Patrick Duffy Shares Sweet Tribute To Late ‘Step By Step’ Co-Star Suzanne Somers On Her Birthday

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Patrick Duffy is among the many celebs on hand at 90s Con, underway this weekend in Hartford, Connecticut.

During a panel, the actor reminisced about co-starring on hit 1990s sitcom “Step By Step” with Suzanne Somers, who passed away in 2023 at age 76 after a lengthy battle with cancer.

‘My Best Friend’

As it happened, the day of that panel happened to fall on what would have been Somers’ 80th birthday, which left Duffy recalling the first time he and his future co-star met.

As he explained, he’d just completed a 12-season stint on primetime soap “Dallas” before joining ABC’s TGIF sitcom.

“I left ‘Dallas,’ and two weeks later I went into the meeting to meet Suzanne Somers, and I looked at her, and I went, ‘Oh my God, that’s my new Larry Hagman,’” Duffy jokingly told the audience, as reported by People. “And so she was that for the next seven years, my best friend.”

Duffy played Frank Lambert on the series, which debuted in 1991 and ran for seven seasons, with Somers playing Carol Foster. Both single parents, the two get married and blend their rambunctious families together, a scenario that led to countless sitcom shenanigans.

Not ‘The Brady Bunch’

During the panel, Duffy explained that he and Somers got to “play out our fantasies” while portraying a married couple on the show. In that respect, he pointed out that “Step By Step” was nowhere near as wholesome as “The Brady Bunch,” TV’s previous show focused on a blended family.

“My favorite episodes were all the times that Suzanne and I got to be in our bedroom alone,” he recalled.

“Quite honestly, we had this conversation on a regular basis of we didn’t want to be. Somebody mentioned ‘The Brady Bunch,’ which was a great show for its time period, but we wanted to be a married couple that basically couldn’t keep their hands off each other, except for the fact we had seven kids running around the house,” Duffy added

“The fun part was when the scenes were always over with, Suzanne and I… Well, Suzanne would be the recipient of whatever I decided was going to get cut anyway. So, I would just do whatever I wanted to do. And God bless the directors who came along that would just let the camera stay rolling for a while,” he continued.

“And then we would be lying in bed and play out our fantasies, in good taste,” he added. “But it was always a chance for us to just look at each other and go, ‘This is why we’re doing this show. We have fun being these characters,’” Duffy shared.

“And that’s another thing: we wanted to present the fact that your life as a vital partner to each other doesn’t end when you start a family, and in one sense, it begins,” he said. “It’s fed like a fire by virtue of what you’ve been able to accomplish. So, we had fun being madly attracted to each other on the show, and always being interrupted at the worst possible times.”

Childhood Memories

EntertainmentNow caught up with Duffy and the rest of the “Step By Step” as they reunited at 90s Con.

For the actors who played the children of Somers’ and Duffy’s characters, “Step By Step” was a huge part of their lives.

That was particularly true for Christine Lakin, who played daughter Ali Lambert.

“I mean, for me, it was so much a part of my childhood,” Lakin told EntertainmentNow. “It was all the formative years … I grew up on that set.”

Asked what she took away from her years on the show, she replied, “I took away so much knowledge about … how to act, how to treat others.”

She credited Duffy and Somers for being not just co-stars, but mentors. “We had amazing role models,” she shared. “For me, it was just an amazing part of my childhood.”