Actor Conrad Bain, best known for his role on the 1970s and 1980s television comedy Diff'rent Strokes as a wealthy, white New Yorker who adopts two young black boys from Harlem, died at age 89, his daughter said on Wednesday.

Bain, who starred opposite the young Gary Coleman on the NBC sitcom as his adoptive father, Philip Drummond, died of natural causes at a comfort-care facility in Livermore, California, east of San Francisco, on Monday. He was three weeks shy of his 90th birthday, according to his daughter.

Born in Alberta, Bain served in the Canadian Army during World War II, became a US citizen in 1946 and went on to a career as an actor on Broadway and television. He often played erudite, professional characters such as lawyers, executives, politicians or doctors.

Following a recurring role on the daytime vampire drama Dark Shadows as an innkeeper, Bain broke into prime-time comedy with a supporting role on Norman Lear's All in the Family spin-off Maude, which starred Bea Arthur in the title role.

At the end of that show's six-year CBS run in 1978, Bain landed his own sitcom, Diff'rent Strokes in which he played Drummond, a rich, widowed industrialist who takes in the two young sons of his housekeeper after she dies, creating a racially mixed family in an era when depictions of such households were rare. The show ran for eight seasons, from 1978 to 1986, on NBC.

Reuters