Malcolm-Jamal Warner, Theo Huxtable on ‘The Cosby Show,’ Dead at 54 After Drowning

Malcolm-Jamal Warner, the actor who rose to fame as a teenager playing Theo Huxtable on “The Cosby Show” in the mid-1980s, died in Costa Rica on Sunday. He was 54.

Mr. Warner apparently drowned while swimming at a beach on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica near Limón, according to the country’s Judicial Investigation Department. The authorities said in a statement that Mr. Warner had apparently been swept away by a strong current, and that bystanders had tried to rescue him. The area is popular with surfers.

“The Cosby Show,” which ran on NBC from 1984 to 1992, was a must-see-TV cultural touchstone whose final episode was covered as front-page news in The New York Times. That article began: “Theo Huxtable graduated from N.Y.U. yesterday, albeit on videotape, and like a lot of graduations it was a bittersweet occasion.”

Mr. Warner, who was 21 at the time, had played the role of the Huxtables’ middle child and only son since he was 13. The show’s portrayal of an upper-middle-class Black family — Bill Cosby and Phylicia Rashad played a doctor and a lawyer raising children in a Brooklyn townhouse — was celebrated as an overdue corrective against harmful stereotypes on television.

“It’s sad, in a way,” Mr. Warner said when its run ended. “Our extended family is breaking up. And I can be nostalgic to an extent. But the show for me has always been a steppingstone in my career. It’s too early in my career to be nostalgic.”