NEW YORK – Norm MacDonald, who was part of the cast of the comedy television show Saturday Night Live in the 1990s, died after spending nine years fighting privately with a type of cancer.
The death of the 61-year-old comedian was made up today, Tuesday, by his Los Angeles representation firm, Brillstein Entertainment Partners.
Macdonald acted as a screenwriter and starred in multiple segments alongside the rest of the Saturday Night Live cast.
The son of schoolteachers raised in the Canadian city of Quebec, he was a standup comedian and worked briefly as the screenwriter of the series Roseanne when he was chosen to join the cast of Saturday Night Live in 1993.
After leaving the show in 1998, he created and starred in the comedy The Norm Show for ABC, in which he played a former NHL player expelled from the league for tax evasion and gambling, and forced to provide community service as a social worker.
He became famous for his esoteric imitations of personalities that included Burt Reynolds, in the Celebrity Jeopardy segment with Will Ferrell as Alex Trebek. He also imitated Bob Dole, Larry King and David Letterman.
MacDonald led the Weekend Update program at a time of great influx for news-based jokes. Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson and OJ Simpson were some of his frequent targets.