Cliff Emmich Cause of Death

Cliff Emmich, the lovable character actor who appeared in films such as Payday, and Lightfoot and Little House on the Prairie, died of lung cancer on November 28, 2022, just fifteen days before his 86th birthday, at his home in Los Angeles’ Valley Village neighborhood. He was 85.

He made his film debut as an uncredited extra in Norman Jewison’s Gaily, Gaily (1969), starring Beau Bridges. Later, in 1979, Emmich portrayed the counterfeiter known as “The Candy Man” in the two-part Happy Days episode “Fonzie’s Funeral.”

In Payday, Emmich played the driver Chicago, who drove the Cadillac sedan with Rip Torn’s hard-living honky tonk singer Maury Dann in the backseat (1973).

Cliff Emmich played the Western Union security guard with a porn fetish who is attracted to the long-legged, dress-wearing Jeff Bridges in Michael Cimino’s Thunderbolt and Lightfoot (1974). In Halloween II, he played another security guard who is killed by Michael Myers’ hammer (1981).

In the episode “The Man Inside,” Emmich played an overweight, shy, and embarrassed middle-aged man whose daughter is ashamed of him in the fifth season of NBC’s Little House on the Prairie.