Fred Berry, at 52; starred in TV's `What's Happening!'

Mr. Berry, who recently suffered a mild stroke, died Tuesday in his home in Los Angeles. A county coroner's investigation was being conducted to determine the cause of death.

A former member of the dance group the Lockers, Mr. Berry shot to TV fame in 1976 as the happy-go-lucky Freddie "Rerun" Stubbs on "What's Happening!," a comedy about three black Los Angeles high school students. (The others were Ernest Thomas as "Raj" and Haywood Nelson Jr. as Dwayne.)

The series aired on ABC until 1979. An updated version -- "What's Happening Now!" -- ran in syndication from 1985 to 1988, although Mr. Berry left after its first season because of a contract dispute.

But there was a down side to his celebrity.

"I was a millionaire by the time I was 29," he told People magazine in 1996, "but then the stress of success got to me. The fat jokes got to me. And I got heavily into drugs and alcohol."

Mr. Berry said in another 1996 interview that he had been "experimenting with drugs and alcohol" since he was a teenager, but as he became more successful, he could afford more drugs.

He was, Mr. Berry told the Cincinnati Call and Post, "addicted to drugs and alcohol for 10 years and probably spent a million dollars partying, and tried to commit suicide three times. I just got tired of being tired and decided to rededicate my life to the Lord in 1984. That's when I also got delivered from the drugs and alcohol."

At the time of the interview, Mr. Berry was an unpaid associate minister and evangelist at the Little Shiloh Church on the outskirts of Huntsville, Ala., where he had moved from Los Angeles a year and a half earlier.

Raised in a St. Louis housing project, Mr. Berry moved with his family to Los Angeles in 1965. He dropped out of high school in the 10th grade, he once said, "because they wanted me to read books on a fourth-grade reading level."

He began dancing on the television dance show "Soul Train" as a teenager and, in the early '70s, joined the Lockers, who performed in Las Vegas and opened for Bill Cosby, Dean Martin, and other entertainers.

He was still dancing with the Lockers when he auditioned for "What's Happening!"

In the years since the show, Mr. Berry never tired of being recognized as Rerun, a nickname he legally adopted as his middle name. He cashed in on his TV fame in recent years by donning his trademark red beret and working as a pitchman for various companies.

"I'm still Rerun and I love it!" Mr. Berry said in an interview a year ago. "People ask me to dance every day, no matter where I am -- in the grocery store or in the boardroom."

Mr. Berry, who lived most of the time in Los Angeles, also kept busy as a minister. "I'm not the ordinary orthodox pat-you-on-the-head type," he said. "I'm the type of minister that will get in your face. I'm real because it's a real world out there."

Last summer, he began working with a Web site that, for a fee, provides 15-second phone calls from celebrities who offer up birthday greetings or simple hellos. Mr. Berry received more than 130 requests a month for calls, and fans sometimes screamed with delight when he told them Rerun was on the line and gave them him his signature "Hey, hey, hey."

Mr. Berry was married six times (he married two wives twice) and had three children, DeShannon, Portia, and Freddy.