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Patton Oswalt Gets Support From Celebrity Friends After Sudden Death Of His Wife Michelle McNamara

By Victoria Miller
Published on: 02:12 PST, Apr 23, 2016

Patton Oswalt is mourning the death of his wife Michelle McNamara. Oswalt’s wife died suddenly at age 46, just hours after the stand-up comic and Goldbergs narrator posted multiple social media messages about the death of music icon Prince.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Michelle McNamara died in her sleep at the couple’s home in Los Angeles on Thursday night. No cause of death has been revealed, and Oswalt’s publicist confirmed to Extra that McNamara’s death “was a complete shock to her family and friends, who loved her dearly.” Michelle McNamara and Patton Oswalt married in 2005 and had one daughter together, Alice, who is 7-years-old.

Michelle McNamara was a crime writer who had a degree from the University of Notre Dame and a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Minnesota. Oswalt’s wife also founded the popular website True Crime Diary, a site that is known for covering long-forgotten cold cases. In an interview with SuicideGirls.com, McNamara said her husband gave her the idea to launch a website to feed her fascination with true crime stories.

“I was always doing this research to satisfy my own curiosity,” Michelle said. “I realized there was so much information online available about these unsolved cases that wasn’t making it to the news. … [Patton] saw me yelling at the news anchors getting it wrong or I had it first or something. He said, ‘Well, you should start a website.’ So I kind of just did it almost as a lark at first, not figuring it would become such a regular thing.”

Patton Oswalt is best known for his role as Spence Olchin on the long-running CBS sitcom The King of Queens, and he currently voices and adult Adam Goldberg on the ABC comedy TheGoldbergs.

Patton Oswalt’s celebrity friends took to social media to offer their condolences to the actor. Oswalt’s King of Queens co-star Kevin James said he was “crushed” by the news, while his The Heart, She Holler co-star Kristen Schaal reminisced about a dinner that she attended with Patton and his wife.

The death of Patton Oswalt’s wife came at what should have been a happy time for the couple. Michelle passed away the night before the release of Patton’s latest Netflix special, Talking For Clapping. In recent years, Oswalt has incorporated more material about his family life into his stand-up routines, and he recently told Entertainment Weekly that his home life has changed a lot since his last TV special because his daughter is no longer a baby.

“Now I have a daughter that I’m not trying to keep alive,” Patton said. “I have a daughter that I actually have to contend with as a personality and as a growing intellect. I’m very aware of, and you’ll see this on the special, I’m very aware of, okay, what direction do I want to push this person in? How conscious am I of the mistakes I made, that my parents made? I want to keep her away from those, but also, shouldn’t she have some mistakes to learn from? Instead of ‘new parent,’ it’s ‘worried parent,’ if that makes sense.”

Patton Oswalt can take comfort in the condolences sent from fans and friends all over the world through social media. Interestingly, it was just a few years ago that Patton snubbed social media, telling the A.V. Club that sometimes he preferred “radio silence.” Oswalt also noted that as a comedian “you have to go look at the world.”

“There’s like five people I just call and yak with every single day,” Oswalt said at the time. “And that to me is my internet. You can replace the internet with five really smart friends.”

Sadly, with the sudden death of his wife, Patton Oswalt will need to lean on those friends even more now than ever.

Take a look at the video below to see Patton Oswalt talking about his daughter.

[Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images]

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