Her career began in entertainment with small roles in television shows and movies before she gained widespread recognition. However, it was her role on “Three’s Company” that propelled her to stardom. The series co-starred John Ritter and Joyce DeWitt in a comedy about two single women living with a single man who pretended to be gay in order to bypass the landlord’s policy of prohibiting single men sharing an apartment with single women. After leaving the show due to a contract dispute, she continued her career in entertainment through various television roles, movies, and theater productions. Somers appeared in two Playboy cover-feature nude pictorials, in 1980 and 1984. Her first set of nude photos was taken by Stan Malinowski in February 1970 when Somers was a struggling model and actress and did a test photoshoot for the magazine. She was accepted as a Playmate candidate in 1971, but declined to pose nude before the actual shoot. During an appearance on The Tonight Show in 1980, she denied ever posing nude, except for a High Society topless photo. This prompted Playboy to publish photos from the 1970 Malinowski shoot, without her permission. The second nude pictorial by Richard Fegley appeared in December 1984 in an attempt by Somers to regain her diminished popularity after the Three’s Company debacle in 1981. Despite her anger and the earlier lawsuit, Playboy approached her earlier that year to pose nude a second time. Initially, she was angered again, but eventually agreed after discussing it with her family. She felt she would have a better chance to control the quality of the photos the second time, and having such control was an important condition that Somers attached to posing. In September 1991, Somers returned to series television in the sitcom Step By Step (with Patrick Duffy), which became a success on ABC’s youth-orientated TGIF lineup. In the early 1990s, Somers was the spokeswoman in a series of infomercials for the Thighmaster, a piece of exercise equipment which is squeezed between one’s thighs above the knees. Somers died at her home in Palm Springs, California, on October 15, 2023, one day before her 77th birthday. Her breast cancer had returned earlier in the year.
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