Jimmy Fallon‘s mom, Gloria Fallon, died on Saturday, November 4, one day after he canceled a Tonight Show taping.
“Jimmy Fallon’s mother, Gloria, died peacefully on Saturday,” a Fallon family spokesperson told Us Weekly in a statement. “Jimmy was at his mother’s bedside, along with her loved ones, when she passed away at NYU Langone Medical Center in NYC. Our prayers go out to Jimmy and his family as they go through this tough time.”
A source told Us earlier on Saturday that “Jimmy comes from a very close-knit family, and together with his loved ones they are by her side right now.”
On Saturday afternoon, Questlove, the Tonight Show band front man and drummer, was asked by TMZ how Fallon, 43, was doing after he pulled out of taping Friday’s show due to a family emergency.
“When you lose someone it’s always sad,” the musician told TMZ.
Fallon has often talked about his childhood growing up in upstate New York, revealing that his mom and dad, Jim, would tape clean versions of Saturday Night Live when he was a kid so that he and his sister, Gloria, could watch and re-enact the sketches for their parents and friends.
“I was one of those kids who, if I hung around another kid for an hour, I was that kid,” Fallon told Spin magazine in 2000. “It was weird. I’d come home and I’d do his type of humor, his type of mannerisms. And my mom would say, ‘OK, Joey, you want dinner now?’ ‘Cause I’d be acting like Joey Gonzalez.”
In an interview with New York magazine before he left SNL in 2004, Fallon joked that his mom was “a total square.”
“She wasn’t allowed to leave her stoop in Brooklyn,” he said. “She was a nun for about a month, but then she was like, ‘You know what? I didn’t get the calling!’ Ha! When did Sound of Music come out? I think there was like a thing where everyone wanted to be a nun.”
