Actor Eric Dane announced in April of 2025 that he had been diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. “I’m fighting as much as I can,” he said a few months later, shortly after finishing work on the third season of Euphoria, on which he played Cal Jacobs, the father to Jacob Elordi‘s Nate Jacobs. But ALS is an unrelenting and merciless degenerative disease, for which there is no cure. And on February 19, the 53-year-old actor died, after final days spent with friends and family.
“With heavy hearts, we share that Eric Dane passed on Thursday afternoon following a courageous battle with ALS,” Dane’s family has said via a statement shared with media. “He spent his final days surrounded by dear friends, his devoted wife, and his two beautiful daughters, Billie and Georgia, who were the center of his world. Throughout his journey with ALS, Eric became a passionate advocate for awareness and research, determined to make a difference for others facing the same fight.”
Dane was born on November 9, 1972, in San Francisco, California. He fell in love with acting as a youth, after he was cast in a high school production of All My Sons. He moved to Los Angeles after graduation to seek his fortune as an actor, but it took a while for Hollywood to catch on to his easy grin and athletic charm. Eventually, he started winning small roles in the TV shows of the day: Married… with Children, Saved by the Bell, and Roseanne.
His big break was a recurring role in short-lived Y2K medical drama Gideon’s Crossing, followed soon thereafter by a central role in the later seasons of supernatural series Charmed. That combination of roles cemented Dane as the go-to for a certain type of sturdy and appealing television role, but it was his role as Dr. Mark Sloan beginning in the second season of Grey’s Anatomy that made Dane a household name—that, as well as his 2004 marriage to actor Rebecca Gayheart. Dane left the show six years later, in 2012, but reruns and syndication kept his lab-coated figure in the public eye long after that.
While he worked consistently in the years since, it was his role on Euphoria that opened a new chapter in Dane’s career. As closeted Cal Jacobs, the seemingly perfect family man living a double life, Dane received some of the best reviews of his career. As Variety‘s Daniel D’Addario wrote in 2022, “Dane is simply spectacular” in the role, citing a Jacobs-centered episode as “a high-water mark for an exceptional series.”
“I don’t know what it’s like to be Cal, but I know what it’s like to live a double life,” Dane told Vanity Fair in 2022. “I’ve had my own experience with drug and alcohol abuse. That’s a double life.
