Personal Life
Urich was of Rusyn and Slovak extraction and raised Byzantine Catholic and Roman Catholic in the small town of Toronto, Ohio, where he is honored with the Robert Urich Interchange leading to State Route 7. Due to the similarity in names with Toronto, Ontario, many sources list him incorrectly as being a Canadian. His second wife, actress Heather Menzies, actually is a Canadian from the latter city.
Urich attended Florida State University on a football scholarship. In 1968, he earned a bachelor's degree in Radio and Television Communications. While attending, he joined Lambda Chi Alpha Fraternity. He went on to Michigan State University after working in Ohio to earn a master's degree in Broadcast Research and Management.
Urich was first married to actress Barbara Rucker (1968–74). He married actress Heather Menzies in 1975, and they remained married until his death in 2002. Menzies played one of the von Trapp children, "Louisa," in the film version of The Sound of Music. Urich and Menzies adopted three children, Ryan, Emily and Allison.
In 1996, Urich announced that he had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, synovial sarcoma, that arises in soft tissues. The TV series he was working on at the time, The Lazarus Man, was ultimately canceled - he cited his failing health as the reason. He continued to appear in film and TV during treatment, but ultimately died from the disease on April 16, 2002 at the age of 55.
Menzies also battled cancer, and is an ovarian cancer survivor. She works with the Robert and Heather Urich Fund for Sarcoma Research at the University of Michigan Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Read more about this topic: Robert Urich
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“... it is a rather curious thing to have to divide one’s life into personal and official compartments and temporarily put the personal side into its hidden compartment to be taken out again when one’s official duties are at an end.”
—Eleanor Roosevelt (1884–1962)
“But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself.... Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)