Malcolm-Jamal Warner, 'Cosby Show' actor, dies at 54 in Costa Rica drowning

SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) — 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 Monday.

Costa Rica’s Judicial Investigation Department said Warner drowned 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.

Warner worked for more than 40 years as an actor and director, also starring in the sitcoms “Malcolm & Eddie” and “Read Between the Lines,” and in the medical drama “The Resident.”

His final credits came in TV guest roles, including a dramatic four-episode arc last year on the network procedural “9-1-1,” where he played a nurse who was a long-term survivor of a terrible fire.

“I grew up with a maniacal obsession with not wanting to be one of those ‘where are they now kids,’” Warner told The Associated Press in 2015. “I feel very blessed to be able to have all of these avenues of expression ... to be where I am now and finally at a place where I can let go of that worry about having a life after ‘Cosby.’”

He played Theo

Huxtable for eight seasons, appearing in each of the 197 episodes of “The Cosby Show” and earning an Emmy nomination for supporting actor in a comedy in 1986.

Actor Viola Davis was among those giving tribute Monday.

“Theo was OUR son, OUR brother, OUR friend. He was absolutely so familiar, and we rejoiced at how TV got it right!!”, The Oscar winner said on Instagram. “But Malcolm got it right ... we reveled in your life and are gutted by this loss.”

The Cosby legacy

Like the rest of the “Cosby Show” cast, Warner had to contend with the sexual assault allegations against its titular star, whose conviction in a Pennsylvania court was later overturned.
Warner told the Associated Press in 2015 that the show’s legacy was “tarnished.”

“My biggest concern is when it comes to images of people of color on television and film,” Warner said. “We’ve always had ‘The Cosby Show’ to hold up against that. And the fact that we no longer have that, that’s the thing that saddens me the most because in a few generations the Huxtables will have been just a fairy tale.”