David Cassidy

David Bruce Cassidy, born April 12, 1950, at Flower Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York City, was an American actor, musician, and Broadway performer who died on November 21, 2017. The son of singer and actor Jack Cassidy and actress Evelyn Ward, he grew up primarily in West Orange, New Jersey, raised by his maternal grandparents Frederick and Ethel Ward while his parents toured. He learned in 1958 that his parents had been divorced for more than two years without informing him. His father had married singer and actress Shirley Jones in 1956, and Cassidy's half-brothers from that union are Shaun, born 1958, Patrick, born 1962, and Ryan, born 1966. In 1968, after completing summer school to earn his high school diploma, Cassidy moved into his father's home in Irvington, New York, working half-days in the mailroom of a textile firm while pursuing acting and music.

Jack Cassidy introduced his son to talent manager Ruth Aarons, a former table tennis champion with a theater background who had previously represented both Jack and Shirley Jones. Aarons became a close friend and authority figure to Cassidy, and he credited her as the driving force behind his on-screen success. When The Partridge Family became a hit and Aarons discovered Cassidy had been underage when he signed his Screen Gems contract, she renegotiated it with significantly improved provisions and a rare four-year term.

Cassidy's Broadway career spanned 1969 to 1994. His professional debut came on January 2, 1969, in The Fig Leaves Are Falling, which closed after four performances. A casting director who saw the show invited him to make a screen test, setting his Hollywood career in motion. He later appeared on Broadway in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and starred in both Little Johnny Jones and Blood Brothers.

After signing with Universal Studios in 1969 and relocating to Los Angeles, Cassidy appeared in episodes of Ironside, Marcus Welby, M.D., Adam-12, Medical Center, and Bonanza. His major breakthrough came in 1970 when he was cast as Keith Partridge on the Screen Gems musical television series The Partridge Family. He and his stepmother Shirley Jones, who played his on-screen mother, were the only cast members to perform on the show's recordings. The series aired until March 1974, and ten Partridge Family albums and five Cassidy solo albums were produced during its run, with most selling more than a million copies each.

Once the Partridge Family single "I Think I Love You" became a hit, Cassidy launched a solo recording career. His cover of The Association's "Cherish," from the 1972 album of the same name, reached number nine on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States, number two in the United Kingdom, and number one in Australia and New Zealand. His solo chart success was considerably greater in the United Kingdom than in the United States, where his hits included a number one cover of The Young Rascals' "How Can I Be Sure" and the double single "Daydreamer" / "The Puppy Song," which topped the UK charts but failed to chart in the United States. At the height of his popularity, Cassidy was for a period the highest paid entertainer in the world, and his fan club surpassed in size those of The Beatles and Elvis Presley.

His concert tours generated extraordinary crowd responses. In 1972, he performed to two sellout audiences of 56,000 each at the Houston Astrodome over a single weekend, and a Madison Square Garden concert sold out in one day and was followed by riots. His 1973 UK tour included sellout dates at Wembley Arena, and a 1974 concert at Melbourne Cricket Ground drew 33,000 people and prompted calls for his deportation from Australia. A turning point came on May 26, 1974, at London's White City Stadium, where nearly 800 people were injured in a stampede near the stage, thirty were hospitalized, and a 14-year-old girl, Bernadette Whelan, died four days later at Hammersmith Hospital without regaining consciousness.

In a 1993 interview, Cassidy expressed frustration with fan magazines that he felt sanitized his image. His fan club registered a star in his name through the International Star Registry in 1983. In his autobiography, he described feeling overwhelmed by his fame, stating that it had become impossible to enter a store or walk down the street without being recognized. Though he had aspired to be regarded as a serious rock musician, he acknowledged in later life having come to terms with his origins as a teen idol. In addition to his music and stage work, Cassidy acted in film and on television throughout his career.