The fall of the former child star is one of show business's oldest tropes—but that doesn't make each and every story of talent squandered or a life wasted any less heartbreaking. Dana Plato, whose downward spiral helped propel the theory that the hit sitcom Diff'rent Strokes was cursed, has been gone for more than 20 years, having died of a drug overdose in 1999, a day after insisting on The Howard Stern Show that she had been sober for a decade—except for painkillers she took four months prior, when she got her wisdom teeth removed. She even offered on the air to take a drug test. The 34-year-old actress was on the show in the first place to rebut the claims of a...