Dustin Diamond, best known for his recurring role as Samuel “Screech” Powers on Saved By The Bell and its spin-offs, has died. He died on Monday of stage 4 lung cancer, a diagnosis that the actor revealed earlier this month. TMZ first reported the news, and The Hollywood Reporter confirmed it shortly after. He was 44.
Diamond played the sweet, dorky, and curlicued Screech on just about every iteration of Saved By The Bell, from its precursor series Good Morning, Miss Bliss to The College Years to The New Class, in which he played the assistant to Dennis Haskins’ Principal Belding. As a child, Diamond also appeared on TV shows like The Wonder Years, American Playhouse, and The Munsters Today, and in films like Big Top Pee-wee and Purple People Eater.
Diamond was 23 when he left the franchise, and spent much of his adult career playing the bad guy on reality shows like Celebrity Fit Club, Celebrity Boxing 2, and Celebrity Big Brother. He also saw his name in the tabloids after the release of a sex tape, Screeched—Saved by The Smell, and a book, Behind The Bell, that was filled with scandalous stories about his former castmates. He would later claim that a “stunt person” stood in for him in the tape, and that the stories in the book were mostly fabricated by a ghost writer. He was not included in The Tonight Show’s 2015 reunion of the cast, nor in Peacock’s new Saved By The Bell reboot.
He spoke candidly about these topics and others in a 2013 interview with OWN, saying he “was kind of going through my rebellious teens in my 20s.” In a 2016 interview with Extra’s Mario Lopez, his former Saved By The Bell costar, he asked his other former castmates for “forgiveness for any misunderstandings.”
Diamond appeared in a few film roles as an adult—Made, Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star, Pauly Shore Is Dead—though it was usually as a heightened version of himself. His career skidded to a halt, however, after he was convicted of disorderly conduct in 2015 after he stabbed someone with a switchblade in a 2014 bar fight. He served three months in jail.
“I’m proud of the work that I’ve done when I’ve done it,” he told Lopez. “It’s just, how do you come off such a phenom role of this Screech character and break out of that mold and do something different?”
77 Comments
jfc that was fast
The way the news described the treatment when it was first announced he had cancer, this was ADVANCED when they found it. He essentially went straight into hospice care. Awful.
Same thing happened to my mom. But she went to the doctor regularly. They didn’t give her a MRI on her brain. If they did at one of her countless checkups she had they would have caught it early.
My college roommate died of leukemia that was discovered six weeks after she gave birth to her daughter. She was dead six weeks after diagnosis. In all these years I still don’t understand how you can’t realize someone has cancer when they are literally handing over urine and blood samples once a freaking month for nine months.
“Sorry, we weren’t testing for that: insurance doesn’t cover it.”That’s how.
Yep.
I’m really sorry
That’s the bad thing about cancer. In a lot of cases, it can be around for years, just not causing any trouble. Even routine check ups would not notice it. By the time it starts giving you trouble, in many cases, it can be very difficult to treat. Fuck cancer hard.
44 is too young. RIP. And for the eleven millionth time, fuck cancer.
I…understand he had his issues, to put it gently. But even so, cancer is shitty and it ended a life that still had potential. Fuck cancer.
Yeah. Dude needed help for years, clearly, but finally seemed to be acknowledging that in the last several months.Fuck cancer.
Yep. After losing two family members recently to aggressive forms of cancer, it’s certainly not something I’d wish on anyone. R.I.P.
Wasn’t reported ‘earlier this month’, it’s February 1st.
Sorry to be a pedant.
Are you, though?
you’re right. i’m not. because expecting accuracy in journalism isn’t something to be ashamed of, actually.
No you’re not.
yep. see above.
What a shitty deal man. So fucked that cancer can come at you like that with ZERO warning.
While cancer can certainly move fast, I do wonder if this is also a symptom of folks putting off routine medical checks throughout 2020 because of the pandemic. News coverage said he felt body ache and “general unease” at the beginning of the year and that’s what sent him in. Wonder if he was supposed to have an exam in 2020 that he put off, and if so if that would have caught it. I myself was supposed to have my yearly checkup March of last year. Am finally getting around to it this Friday.
That’s certainly a possibility. Makes sense.
If you read any deeper coverage from when he was initially diagnosed, you’ll see he had some symptoms but was sadly afraid to have it checked out. So sad.
god damn 44 is way too young
Afraid because of the people who’d take photos of him visiting the hospital and the way people would make fun of him online specifically (though I’m sure fear of bad news would also play a part). It must be pretty fucking awful to have been a kid going through puberty on a super famous beloved TV show where all your cast mates are loved by the fans but you’re the butt of the joke in the show AND viewed that way in the real world too. Just a shitty situation that fucked him over for life and contributed to even his death.
His representatives/agents released a really wonderful statement about him that basically talked about how his early life experiences on TV did him no favors. The SBTB creator/writer wrote that Dustin was the only actor that he allowed to change his lines to something funnier when they made the movies, which doesn’t seem like it would have been that hard, but nice to say nonetheless.
Yeah, knew a guy, played golf with him a lot on the weekends. He started looking a little pale and lost his appetite. He would hang at happy hour drinking beer though. He went to the doctor and found out he had Stage 4 colon cancer and had a couple months to live…. That sucked.
Same thing happened with my grandfather back in the early 2000s. He was doing great, just bought a new car and was planning a trip but was feeling a bit off and went for a check up. Turned out it was pancreatic cancer and he was gone three weeks later.
I am sorry to hear that. Cancer sucks.
He had small cell lung cancer. There is no known way of catching it early enough to make a difference.You may be right in general, not in this specific case.
Damn, poor guy. IIRC the 5 year survival rate for small cell lung cancer is not even 10%, and that includes the rare patients that have it caught early enough for surgery.
Small cell is a completely different disease than the more common non-small cell. Small cell grows really fast, spreads early and is rarely caught at an early stage when it might be curable. When it is caught early, cure is achieved with chemotherapy and radiation, only occasionally with surgery. Even then, only about a quarter of those people are cured.When caught late, it usually responds very well initially to chemotherapy, shrinking visibly in a matter of days or weeks, but almost invariably comes back in les than a year, at which point treatment is much less effective. Living 2 years is uncommon, much less five.
Yup. My Dad in a nutshell. Not discovered until stage 4 in several places. (Though how they missed it astounds my nurse mom as he went to the doctor regularly for a number of job related health issues and he knew something was off.) Keytruda worked a treat for about 18 months then didn’t. To make matters worse, bad liver tests and several snowstorms delayed any consistent further treatment for months allowing the cancer to have free reign. The ups and downs were enough for him to call an end to it all. He rode out the last two weeks on his terms.
I mentioned in the comments of the original article that my mom died of cancer in 2018, and it was actually the same one – small cell lung cancer. And yeah, she survived for about 10 months during which the chemo and radiation took out all but a tiny speck in her brain, as per a full body MRI. But then that speck went from that to fist sized tumors all through her brain in just over two weeks, and she was gone a few days later. That she didn’t make it wasn’t a surprise, but the speed was just stunning.
I have felt body aches and “general unease” all year, and everything I’ve read (and my doctor confirmed) said this was more likely anxiety at living during a pandemic while an incompetent asshole tried to steal an election, so if those truly were his only symptoms, I can’t totally blame the guy for not going to a doctor (and risking exposure to Covid-19) to be told “it’s all in your head.” But I’d be lying if (after my daughter’s friend’s non-smoking dad died of lung cancer in his late 40’s, and her other friend’s dad now has stage 3+ pancreatic cancer) those hypochondriac thoughts didn’t cross my mind every now and then.
Chest pains drove me to the doctor last year. I suspected anxiety because it wasn’t severe and happened randomly in time and location but I figured that’s something I should be careful about. A bit of blood work and a cardiogram showed that it wasn’t a heart issue, thankfully. And it for the most part stopped after that so I think I was correct.
Glad it was nothing. Truth be told I wasn’t in great shape before the pandemic started and since then my diet has been garbage and I have not been keeping up with exercise… a little nervous about this Friday’s checkup.
I’ve heard about someone I knew casually, who had developed melanoma twice since 2019, the second time with metastasis. It was successfully treated in both cases. Because of the lockdown in France, she delayed a planned checkup for a month. At this point, cancer had recurred and spread so much that even with immunotherapy they weren’t able to contain it. She died this fall, just a couple of days before her 29th birthday.
Holy fuck. Sorry to hear.
That’s definitely true this year, but sadly, it’s always been very normal for people to notice minor, non-specific symptoms and rationalize them away instead of going to the doctor. At 27, it seemed outlandish when google told me some weird symptoms I was having could be caused by cancer. It was only after a very overt lymphoma symptom literally popped up months later— an enlarged lymph node in my neck — that it dawned on me that something serious was going on. I was just oblivious, but there are many who actually have an inkling of what’s going on but can only cope by denying it to themselves. They can explain away a persistent cough, a weird rash, an area that’s grown sensitive because the idea of naming it and treating it is overwhelming.
Obviously this is a much different experience, given that Diamond was (by all accounts) an otherwise relatively healthy person of young age, but when my grandfather got lung cancer it also started as just a mild back ache. He first complained of it in September, finally got someone to order the relevant tests in October, and was dead before Christmas. Stage 4 cancer usually goes pretty fast.
About how it recently took my mum, and a few years ago, my friend’s perfectly healthy father.
In the past couple of years I’ve lost two uncles to aggressive forms of cancer. I felt so bad for one in particular because he was struggling to afford even the most basic of treatments, and a granchild was due the year he passed.
Honestly, now being old enough that I’ve seen a few friends go? If you’re going to get cancer relatively young (which basically always means it’s going to be seriously aggressive), “oops, sorry, better settle your affairs, here’s a morphine prescription” and dead a few weeks later seems like a much better way to go out than the alternative, which is months to years of agonizing and debilitating “treatments” that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy, followed by dying anyway.RIP Mr. Diamond, who seemed to have only intermittant peace in life. You deserved better.
Part of me thinks that’s true. Part of me thinks that if I had 2 months to spend with my husband and kids or 12 months, I’d take the 12 no matter how shitty they were.
Yeah, that’s the thing. If you have a choice on the table, you’re going to take “more life” and you’re gonna take it at any cost, especially if you have kids. You’ll do it, I’ll do it, everyone does it.But.. it’s not good. The goal of most cancer treatments is “kill the cancer 1% faster than you’re killing the patient.” We do insane things to people in the name of extending their life through a cancer diagnosis and a lot of the time it’s not clear if we’re actually extending their life much if at all. (I recommend Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal on the subject, although I couldn’t describe it as a fun read.)So I think there’s something to be said for the case of being told “The last two years of your life? That was actually the ‘fighting cancer’ part and you didn’t even know it and probably had a much better time for not knowing it. Now we prioritize your comfort.”
Oh, definitely. I think people who choose the longer option are incredibly selfless. But it’s hard to watch that, even if (especially if) you’re the person they’re staying alive for. Watching my grandmother deteriorate over three years was so hard, and when she died all we could feel was relief.I mentioned it elsewhere on this thread, but my college roommate was diagnosed with cancer when her baby was six weeks old. Obviously in that scenario the only thing to do is choose to fight, no matter what, for even the smallest hope you get to watch your kid grow up. She died 8 weeks after diagnosis, and half of those weeks she was in the ICU and couldn’t see her child.
I remember when the news broke a few weeks ago that he had ‘stage 4 cancer’, which didn’t reference an initial site and even then included language about ‘keeping him comfortable’, so I was afraid this was coming. RIP.
That’s scary. RIP, man.
Such sad news. Both Dustin and Screech deserved better.
This is really sad news. Not just because he was so young – and Jesus Christ, he was – but because he clearly had a difficult life and was trying to make amends with it, and seemed well on his way to doing that. RIP
This is sad. I grew up watching Saved by the Bell and only know him through those series. Thanks to his portrayal of Screech, I was able to better accept, at a fairly early age, that I was weird and that’s ok. People should love you for who you are. Ok, I had to learn that lesson multiple times in life.Yeah, Dustin Diamond the person had his issues, but I’ve found some sympathy for him there. Child actor, youngest of the cast of hot teen stars and generally cast aside, likely typecast thereafter, and the contract he and his costars received had nothing in the way off residuals. The best thing in your life can come with some weight to it, too.
RIP, for all of his misguided adult choices, he seemed like he still had a good time. I mean he was in a jam band called Salty the Pocketknife…
Welfare check on Lisa Turtle
44 is way too young. RIP Dustin.
Sadly he’d become a prime example of someone seemingly fucked up by the wages of medium fame. Never thought of Diamond as someone who’d have a career resurgence, but always hoped he’d find some kind of contentment.
Obviously a 44 year old dying of cancer is sad, but as celebrities deaths go, dying young of cancer and leaving a legacy of bad television, noxious publicity, and violent crime is pretty heartbreaking. Especially for a child star.
Yeah, like his was a redemption story that failed to reach the third act.
imagine if RDJ had died before Iron Man. That’s essentially the story we’re seeing here; he never got the chance to turn it back around.
recurring roleStarring role* in an ensemble cast
Damn. Dude has his issues, but he didn’t deserve this.
I was afraid of that. R.I.P.
I thought the next few months were going to be rough due to COVID. Turns out, it’ll be finding another go-to punchline that isn’t “something something Screech.”
The episode of Your Pretty Face is Going to Hell he was in was actually pretty stellar, but I also just adore that show.
I only saw that episode for the first time on Sunday, and he was actually pretty funny in it , but damn 44 is way to young.
He had a rough life but I think if nothing else, he tried to live it to the fullest. Zichrono Livracha
My husband had similar feelings of malaise for some months, was wheezing, finally went to a pulmonary specialist and found he had a malignant tumor in between his lungs, thus inoperable. He did chemo and radiation but was gone in a little over a year, not yet 60. As my birthdays rack up I am grateful for every one.
Say what you will about his personality and life choices, that is a fucking brutal way to go. He didn’t deserve that. RIP.
Will “The Samuel Powers Rhythm 3″ change their name out of respect?I doubt it!www.TheSPR3.com
Looks like his life came to……wait for it……a Screeching halt.
*readies The Hook*
A dead random dude I vaguely recognize from a job he had many years ago. At best this is neither any more nor any less tragic than if one of us died on the younger side. Why all the hand-wringing? Moving on now.
. . . good for you?
.
This is sad to see. He had his issues, but no one deserves this. (My dad and two of my closest friends have all died of cancer, but I’m not going to say “fuck cancer” because I can’t imagine cancer is reading this.)
I bet he regrets mocking a little girl dying of cancer now, huh?
This is hitting hard. Not particularly because of Diamond (though I did grow up watching SBTB and we’re very close in age) but damn, he went fast. My grandfather had complained of a mild back ache in September and died of lung cancer three months later. It’s fucking hell to lose someone you love that quickly and watch them deteriorate basically overnight when just a few weeks earlier they were living their normal life, feeling fine. Fucking cancer.
I feel bad for him and what happened. He is basically the case against child stardom (with Lindsay Lohan). He was forever known for a gig he did as a freakin kid..that had to be hard enough. Then he never left the industry maybe because he had no other education or skills and had to make a living goofing of a gig..he had as a freakin kid. He should have done literally anything else with his short life than what he has done the last twenty years. Go be a teacher or a salesperson or anything. When you reach adulthood and it is not happening for you, get out man.It is sad.
Hope he can rest in peace if you believe that sort of thing.