“The Facts of Life” star Mindy Cohn said a revival of the hit ABC sitcom was scuttled by a “greedy” co-star who quietly tried to set up her own spin-off instead.
Cohn, 58, who played Natalie on the beloved comedy from 1979 to 1988, made a cameo in the popular “Live in Front of a Studio Audience” special in 2021. She said that executive producer Norman Lear, who died last December, told her and her co-stars at the time that he was astounded by the positive response to their appearance on the special and wondered if they would be interested in a reboot in its wake.
The actor and her surviving former castmates (Lisa Whelchel, Kim Fields and Nancy McKeon) “had all never really talked about it, but we all started to consider it a little bit,” Cohn said Wednesday on Sirius XM’s “Jeff Lewis Live.” “We got into talks and we hired a writer, and the four of us got together on Zooms — this was during COVID — and we had meetings with Norman about it.”
But, without naming names, Cohn said that “drama” ensued and it was “not cute,” cryptically suggesting sabotage by “one of them” behind the scenes.
“One of the girls … went behind our backs and tried to make a separate deal for a spinoff just for herself and devastated the rest of us,” she said.
“For a 40-year friendship and sisterhood, there was tidal wave of emotion around it,” she said, agreeing with a co-panelist during the Sirius XM interview that the alleged culprit “was a greedy bitch.”
Cohn said that they wouldn’t talk to the co-star “for a while”: “Now we do-ish … It was an ouch [there’s no trust] and no desire to ever work together.”
So, she confirmed, a “Facts of Life” reboot is “very dead.”
Mindy Cohn, from left, Geri Jewell, Lisa Whelchel, Charlotte Rae and Nancy McKeon attend “The Facts Of Life” reunion at the 2014 Paley Fest in Beverly Hills.
(Richard Shotwell / Invision / Associated Press)
“A couple of people can’t move past it, don’t want to move past it,” she said. “We were united for 40 years over not talking about each other, not doing dirty, ‘all for one, one for all,’ and this kind of wrecked that, which is sad. Really sad.”
“The Facts of Life,” which began in 1979 as a spinoff of “Diff’rent Strokes,” starred the late Charlotte Rae as housemother Edna Garrett (and later Cloris Leachman as Beverly Ann Stickle), who taught the girls of the Eastland School how to solve their teenage problems.
The Emmy-nominated series centered around Cohn as class clown Natalie; Fields as her best friend and aspiring actor Tootie; Whelchel as the wealthy, spoiled Blair Warner and McKeon as Blair’s foil Jo Polniaczek, a street kid from the Bronx. The actors (minus “The Division” star McKeon) reunited in 2001 for a made-for-TV movie titled “The Facts of Life Reunion” that aired during ABC’s “The Wonderful World of Disney.”
Cohn, who went public in 2017 with her metastatic breast cancer battle, has reunited with her co-stars periodically over the years and made a cameo alongside Fields and Whelchel in ABC’s 2021 “Live in Front of a Studio Audience” special. But she wouldn’t directly “deny or confirm” which of them led to the reboot’s nosedive. However, she told Lewis and the panel that it wasn’t her and that they had a “33% chance” of guessing correctly. She also said they would find their answer if they browsed her Instagram account to see which co-star lacks a prominent presence in recent years. (We checked: Fields and McKeon have gotten regular birthday wishes.)
“Some people are so desperate for either money or fame that it causes them to do things that — to me, I guess I’m still not that jaded — it shocks me,” she said. “It always just kind of freaks me out that people will do that, throw friendships — deep true friendships — under the bus for a dollar.”
A representative for Whelchel did not immediately respond Wednesday to The Times’ request for comment.
