Amy Yasbeck Opens Up About Life Without John Ritter

Nov 02, 2026 by apost team

Every day, Amy Yasbeck has a conversation with her late husband. It is not a ritual she announces. It is simply something she does.

“I still talk to John,” Yasbeck said in an on-camera interview. “I check in all the time. I talk to him every day.”

Yasbeck was married to John Ritter, the beloved star of “Three’s Company,” best known as the lovably clumsy Jack Tripper, until his sudden death from an aortic dissection. That is a rare but life-threatening condition in which a tear occurs in the inner layer of the body’s main artery. The Emmy winner collapsed on the set of his ABC sitcom “8 Simple Rules... for Dating My Teenage Daughter.” The conversations she describes are not grand. They are the kind a spouse has in the middle of an ordinary day, and they have continued long after the world lost one of its most recognizable sitcom stars.

Ritter had four children: Jason, Tyler and Carly with his first wife, Nancy Morgan, and Noah with Yasbeck. She is not the only one who keeps his presence close. Yasbeck and his older children connect over the things they think he would have loved, such as when “a new comic comes on the scene, or there’s physical comedy.” Those moments, she explained, help her feel he “is with us or beside us.”

She also described, in warm detail, what made him who he was. “That encompasses everything,” she said. “His humanity, his comedy, his empathy, his frustration at the world.” And she remembered his love of an audience, as both a performer and a fan. “John was such a good audience,” she said. “He loved being on stage. He loved to be in an audience.”

Within weeks of Ritter’s death, Yasbeck founded the John Ritter Foundation for Aortic Health, an organization dedicated to raising awareness of the rare condition that took his life and helping prevent other families from facing the same emergency. The work has continued ever since, and it now includes events that bring his television family together, among them a celebrity reading of “Three’s Company” with his former co-star Joyce DeWitt, with proceeds supporting aortic health research and education.

The foundation’s annual gala, “An Evening from the Heart,” has also drawn friends from Ritter’s later work, including Kaley Cuoco, who starred alongside him on “8 Simple Rules.” Each event turns remembrance into something practical: funding, education, and awareness of a condition many people have never heard of.

The couple’s story began on a film set, and Yasbeck has described how quickly it deepened. She knew they were meant for each other, she said, “kind of right away.” It “just kept getting more and more undeniable.” Eventually, “here’s a soulmate. And I had him for a long time.” Their son was born before they married, and Yasbeck has said that watching Ritter be a father is what she misses most.

She has also joked that his presence is part of why she has not dated. She has said she would miss him more if she were seeing someone. “I always feel like he’s with me,” she has said, “and that would be weird because in that case, three is not company.”

Strangers still approach her to tell her how much he meant to them. “He really affected people that way,” she said. Ritter, in her view, was “exactly who you thought he was.” That, perhaps, is why the daily conversations feel less like grief than like habit.

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Are you a fan of John Ritter and “Three’s Company”? Do you think Amy Yasbeck’s daily conversations with her late husband are one of the most touching ways to keep a loved one close? Let us know in the comments and pass this on to your family, friends, and other fans out there!