Overview
- Her brother, Robert Watson, confirmed the Dec. 26 death in Colorado Springs, with TMZ first reporting the family’s account and major outlets corroborating it.
- She had been hospitalized for bleeding and deteriorated quickly, and officials have not announced an official cause of death.
- Watson was best known as Kathy Gordon in four episodes of Diff'rent Strokes in the early 1980s, a then-uncommon example of a disabled actor portraying a disabled character on network TV.
- Born with osteogenesis imperfecta, she used a wheelchair and later discussed both the challenges and impact of her appearances in a 2020 interview.
- After retiring from acting, she co-founded Train Rite to train service dogs and was reported to have held leadership roles in disability-focused organizations, while reports differ on the first name of a former spouse from a 1994–96 marriage.