Chevy Chase suffered “near fatal” heart failure which led to him being placed in an induced coma during the pandemic in 2021, according to a new film about the American actor and comedian.
As documented in I’m Chevy Chase and You’re Not, the star of films such as Caddyshack and the National Lampoon movies, who hosted the Oscars twice, spent a total of five weeks in hospital.
Speaking in the documentary his wife, Jayni, says: “Something was wrong, and he couldn’t explain to me what was wrong. So, we go to the ER. His heart stops. During those years he was drinking, he got cardiomyopathy; when the heart muscles get weaker, and they can’t pump as much blood out with each beat.”
Doctors then placed him in a coma for eight days, before warning his daughter, Caley: “We might not get him back. We don’t know how present he’ll be. Prepare yourselves for the worst.
“When he woke up, all he could do was use his voice,” she continued. “He has basically come back from the dead.”
Chase himself has said that he has suffered memory problems since his hospitalisation, and in the documentary he fails to recall some of his past on-set and backstage controversies, including a fistfight with Bill Murray in a Saturday Night Live dressing room.
Chase said he was “hurt” by his omission from the 50th anniversary special of SNL earlier this year, at which he was in attendance but not on stage.
“Well, it was kind of upsetting actually,” he said. “This is probably the first time I’m saying it. But I expected that I would’ve been on the stage too with all the other actors. When [co-stars] Garrett [Morris] and Laraine [Newman] went on the stage there, I was curious as to why I didn’t. No one asked me to. Why was I left aside?”
Chase, 82, almost died in 1980 when he was electrocuted on the set of Modern Problems, an accident which triggered a period of depression.
