(TargetDailyNews.com) – The wife of the late comic actor and Saturday Night Live star John Belushi has died. Judy Belushi Pisano was 73 years old, and her son, Luke Pisano, said she died of endometrial cancer.
Born Judith Victoria Jacklin in 1951 in Illinois, her father was a tools salesman, and her mother was a homemaker and a secretary. Pisano met John Belushi at Wheaton Central High School during their senior year, and the couple quickly fell for each other. While John Belushi went off to the University of Wisconsin, Pisano enrolled at the College of DuPage, also in Illinois.
Belushi’s star was rising in comedy, and after they left college, the couple moved to New York City for the sake of Belushi’s career. John Belushi started out on radio and in stage pieces for the famous National Lampoon before he landed his iconic role as a cast member on Saturday Night Live during its glory days in the 1970s.
Along with his SNL stint, Belushi became a household name in the 1980s thanks to his starring roles in the movies National Lampoon’s Animal House and The Blues Brothers (with Dan Ackroyd). Both films have gone on to achieve legendary status.
Like many of his comedy cast members, Belushi partied hard. He was found dead in 1982 at the famous Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood. Toxicology reports established he died from a mixture of cocaine and heroin. Although not unique among comic actors of his era and circle, John Belushi immediately became a symbol of hard living and libertine excess in the Hollywood and New York film and comedy worlds.
His widow, Judy Pisano, was not pleased that her husband has been remembered first for his drug use and partying lifestyle. She said several books and reports on her late husband were “unfair and inaccurate,” and she said it would have been “refreshing” for people to celebrate her husband’s “beautiful life.”
She tried to do some of that herself in her own books. Her first was called “Samurai Widow,” a play on one of Belushi’s famous SNL characters. It was published in 1990. In 2005, Pisano teamed up with Tanner Colby to publish a biography titled “Belushi.”
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