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Actor and comedian Bob Saget dies at 65

Actor and comedian Bob Saget, pictured in November 2021, has died at age 65.
Phillip Faraone
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Actor and comedian Bob Saget, pictured in November 2021, has died at age 65.

Updated January 9, 2022 at 10:06 PM ET

Actor, comedian and director Bob Saget has died at age 65.

The Orange County Sheriff's Office in Florida said deputies were called to the Ritz-Carlton in Orlando on Sunday after an unresponsive man was found in a hotel room.

"The man was identified as Robert Saget & pronounced deceased on scene. Detectives found no signs of foul play or drug use in this case," the sheriff's office said. Saget was on tour and had done a show near Jacksonville a day earlier.

Saget was a prominent presence on American television screens throughout the 1990s as the father Danny Tanner on Full House and the host of America's Funniest Home Videos.

He was also the narrator on the show How I Met Your Mother from 2005 to 2014 and reprised the Danny Tanner role on the Netflix reboot Fuller House between 2016 and 2020. And Saget often played himself or parodies of himself in one-time or recurring roles in TV shows and movies.

Tributes poured in on social media from Saget's co-stars and friends.

"I am broken. I am gutted. I am in complete and utter shock. I will never ever have another friend like him. I love you so much Bobby," wrote John Stamos, a Full House co-star.

TV producer Norman Lear said Saget was a close friend who "was as lovely a human as he was funny. And to my mind, he was hilarious."

"I don't even know what to say about Bob Saget. I loved him and was so lucky to work with someone so funny, soulful and kind," said How I Met Your Mother co-creator Craig Thomas.

Saget also had credits as a director, with his most notable being the cult favorite movie Dirty Work from 1998 with Norm Macdonald.

His stand-up comedy was the opposite of his wholesome on-screen persona

Saget was a stand-up comedian as well, having started at age 17, he wrote in his 2014 memoir Dirty Daddy. His jokes were known to be dirty — a marked contrast to his Full House character's loving and wholesome father persona.

"In my career I've had the fortune of being able to work continually in radically diverse creative worlds," he wrote. "By day I've done some of the most family-friendly TV imaginable. Then, often in the same day, I've gone onstage in the L.A. comedy clubs and whirled off with an adolescent's delight about my grandma's projectile diarrhea."

Saget's 2014 comedy album That's What I'm Talkin' About was nominated for a Grammy.

Saget also advocated for people facing scleroderma, a chronic autoimmune disease. His sister, Gay Saget, died of the disease in her 40s.

In his memoir, Saget said jokes have helped him deal with tragedy. And he offered what could have been his own parting words in the book's introduction.

"The goal of living a full life is so, at its end, you'll have learned some things along the journey," he wrote. "I'm nowhere near the end yet, but I've already had some incredible experiences. I've met and worked with some amazing people, I've lived, I've loved, I've cried ... and through it all, I did it my way."

Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

James Doubek is an associate editor and reporter for NPR. He frequently covers breaking news for NPR.org and NPR's hourly newscast. In 2018, he reported feature stories for NPR's business desk on topics including electric scooters, cryptocurrency, and small business owners who lost out when Amazon made a deal with Apple.