The fitness instructor and weight-loss guru Richard Simmons, who has died aged 76, parlayed the popularity of his Hollywood fitness studio, Slimmons, into a television show and early success in the burgeoning video market, becoming a household presence in the US.
Dressed in skintight shorts and tank tops festooned with Swarovski crystals, with his high-energy prancing and upbeat patter Simmons encouraged his unfit audience to think of exercise as fun. More importantly, he helped them feel better about themselves by shedding the paralysing self-consciousness Simmons himself knew from his own adolescence.
Jane Fonda may have set the standard for the US fitness video market in the early 1980s, but by 1988, Simmons’s Sweatin’ to the Oldies – a workout party set to the hits of the 50s and 60s – was dubbed in one review “the Citizen Kane of exercise videos”.
Simmons became a regular on television game shows, including the hugely popular Hollywood Squares, and played himself on many programmes, including a four-season run on the daytime soap opera General Hospital.
He provided voiceovers for animated characters and was a popular guest on talkshows aimed at older audiences, such as Merv Griffin or Phil Donahue, but also with edgier hosts such as radio’s Howard Stern or The Late Show’s David Letterman, who pushed Simmons’s clowning to greater heights in order to make fun of him. Once, Simmons, dressed as a turkey, tried to kiss Letterman, who sprayed him with a fire extinguisher, prompting an asthma attack. Simmons boycotted the show for six years.
Simmons toured for as many as 200 days a year, undertaking everything from personal appearances in shopping malls to “lose cruises” on boats and weeks on stage in Las Vegas. Among his books were an inspirational volume, Never Give Up (1993), and an autobiography, Still Hungry After All These Years (1999).
He was born Milton Simmons in New Orleans, the son of Shirley May (nee Satin) and Richard Simmons, who had both been on the fringes of show business before settling into more mundane careers in sales.
His father had worked as a band MC, while his mother supposedly ran away from her Jewish family to become a fan dancer. Milton was already chubby as a child (“in New Orleans, lard was a food group,” he said) and with his mother watched the 50s exercise guru Jack LaLanne on TV. He saw someone “fit and healthy. He had such a positive attitude ... I was none of those things.”
Taking the name Richard, he attended the Catholic Cor Jesu school (now Brother Martin Academy) in New Orleans, and then, a quiet asthmatic who weighed over 19st, started at Southwestern Louisiana University (now the University of Louisiana at Lafayette) before transferring to study art at Florida State University. His attitude changed during a year on an exchange programme in Rome: “I was fat, had curly hair. The Italians thought I was hysterical. I was the life of the party.” He did commercials and was an extra in Federico Fellini’s 1970 film The Clowns.
He also discovered, one rainy night, a note on his car. “You are very funny, but fat people die young. Please don’t die.” He went on a crash diet and lost 100lb, but fell so ill he needed to put some of the weight back. Moving to Los Angeles in the early 70s, he worked as a maitre d’ and began controlling his weight with exercise and diet. He realised LA’s gym culture was aimed at those who were already fit, and opened his own salon, originally called The Anatomy Asylum but renamed more positively as Slimmons, which began attracting a celebrity clientele that included Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross.
In 1979, Slimmons was featured on the popular reality show Real People, and soon afterwards he published his first book, the bestselling Never Say Diet (1980) and was signed up for his own television show, which combined exercise and a talk format. Simmons played comic characters such as the Reverend Pounds, “a man of the cloth – the tablecloth”. The TV show lasted only four years, but it and a short-lived cooking programme provided the platform for the endless stream of videos that followed.
Throughout his career, he continued to offer classes at Slimmons, including personal instruction that in 2010 was still charged at $12 per hour. In 2014, he missed classes, and then disappeared from public view, closing Slimmons two years later.
In February 2017 a podcast, Missing Richard Simmons, was launched, aiming to trace his whereabouts, and it ran for over a year despite the LAPD doing a “welfare check” that March, which confirmed Simmons was at home and well. Over the following few years he filed a series of lawsuits against media companies or their investigators for invasion of privacy.
Media speculation swirled round what Simmons’s appearance might be like, but also the persistent question of his sexuality. Simmons had once explained: “While other kids my age were exploring their sexuality, I spent time exploring food”. But his private life remained private.
In January this year, the actor Pauly Shore debuted a short film about Simmons entitled Court Jester, intended to be expanded into a full length movie. Just a week before he died, Simmons disassociated himself from the film, saying he was in his own talks with studios.
He is survived by his brother, Lenny.
• Richard Simmons (Milton Teague Simmons), fitness instructor, born 12 July 1948; died 13 July 2024
