Nick Cordero, Broadway actor who battled COVID-19, has died at age 41, wife says
Broadway actor Nick Cordero, who had been hospitalized for three months and had his leg amputated after contracting the coronavirus, has died, his wife, Amanda Kloots, said Sunday. He was 41.
"My darling husband passed away this morning," Kloots said in an Instagram post. "He was surrounded in love by his family, singing and praying as he gently left this earth."
"I am in disbelief and hurting everywhere," Kloots added. "My heart is broken as I cannot imagine our lives without him."
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Last week, Kloots told "CBS This Morning" that Cordero would need a double lung transplant.
"A 99% chance that he would be needing that in order to live the kind of life that I know my husband would want to live," Kloots said. "That is a long road away and a lot of things would have to line up in order for Nick to be a candidate for that."
She described to Gayle King how hard it was for her that she couldn't do more than hold his hand.
"There's so many cords everywhere," she said. "I just want to jump in his bed and hug him and grab him and squeeze him, but you know, you have to be very careful with everything that's going on, so I grab his hand and I massage his hand and I hold his hand, and I'm waiting for the day that he holds my hand back."
Cordero was hospitalized three months ago for what doctors initially said was pneumonia, but Kloots posted on Instagram on April 1 that they believed he had been misdiagnosed and had COVID-19.
After he was sedated in the ICU for 18 days, his leg was amputated. He also went into septic shock, had a lung infection and had a temporary pacemaker put in.
Kloots described the ups and downs of his illness as the "vicious ICU dance circle."
"One thing goes right and then another thing goes wrong and that thing that was wrong goes right but then the thing that was right goes wrong," she said.
Kloots, a former Broadway dancer who is now a celebrity trainer, has been using her Instagram account to post updates on Cordero's condition.
Cordero starred in the musical adaptation of the Woody Allen film "Bullets Over Broadway" in 2014, for which he earned a Tony nomination. He had also appeared previously on Broadway in "Rock of Ages," "Waitress" and "A Bronx Tale: The Musical."
Cordero and Kloots have a 1-year-old son, Elvis. Throughout his battle with COVID-19, Kloots encouraged fans to sing Cordero's song "Live Your Life" daily at 3 p.m. ET.