Alan Dysert, 'All My Children's' Sean Cudahy, dies aged 75

Alan Dysert, the actor best known for playing the scheming Sean Cudahy on the ABC soap opera All My Children, has died at the age of 75.

His wife, Michele Dysert, confirmed the news in a Facebook post, calling him her best friend. 

She wrote that she was “struggling to imagine life without him” and was grateful for “the love of a lifetime.” 

She also noted that he had faced more than his fair share of health challenges over the years. 

PEOPLE was the first outlet to report his death, on Monday 26 October.

Dysert was raised on a farm in Illinois and studied television arts at the University of Illinois before moving into acting. His screen debut came in 1978 on the sitcom Soap. 

Two years later, in 1980, he first appeared as Cudahy on All My Children, a role that would define his career. Over the following decade he appeared in 79 episodes, with his last credit on the show arriving in 1990.

In 2023, he revealed in his autobiography, Lights, Camera, Cancer!, that he had been diagnosed with what he described as a “rare, aggressive and incurable cancer”. 

He wrote about going through four major cancer-related surgeries, one recurrence, many rounds of chemotherapy and 29 CT scans. 

Several outlets have linked his death to that illness, though the cancer is not explicitly named as the cause in every report.