Huffington Post reports that Gary David Goldberg passed away on June 23 of brain cancer.
Goldberg, Emmy-winning creator of Family Ties was born and raised in Brooklyn where he lived with his closely-knit extended family. He met his wife, Dr. Diana Meehan in 1969 while he was working as a waiter at the Village Gate club in Greenwich Village.
According to Huffington Post, in the mid 1970s, Goldberg broke into show business was he started writing scripts for the Bob Newhart Show, Lou Grant, the Tony Randall Show and the Last Resort. He won his first Emmy Award in 1977 for his work on the CBS drama Lou Grant, a spin-off of the successful series the Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Goldberg started his own production company, UBU Productions, in 1981. He produced nine TV shows, including the CBS program Brooklyn Bridge, a semi-autobiographical series about his childhood.
UBU’s first big success was Family Ties. Family Ties was a half-hour comedy about two left-wing parents raising three children, including a son who was very conservative. By its third season, Family Ties had become part of NBC’s much-touted and wildly popular Must-See TV Thursday night lineup, according to Huffington Post. The show, which ran for seven seasons, earned Goldberg a second Emmy and was the debut for successful actor Michael J. Fox.
Fox and Goldberg also worked together on Spin City, which aired 6 seasons on ABC. Fox admits that if he had not gotten the role in Family Ties, he would have gone home to Canada and given up on acting.
Goldberg received many honors for his work in Hollywood, including a Golden Globe, a Peabody, two Writers Guild Awards, five Humanitas Awards, the Producers Guild Award and the Valentine Davis Award. Goldberg was also a member of the Broadcasting Magazine Hall of Fame.
In 2008, Goldberg wrote an autobiography entitled Sit, Ubu, Sit: How I went from Brooklyn to Hollywood with the same woman, the same dog and a lot less hair.
Hollywood reported notes that Golberg did not only make television shows, he also wrote and directed the films “Dad”, “Bye Bye Love”, and “Must Love Dogs”.
According to Huffington Post, “Goldberg is survived by his wife and two daughters, Shana Goldberg-Meehan, the Emmy-winning writer and producer of Friends; and Cailin Goldberg-Meehan, a freelance writer and contributor to the Huffington Post.”