Dennis Haskins Dead at 75: ‘Saved by the Bell’ Mr. Belding’s Cause of Death

• Dennis Haskins, who played Principal Richard Belding on Saved by the Bell and its spin-offs for 12 years, died Sunday, Sept. 27, in Burbank, California. He was 75.
• His agent confirmed the death Monday and gave no cause. His longtime caretaker says he had lived privately with Parkinson’s disease for about eight years.
• Mario Lopez, Tiffani Thiessen and Lark Voorhies led the tributes. “If you knew him, you loved him,” Lopez wrote.

Dennis Haskins, the actor who spent 12 years as Bayside High’s Principal Richard Belding on Saved by the Bell and its spin-offs, died Sunday, Sept. 27, in Burbank, California. He was 75.

His agent, Jay Schachter, head of film and television at Stewart Talent, confirmed the death on Monday. He said Haskins had been his client and “dear friend for over 20 years.”

Everyone loved Mr. Belding and those of us who got to know Dennis loved him even more. He was a great person, and he loved, I mean absolutely LOVED his fans.

Jay Schachter, Dennis Haskins’ agent, in a statement

What was Dennis Haskins’ cause of death?

No cause has been released. Schachter’s statement did not give one, and neither has his family.

Haskins died at an assisted living facility in Burbank, his friend and caretaker Kimberly Snow told the Los Angeles Times. Snow said he got sick about eight years ago and kept his Parkinson’s disease and other health problems to himself because he did not want the attention.

Parkinson’s is a progressive brain disorder that affects movement, according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Nobody close to Haskins has said it caused his death.

His ex-wife, Sarah Quinones, said he “did not want people to know about his illness.” Snow, who used to manage the Burbank karaoke bar Dimples, which he called his second home, said she read him the messages that friends and fans sent in his final years.

Who played Mr. Belding on Saved by the Bell?

Haskins, for 12 years, though not in the very first version. When NBC aired the pilot of Good Morning, Miss Bliss in July 1987, the principal was a Gerald Belding, played by Oliver Clark.

The Disney Channel picked the show up as a series on Nov. 30, 1988, with Haskins as Richard Belding and Hayley Mills as the title teacher at John F. Kennedy Junior High in Indianapolis.

Disney dropped it after 13 episodes. Producer Peter Engel rebuilt it for NBC’s Saturday mornings: Miss Bliss was written out, the school became Bayside High in California, and four characters made the move, Zack, Screech, Lisa and Belding.

That version, Saved by the Bell, ran on NBC from 1989 to 1993. Belding was the only adult in the regular cast, the principal the kids outsmarted every week, with a catchphrase fans still quote: “Hey, hey, hey! What is going on here?”

When the original class graduated, Haskins stayed. He played Belding for all seven seasons of Saved by the Bell: The New Class (1993–2000), plus the TV movies Hawaiian Style (1992) and Wedding in Las Vegas (1994).

He came back once more in February 2015, in a Tonight Show sketch in which Jimmy Fallon enrolled at Bayside with Mark-Paul Gosselaar, Mario Lopez, Tiffani Thiessen and Elizabeth Berkley. Belding walks in near the end. The clip has more than 53 million views on the show’s YouTube channel.

Peacock’s 2020 revival brought back Gosselaar, Lopez, Berkley and Thiessen, but not Haskins. The new Bayside had a new principal, Principal Toddman, played by John Michael Higgins.

Who was Dennis Haskins before Bayside?

Dennis Button Haskins IV was born on Nov. 18, 1950, in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He went to Notre Dame High School and then to the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, where he acted with the drama club and helped found the Harlequins, a community theater group.

As the student government’s entertainment chairman at UTC, he booked Ike and Tina Turner for a campus show in 1973. Before Belding, he picked up TV parts on The Dukes of Hazzard, Magnum, P.I. and The Twilight Zone.

After Bayside, he kept working in guest roles on The West Wing, Mad Men, How I Met Your Mother, New Girl and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and in the 2014 movie A Million Ways to Die in the West.

In 2017 he played a school principal twice more, in music videos. He lip-syncs all of Dirty Heads’ “Vacation” through an empty school, a video with more than 105 million views, and opens Khalid’s “Young Dumb & Broke” at the principal’s microphone.

What did the Saved by the Bell cast say?

Mario Lopez, who played A.C. Slater, posted a photo from their 2015 reunion on Instagram. “He played the principal, but Dennis was the biggest kid on the SBTB set,” he wrote. “If you knew him, you loved him — and if there was karaoke, you knew Dennis was getting on that mic!”

Tiffani Thiessen, who played Kelly Kapowski, called him “a steady presence in my teenage years, the kind of figure who kept us in line while making sure we knew he was in our corner.” She signed off: “RIP Mr. B.”

Lark Voorhies, who played Lisa Turtle, one of the four characters who made the move from Good Morning, Miss Bliss with him, wrote that knowing him “for almost 40 years has been one of the truest blessings of my life.”

WWE star The Miz said he grew up watching Haskins on TV “and never imagined that one day I’d get to call him my friend.” Haskins is survived by his son, Dustin.

More from Movies & TV. This week the wrestling world also lost PAC, the AEW star known as Neville in WWE, at 40, and music lost ‘Barely Breathing’ singer Duncan Sheik at 56 and New Found Glory’s Chad Gilbert at 45.

— Bruno Monteiro

Sources: statement from Jay Schachter, Stewart Talent, as reported by ABC News (Leah Sarnoff), Fox News Digital (Stephanie Giang-Paunon) and NBC News (Dennis Romero and Emmy Beck-Aden); Kimberly Snow, as reported by the Los Angeles Times; Sarah Quinones, as reported by TMZ; WTVC NewsChannel 9, Chattanooga (school and UTC background); Mario Lopez, Tiffani Thiessen and Lark Voorhies on Instagram and The Miz, as reported by Yahoo Entertainment. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, National Institutes of Health (NIH) (definition of Parkinson’s disease). Photos and video: the official Saved by the Bell YouTube channel; The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (NBC); WDEF News 12; Better Noise Music (Dirty Heads, “Vacation”); Khalid (“Young Dumb & Broke”).