Conan O'Brien's parents, Dr. Thomas O'Brien and Ruth Reardon O'Brien, died three days apart last week. Dr. O'Brien was 95, and Ruth O'Brien was 92. They had been married for 66 years.
According to The Boston Globe, Dr. O'Brien, who was among the first doctors to warn of the dangers of antimicrobial resistance, died at his home in Brookline on Monday, December 9. His wife, Ruth Reardon O'Brien, one of four women in her Yale Law School graduating class and the second woman partner at the Ropes & Gray law firm, died at home on Thursday, December 12. The couple had six children together—including one renowned talk show host—and nine grandchildren.
"For the rest of my time on earth, I will be hearing from people who want to talk with me about my dad," Conan told The Globe. "I've never met anyone like him, and he happens to be my father. If I met him randomly in a hotel lobby, I'd think, 'Who the hell is this guy? He's the most interesting person I've ever met.'"
Conan credited his father for introducing the young funnyman to Charlie Chaplin and Marx Brothers movies, setting him on the course to change American comedy in his own right. He told The Globe, "The loudest I've ever heard anybody laugh was sitting next to him in a theater watching Peter Sellers in a Pink Panther movie."
Unlike other late-night hosts, O'Brien's family was not an on-camera fixture. That was by design. "I've never let my parents near my show," Conan told Pete Holmes in 2017. "For 20 years, whenever we had a skit that involved my mom, we would hire an actress, and each time, a different actress, so my mom's been played by hundreds of different women who look nothing like my mom. She's just always at home, like, 'Well, I'd have done that!'"
