Wilford Brimley Remembered by His Our House Co-Star Deidre Hall: 'Heaven Just Got a Lot More Interesting'
Days of Our Lives‘ Deidre Hall is mourning the loss of former Our House co-star Wilford Brimley, who died on Saturday at the age of 85.
From 1986 to 1988, Brimley played family patriarch Gus Witherspoon on the NBC family drama, on which Hall played his widowed daughter-in-law, Jessie. On Instagram Sunday, Hall spoke fondly of the esteemed character actor, referring to his loss as “a great one.”
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“We lost a great one yesterday,” she said. “Every day with Wilford was a life lesson. Heaven just got a lot more interesting.”
Hall wasn’t the only Our House alumna who paid homage to Brimley. His TV granddaughter Shannen Doherty posted that “he was like a grandpa to me for a very long time.” (See her full tribute here.)
Brimley passed away in his Utah home on Saturday morning. He had recently spent days in an ICU hospital unit on dialysis.
His breakthrough role came in 1974, when he was cast in the recurring part of Horace Brimley on The Waltons. He would go on to appear in more than a dozen made-for-TV movies before he found a starring role in Our House, which ran for two seasons. Among his most memorable TV work, though, was a series of ads for Quaker Oats breakfast cereal throughout the 1980s, as well as a string of commercials for the diabetes testing supplies service Liberty Medical.
On the big screen, Brimley appeared in such films as The China Syndrome, The Thing, The Natural and Cocoon. All told, he had more than 70 acting credits to his name.
He is survived by his wife, Beverly, and his three children.
A post shared by Deidre Hall (@deidrehall_official) on Aug 2, 2020 at 8:01am PDT
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