Kaley Cuoco won’t forget her first time working with the late John Ritter, when he played her dad on the former ABC sitcom 8 Simple Rules.
“I was 16 when we did our first table read, and I was playing the ‘sexy’ sister,” Cuoco told PEOPLE recently at the John Ritter Foundation for Aortic Health‘s Evening from the Heart L.A. Gala, where she took part in the reading of a script from a previous Ritter show, Three’s Company. “And so, I remember I wore a very revealing dress to our table read.”
Ritter, already a TV star at the time, was not amused.
“When John walked in, he came in, he didn’t say anything to me. He took his jacket off and put his jacket over me and he said, ‘You’ll never dress like that again, missy.’ That was the first thing he ever said to me, and he instantly became my TV dad.”
The Emmy-winning sitcom, which costarred Katey Sagal, Amy Davidson, and Martin Spanjers, originally aired for three seasons, from 2002 to 2005. Cuoco played Bridget, the eldest daughter of Ritter and Sagal.
However, Ritter died in 2003, when he was 54, of a heart issue called an aortic dissection. He had been rehearsing a season 2 episode of his and Cuoco’s sitcom, then called 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, when he collapsed on set.
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Cuoco, who’s gone on to star on The Big Bang Theory and The Flight Attendant, has noted the closeness that she felt with Ritter.
She recalled in a September 2018 interview with ET that he had stopped by her dressing room before heading home in one of their last interactions.
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“He sat down on the couch and he goes, ‘I love you,’ and I was like, ‘I love you too, silly man,'” Cuoco said. “And he goes ‘No, I want you to know, I love you.’ And I said, ‘I love you too,’ and then he goes, ‘That’s it,’ and he gave me a hug and that’s the last time I saw him.”
Cuoco noted to PEOPLE that her time with the actor, who also appeared in the movies Sling Blade and Problem Child, had left a lasting impression.
“He changed the course of my life,” she said. “He was there at the beginning for my career. I spent a year and a half with him, but it changed my life, my entire life.”
