Earlier than the world knew Suzanne Somers because the ThighMaster entrepreneur, she performed Chrissy Snow on “Three’s Firm,” for 5 seasons of the hit present, which aired from 1977 to 1984. However in 1981, she was fired for demanding the identical pay as her male colleague and sequence star, John Ritter, which might have bumped her pay from $30,000 an episode to $150,000, plus a proportion of the present’s earnings, per Fox Information.
“At the moment, the lads had been making 10 to fifteen instances greater than I used to be,” Somers informed Fox in an interview final 12 months. “And I used to be on the No. 1 present. It simply appeared flawed as a result of I used to be clearly being underpaid.”
Somers, who handed away at age 76 on Sunday, was an equal pay pioneer — and took a number of backlash for it.
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ABC refused to satisfy her calls for and slowly phased her out of the present. Her final episode was on the finish of the present’s fifth season.
“Now, I used to be out of labor and labeled ‘hassle’ solely as a result of I wished to be paid pretty for doing my job,” she mentioned.
After getting over “the shock and the harm and the anger,” Somers remembered that there was nice energy to her identify that now had “huge visibility.”
“I used to be portrayed as grasping and ‘Who does she assume she is?’ and was persona non grata in tv,” Somers recalled.
She went on to cement a Las Vegas residency on the MGM Grand shortly after her exit from the present. “We did unbelievable enterprise and my stage profession was began,” she mentioned in 2016 to the Las Vegas Assessment-Journal.
Her residency was reduce brief attributable to a fireplace on the MGM Grand, however she went on to star in Las Vegas Hilton’s “Moulin Rouge” present for 2 years.
However following her stint on stage, Somers turned her consideration to entrepreneurship and have become a model ambassador for an at-home train system referred to as the ThighMaster. She turned identified for her infomercials, with one notably memorable for that includes her in excessive heels and exercise put on.
She bought 10 million ThighMasters within the first two years, in response to Fox. Whereas she stopped counting what number of she bought, she mentioned she made $300 million from the deal.
Throughout a March 2022 interview with “The Hollywood Uncooked Podcast,” she mentioned she purchased out the corporate, which was developed by tobacco inheritor Joshua Reynolds, and owns 100% of the ThighMaster enterprise.
“We had companions — 50/50 — they usually obtained drunk on cash when it began promoting,” she mentioned through the interview. “They overspent to the purpose the place they might not afford to be of their facet of the enterprise, so we purchased them out.”
She went on to develop her personal merchandise underneath her identify starting from clothes, jewellery, and well being and wellness merchandise. She was one of many top-selling manufacturers on the House Procuring Community in 1992, and since then, her enterprise has remained in operation and she or he nonetheless sells merchandise on her web site at the moment.
“I’ve over a thousand merchandise,” she informed Fox Information Digital in Might 2022, including that she additionally printed 27 books, 14 of which had been greatest sellers.
“Would I’ve wished to do it this fashion? No, however I allowed it to take me and us the place it wished to go,” she informed Fox. My largest criticism at the moment is that I work an excessive amount of. I am all the time preserving busy.”
At her time of dying, Somers had a reported internet value of $100 million.