Rise to Fame
The audition tape was just him banging on Tupperware and glasses. No formal voice training, no musical theater background, just a Canadian dropout who'd worked at Walmart and driven school buses. Glee producers wanted a football quarterback reluctantly pulled into show choir, and somehow this guy, with zero experience and a lot of charm, fit better than anyone they'd seen. The show debuted in 2009 and put more than 200 songs on the Billboard Hot 100. He was the center of it.
In the Spotlight
His reputation is inseparable from his death now, which might be the only sad version of lasting fame. He checked into rehab in March 2013 after an intervention on the Paramount lot, got out in April, and was dead by July. The BC coroner found that the months of sobriety had lowered his tolerance, making a previously manageable dose fatal. He was 31 and dating Lea Michele. The story didn't get to have any other chapter.
Side Notes
Sixteen schools and a dropout at 16 is the curriculum most people don't associate with TV stardom. Before Glee, he was a Walmart greeter, school bus driver, roofer, and occasional drummer for bands that went nowhere. He started using drugs around 13, has said it was about not fitting in more than about the substances themselves. He finally got his high school diploma in 2011, at 29, from an alternative school in Victoria. Two years before he died, he finished what he started when he was a kid.
Final Chapter
His body was cremated on July 17 after a private viewing by family and Lea Michele. On July 25, Michele and Ryan Murphy held a celebration of life in Los Angeles attended by the full cast and crew. Glee halted production for a week before returning with grief counselors on set. The tribute episode, 'The Quarterback,' aired October 10, 2013, with an accompanying EP whose proceeds benefited Project Limelight, a Canadian performing arts program he had supported.