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Dustin Diamond’s growing pains: the tragedy of a child star who couldn’t leave Screech behind

Dustin Diamond as Screech in Saved By The Bell - Getty
Dustin Diamond as Screech in Saved By The Bell - Getty

The bell has rung for Screech one last time. To a generation who grew up during the Nineties, actor Dustin Diamond will forever be Samuel "Screech" Powers from hit US high school sitcom Saved By The Bell, a fixture of Saturday morning TV. That same generation will have been saddened by news that Diamond - whose adult life proved eventful, even by Hollywood child star standards - has died from cancer, aged just 44.

Saved By The Bell followed a group of pupils at the fictional Bayside High School in suburban California. As the endearingly awkward sidekick to popular school heartthrob Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar), this curly-haired nerd was the show’s scene-stealing comic relief. Screech became an instant fan favourite.

Aged 10, Diamond had beaten 5,000 other hopefuls to land the role in Disney Channel comedy Good Morning, Miss Bliss, which starred Hayley Mills as an Indiana teacher. After one middling season, it was rebooted by NBC as Saved By The Bell, becoming an overnight smash and syndicated worldwide. It ran for four series from 1989 to 1993, while fans watched Diamond grow up before their eyes.

The gawky Diamond was adept at physical comedy, forever ending up with a pie in his face. He was Shaggy from Scooby Doo meets Mr Bean, with a dash of Ross from Friends. Screech was academically gifted, obsessed with chess, insects and computers, but lacked common sense or social skills. Although he nursed a longtime crush on classmate Lisa Turtle (Lark Voorhies), he eventually shared his first onscreen kiss with snooty-but-sweet Violet Bickerstaff (Tori Spelling).

As the cast became too old to credibly pass for junior high pupils, the show aged with them. It was spun into sequels Saved By The Bell: The College Years and Saved By The Bell: The New Class, which saw Screech return to Bayside High as assistant to bumbling school principal Mr Belding (Dennis Haskins).

The cast of Saved By The Bell - NBC
The cast of Saved By The Bell - NBC

When the last episode aired in 2000, Diamond was 23 and had been playing Screech non-stop for 12 years. "The hardest thing about being a child star is giving up your childhood,” he said. “You don't get a childhood, really.”

Even though he played a major part in Saved By The Bell’s success and was arguably its most memorable character, Diamond's subsequent career failed to take off. After being synonymous with Screech for so long, he found it hard to find other work. "I'd audition and every single time they'd say, 'Hey, we loved it but we saw too much Screech in it’,” he said. “Well, I can't change my bone structure. What do you want me to do?"

A year after the franchise came off-air, Diamond declared bankruptcy, explaining that his parents had spent the money he’d earned from Saved By The Bell. So began a 20-year saga of money troubles and misbehaviour.

He was sued several times for overdue taxes and missed mortgage payments. His lifestyle floundered in parallel with his finances. Diamond found himself lost and living out a delayed adolescence. “It was hard to get work that wasn't Screech clone stuff,” he said. “Looking back, I realised I was going through my rebellious teens in my 20s. I was wacky, wild and hyper."

In 2006, he released a sex tape, bizarrely titled “Screeched: Saved by the Smell”, which he self-directed and supposedly starred in. Diamond later claimed that it wasn't actually him in the X-rated 52-minute video, which involved a threesome with two women, and the nude scenes were performed by a stunt double with his face digitally superimposed.

“The sex tape is the thing I'm most embarrassed about,” he admitted. “The rumour was that Paris Hilton had made $14m off her sex tape. My buddy said, 'Holy smokes! Where's the Screech sex tape? You've got to be worth at least a million.' I thought, 'Yeah, maybe.' I got some money off of it but it wasn't worth the fallout. To this day, people look down on me for it.”

Diamond’s misguided hope that the tape “may raise his profile and help get bookings” came to nothing. Continuing cash problems meant that he launched a crowdfunding campaign to save his house from repossession. He announced on Howard Stern’s radio show that he was selling T-shirts with his face on in an attempt to raise $250,000. The back of the shirts read: “I paid $15 to save Screeech's (sic) house”. That extra 'e' was added, in a sad touch, to avoid breaching copyright.

His 2009 tell-all memoir, Behind The Bell, proved equally controversial. It contained juicy behind-the-scenes stories of debauchery from Saved By The Bell’s set, often painting an unflattering portrait of his castmates and including Diamond’s boast that he’d slept with 2,000 women. Again, he appears to have been naive. Diamond later disavowed the more sordid details and blamed the ghostwriter for fabricating salacious anecdotes. “The book was another disappointment of mine,” he said, apologising to those he hurt.

Dustin Diamond as Screech Powers - NBCU Photo Bank
Dustin Diamond as Screech Powers - NBCU Photo Bank

Diamond eked out a living by appearing on reality TV shows including Celebrity Fit Club, Celebrity Boxing (upon which he beat the much older Ron Palillo, aka Arnold Horshack from ABC sitcom Welcome Back, Kotter) and Celebrity Championship Wrestling (entering the ring with Dennis Rodman and Frank Stallone). Here in the UK, he popped up on Celebrity Big Brother alongside such luminaries as “Big Ron” Atkinson and Abz from 5ive.

The actor also started an alt-metal band (knowingly called Salty The Pocketknife), toured as a stand-up comic and played himself in a few low-budget comedy films. Yet still he kept veering off the rails.

In 2014, Diamond was sentenced to four months in jail after getting into a bar fight in Wisconsin and allegedly stabbed a man in the armpit with a switchblade knife. He went on to violate the terms of his probation, leading to re-arrest and landing him in court all over again.

He might have had a talent for self-destruction but Diamond was by no means alone in finding that early fame turned sour. Indeed, it went wrong for many child stars of that generation. The troubles of Hollywood equivalents such as Drew Barrymore, Macaulay Culkin, Lindsay Lohan, Corey Feldman, Britney Spears, Winona Ryder and Shia Leboeuf are well-documented.

Diamond’s TV contemporaries similarly experienced the seedy side of showbiz. Consider “the curse of Diff’rent Strokes”, Saved By The Bell’s forerunner as a hit NBC teen comedy. Actress Dana Plato, aka Kimberly, suffered substance issues from her teens, tried to rob a video store at gunpoint and was arrested for forging a Valium prescription. In 1999, she died aged 34 after overdosing on prescription drugs.

Her castmate Todd Bridges, aka Willis, battled crack addiction, was arrested for drug-dealing, possession of concealed firearms and making a bomb threat. Bridges was even tried for attempted murder, although he was acquitted. Finally, Gary Coleman, aka Arnold, sued his own parents, was charged with disorderly conduct numerous times, punched a bus driver and spent a night behind bars for domestic violence. Coleman died after suffering a brain haemorrhage at 42.

Dustin Diamond leaving the Celebrity Big Brother house in 2013 - WireImage
Dustin Diamond leaving the Celebrity Big Brother house in 2013 - WireImage

Other sitcoms of the era threw up similar stories. Full House starlet Jodie Sweetin developed a debilitating daily meth habit. Growing Pains actor Andrew Koening’s body was found in a park, two weeks after he went missing and died by suicide. His co-star Tracey Gold struggled with anorexia and was jailed for driving under the influence.

The youngest children in domestic sitcoms also seemed ill-fated. Brian Bonsall, aka little Andy from Family Ties, was later arrested for assault and drug possession, while Family Matters' Jaimee Foxworth supported her own narcotic habit by starring in adult films.

Typecast from an early age as fairly lightweight characters, such actors found themselves unable to move on - forever stuck in one job, even when that job was long over. To exacerbate matters, their formative years were spent under high-pressure levels of scrutiny, with every misstep gleefully picked over by the tabloid press and ever-present paparazzi. It’s little wonder that child stardom seems to be a poisoned chalice.

Dustin Diamond’s bungling attempts to milk his fame meant that he’d burnt bridges and alienated former friends. When Saved By The Bell was given a hip new reboot last year on NBCUniversal's new Peacock streaming service, Diamond was the only original cast member not invited back to reprise his role.

While grown-up Zack Morris was now the new Governor of California, his old buddy Screech was nowhere to be seen. It was explained in the scripts that Screech was now living on the International Space Station with Kevin, the robot pal that he’d built. It was a bittersweet sign-off to a career that never fulfilled its early promise.

Despite his rollercoaster life, Diamond calmed down considerably in recent years, coming across as smart and self-aware in interviews. After being diagnosed with stage four lung cancer last month, he’d recently completed his first round of chemotherapy at a Florida hospital and sent messages to fans, seemingly in good spirits.

Sadly, his condition deteriorated fast in the past week. He passed away on Monday, and his former co-stars were quick to pay tribute. “Dustin was my first onscreen kiss,” wrote Tori Spelling. “He welcomed me with open arms onto the set of Saved by the Bell. As one can imagine, being the newbie on a hit show was overwhelming for a 14-year-old girl. He not only showed me around but made sure I was always ok. Such a young gentleman. He was kind, smart, and always making everyone laugh… I'm glad he's out of pain.”