Robert Hegyes, the actor best known for playing Jewish Puerto Rican student Juan Epstein on the 1970s television show “Welcome Back Kotter” died Thursday at a hospital in Edison, N.J., after suffering an apparent heart attack. He was 60.
Hegyes was appearing on Broadway in 1975 when he auditioned for “Kotter,” a television series about a teacher who returns to the inner-city New York school of his youth to teach a group of irreverent remedial students nicknamed the “Sweathogs.”
