BERNIE MAC CO-STAR: "HIS PASSING IS A MAJOR LOSS"

Bernie Mac's Saturday death "is such a major loss to the acting and comedy communities," his former co-star, Niecy Nash, tells Usmagazine.com in a statement.
Mac, 50, died early Saturday morning, in a Chicago-area hospital, from complications due to pneumonia, his rep confirmed to Us. He had been admitted to a hospital August 1, but was expected to make a full recovery after a few weeks of treatment.
See more photos of stars gone too soon.
Nash, 38, played Mac's little sister, Benita, on The Bernie Mac Show, which aired from 2001 to 2006. She currently stars in the Fox comedy, Do Not Disturb.
She says:
"Bernie Mac was so gracious. I'll never forget when I auditioned for the role to play his sister on The Bernie Mac Show, [and] we had to improvise for the callback. I did it, and we had such a good time, but I didn't know yet if I had booked the part. I walked out and I went to say 'hi' to someone else I knew in the cast. And Bernie was walking by and he just walked up and said, 'Congratulations, baby girl' and kissed me on the cheek. And I was like, 'what?' I'm thinking I had to wait for my agent to call, but Bernie gave me that job on the spot.
"
When I showed up to work, he said something to me that had never been said to me on a set before. He said, 'Baby girl, the script here is not the Bible. Do you and I'll follow. I got mine, you get yours.' When he said that, I knew everything was going to be alright. I was happy to have the freedom to make up some funny with him. It was simply delicious. My working experiences with Bernie were so amazing, that from that point on, I wouldn't have cared if he called me in the middle of the night to come and be in a scene where I didn't have anything to do but sit in the background and eat cereal. I would've just done it because I loved him like that.
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His passing is such a major loss to the acting and comedy communities. Everything that I learned and observed from Bernie Mac, I'm going to apply it. Now that I have my own sitcom, I'm going to pay it forward. His great legacy of graciousness and giving will live on. That's how I'm going to keep his memory alive; by expressing the best part of him through me. Bernie Mac was the personification of the word 'real.' He kept it real. That kind of genuine spirit that he carried all time cannot be easily duplicated, but I will do my very best to try."

Usmagazine