Drew Pinksy, and Morita stayed sober for three to four months. She eventually got him into a treatment facility run by Dr. Things started to change in 2003, when Morita’s alcoholism made him all but unemployable. You’d never know that he’d been drinking in his trailer all day.” “For years he was the consummate professional. Two years later, they wed in Las Vegas, where they would eventually make a home alongside her mother and other relatives, as well as famous friends such as Debbie Reynolds, Lance Burton and Siegfried & Roy.ĭespite his demons, Guerrero-Morita says, her husband found catharsis in his work. Guerrero-Morita was house-sitting for her, they began talking and went for sushi that night. Morita called to check on Marr, not knowing she had fled the city. ![]() The two saw each other over the years but didn’t reconnect until the 1992 L.A. If anyone had said to me then, ‘You’re going to grow up someday and marry this man,’ I would have said, ‘You’re crazy! Uncle Pat?’ ” ![]() “It was common to see him coming and going, between my house and my aunt’s house,” she says of Morita. Some of his earliest jobs included opening for Guerrero-Morita’s mother, Dee Strang, a burlesque dancer working under the name Dee Dee Cartier. Her aunt, Sally Marr, Lenny Bruce’s mother, served as a mentor for Morita. Morita wouldn’t get his start in show business until he was 30, which is when the then-12-year-old Guerrero met the man she would marry. The young man’s dreams of medical school were dashed when his help was required in Sacramento, California, at the Chinese restaurant his parents opened - at the time, so soon after World War II, a Japanese restaurant wasn’t commercially viable. “He carried those horrors of incarceration all his life,” Guerrero-Morita says. Morita, who would spend three years locked up there, started drinking when he was 12. His grandfather ran the camp’s bootleg sake operation, which helped distract the prisoners from their unspeakable conditions. When he was finally released, Morita was taken straight to the Arizona internment camp where his parents were being held. For seven years, he was in a cast from his shoulders to his knees. “Listen, it’s nothing short of a miracle that he was able to overcome those incredible odds and achieve such great success.”Īfter contracting spinal tuberculosis as a 2-year-old, Morita spent the next nine years in hospitals, much of that time immobilized. ![]() “It’s a triumphant story, really,” she says. “I didn’t want people to walk away and say, ‘Oh, what a sad story.’ ”īut the late actor made her promise to tell his tale - all of it. “I didn’t want it to define him,” she says. The last third tackles his alcoholism, a subject Guerrero-Morita was hesitant to include. The film is structured around the memoirs Morita began writing but never finished. “And, at the same time, I wanted to examine the fragility of his life.” “I wanted his story to be a testament to the resilience of the human spirit,” says the longtime Las Vegan, who relocated to the valley with Morita after they wed here in 1994. The documentary “More Than Miyagi: The Pat Morita Story,” executive produced by Guerrero-Morita and available Friday digitally and on DVD and Blu-ray, is made for those viewers. The shock is that the comedian was Noriyuki “Pat” Morita, the beloved “Happy Days” actor and “Karate Kid” Oscar nominee whose six decades of drinking contributed to his death in Las Vegas in 2005.įor those who didn’t know him, Morita’s alcoholism seems completely out of character. So, it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that the love of her life turned out to be a comedian with sobriety issues. As an actress, she made a name for herself as Donna in three Cheech & Chong movies. (Evelyn Guerrero-Morita)Īs a teenager, Evelyn Guerrero lived with her cousin Lenny Bruce as he battled obscenity charges and a heroin addiction. A young Pat Morita from his early days as a stand-up comedian.
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