As the Emmy-winner mourned her dad on her “MeSsy” podcast, she revealed it was the “first time” she had cried since losing him.
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The “Dead to Me” star got emotional while speaking with actor JoAnna Garcia Swisher and co-host Jamie-Lynn Sigler on Tuesday’s episode, which is known for its candid conversations about life’s challenges and the hosts’ experiences managing multiple sclerosis (MS).
As Swisher looked back on how she coped with the loss of both of her parents, Applegate shared that her father, Robert “Bobby” Applegate, recently died at the age of 82.
“You’re probably wondering why I’m crying right now,” she said while weeping. “My dad just passed away a week ago. This is the first time I’ve really cried.”
Addressing his death on the podcast seemed cathartic for the Emmy-winner, who said, “I think kind of … I wasn’t allowing myself to have that yet. Too busy with this, too busy with that.”
As Applegate explained that she and her family already “knew” her father was close to death, she wondered if that made mourning easier or harder.
“Is that an excuse for not feeling?” she asked herself. “Because you know that someone’s gonna go? And you’ve said your goodbyes?”
Applegate opened up about her relationship to her father as the podcast went on, telling Sigler and Swisher, “I didn’t grow up with my dad. He and my mom separated when I was, like, 5 months old, but he’s been in my life ever since.”
While he wasn’t completely absent, the “Married with Children” actor admitted her dad “wasn’t part of the lessons, part of life” but gave her “beautiful siblings and an amazing stepmother.”
Applegate previously spoke about feeling distant from her father while appearing with him on the BBC genealogy series, “Who Do You Think You Are?” in 2013.
“My dad and mother split up when I was so young,” she explained. “I didn’t get to spend the kind of time with him that I think either I or him would’ve liked to have spent.”
Though the star was raised by her mother, Nancy Priddy, her music producer father always knew his daughter was destined for something special.
In a 2009 history of the 1970s music label Casablanca Records written by co-founder Larry Harris, the record exec remembered working with Robert Applegate and the “precocious six-year-old named Christina” who sometimes came along with him.
“From the day he arrived he would tell anyone who would listen how his little girl was going to grow up to be a star,” Harris wrote. “He was right.”
