Cosby Show’s Malcolm-Jamal Warner dies at 54 in Costa Rica drowning
Actor known for playing Theo Huxtable was caught in a rip current while swimming in the Caribbean
Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who as teenage son Theo Huxtable on The Cosby Show was central to a cultural phenomenon that helped define the 1980s, died at 54 in an accidental drowning in Costa Rica, authorities there said on Monday.
Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Department said Warner drowned on Sunday afternoon on a beach on Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast. He was swimming at Playa Cocles in Limon province when a current pulled him deeper into the ocean.
“He was rescued by people on the beach,” the department’s initial report said, but first responders from Costa Rica’s Red Cross found him without vital signs and he was taken to the morgue.
Warner created many TV moments etched in the memories of Generation X children and their parents, including a pilot-episode argument with Cosby about grades and careers, and another episode where Theo tries in vain to hide his ear piercing from his dad.
Theo was the only son among four daughters in the household of Cosby’s Cliff Huxtable and Phylicia Rashad’s Clair Huxtable on the NBC sitcom, and he would be one of the prime representations of American teenage life and Black boyhood on a show that was the most popular in America for much of its run from 1984 to 1992.