Pat Morita has died

Pat Morita passed away November 24, 2005, at the age of 73, in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Morita, the son of migrant worker parents, developed spinal tuberculosis and at the age of 2 and then spent the next nine years in treatment at the Weimar Joint Sanatorium in Northern California and for a brief period at the Shriner's Hospital in San Francisco. Upon his release, he was escorted by an FBI agent to join his parents at an internment camp in Arizona.

The Sacramento Bee reports:

Morita's ethnicity was central to his comedy, but it also occasionally put him in an uncomfortable position before certain audiences. He dealt with it quite directly. Like the time he learned - minutes before taking a stage in Honolulu where he was filling in for Don Ho - that his crowd was mostly disabled American veterans marking the 25th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

"I turned on all the angelic, cherubic charm I could find and I went out and said, 'Before I begin, I just want to say I'm sorry about messing up your harbor,'" Morita said in a 1986 interview with the Los Angeles Times.

The line, Morita recalled, drew a second of silence before laughter began at the rear of the audience and rolled forward.

A nice article can be read here - Noriyuki Pat Morita:In the Footsteps of a Sensei.

Read about Morita's credits here.

Read the Wikipedia article here.