Coleman, both of whose post- Strokes lives are also the stuff of child-stardom-gone-wrong legend. Plato had actually credited her arrests in the early 1990s (she got probation for the Rx and robbery offenses) for saving her life. Later that month, the deputy state medical examiner ruled Plato's death a suicide she didn't leave a note, but he factored in her history of drug abuse and depression as well as the amount of medication found in her system. The next day, May 8, 1999, Plato died of a toxic combination of the painkiller Lortab (hydrocodone) and the muscle relaxant Soma-both of which she had been prescribed for back pain, lingering complications from injuries suffered in a car crash-at her fiancé's parents' home in Oklahoma.

Stern said she looked fine to him, but while some callers offered words of support, a few accused her of lying about her sobriety, including one who called her an 'ex-druggie, ex-con lesbian with mental-health problems.'

Teen suicide band autograph