Dennis Weaver - June 4, 1924-February 24, 2006

They say these things happen in threes so I guess we shouldn't have been surprised to hear of the death of Dennis Weaver but, well we were. More than either Don Knotts or Darren McGavin, Dennis Weaver was a constant presence in my TV life. I'm just old enough to remember Weaver when he was playing Marshal Matt Dillon's limping deputy Chester B. Goode in Gunsmoke. He left that role in 1964 and everyone expected him to disappear. Instead he showed up about three years later as Ranger Tom Wedloe in Gentle Ben - he played the father of Ron Howard's little brother Clint, best friend of Ron and Clint's dad Rance and worked with a bear. That series only lasted two years, thanks to the programming weasels at CBS who decided they wanted more "adult" programming. Then came a remake of the Clint Eastwood movie Coogan's Bluff except this one was a pilot called McCloud: Who Killed Miss U.S.A.? and turned into one component of the NBC Mystery Movie along with Columbo and MacMillan and Wife. Around this time he also did a TV movie called Duel directed by some kid named Spielberg (I wonder whatever happened to him?) While he tried a few more times for successful series, none of his later shows lasted more than a season. These included Stone where he played a detective along with his real life son Robby Weaver, Emerald Point N.A.S. with a pre-MacGyver Richard Dean Anderson, and Buck James based on real life surgeon Dr. "Red" Duke. His last regular series role was in 2005 on the ABC Family series Wildfire where he played Nana Visitor's father. And even when he wasn't working in a series he always seemed to be a presence on TV either through theatrical movies or more often made for TV movies or mini-series. He also did voice work on the series Captain Planet and the Planeteers which tied in to his involvement with ecological causes.

Dennis Weaver was born in Joplin Missouri and served in the US Navy during World War II. After the war he went to the University of Oklahoma where he was a star of the track and field team - he finished fifth in the Decathlon in the 1948 US Olympic trials but beat eventual gold medallist Bob Mathias in the 1500 meters. Subsequently Weaver trained at the Actor's Studio in New York and appeared in Streetcar Named Desire with Shelley Winters and toured in Come Back Little Sheba with Shirley Booth. Coming to California under contract to Universal (he was aided in getting the contract by Shelley Winters) he found little work (for example he shows up in an early episode of Dragnet as a forensic scientist) and was actually working as a flower delivery man for $60 a week when he was cast in Gunsmoke playing the role that Parley Baer had played in the radio version of the series (almost - the character in the radio show was named Chester Proudfoot but someone at CBS decided that people would expect someone named Proudfoot to be an Indian; in fact the name Proudfoot is English). In his biography Weaver says that he found the character as written "inane" but "With all my Actors Studio training, I'll correct this character by using my own experiences and drawing from myself." One thing that the 6'2" Weaver did was to give the character a limp so that he'd be noticed alongside James Arness who stood 6'7". The role won Weaver his only Emmy in 1959 as "Best Supporting Actor", although he was nominated twice as "Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series" for his work in McCloud. Weaver called that series "the most satisfying role of my career." That series was memorable for McCloud's fish out of water status and his ability to constantly frustrate and luster his New York Boss, Chief Clifford, played by J.D. Cannon. A trademark of the series was the inevitable final chase scene which usually involved Sam McCloud driving some vehicle that had some link to the storyline of the episode, like a fire engine or a carriage with horses. It was an amazingly enjoyable series.

In his personal life Weaver was a committed environmentalist and activist against world hunger. A vegetarian since the 1960s he served as president of an organization called "Love Is Feeding Everyone" (LIFE) which fed 150,000 needy people a week in Los Angeles County. He founded the Institute for Ecolonomics which tried to solve economic and ecological problems, and he spoke to both the United Nations and Congress on issues of pollution and poverty. One of his major personal projects was "Earthship" his solar powered Colorado home built out of tires and old cans. The thick walls kept the structure at a constant temperature. The depth of Weaver's commitment to the environement could be seen in an exchange during an appearance on The Tonight Show. When Jay Leno quipped "When the garbage man comes how does he know where the garbage begins and the house ends?" to which Weaver responded "If we get into the mind-set of saving rather than wasting and utilizing other materials, we can save the Earth." Most recently he's been a major advocate of alternative fuel vehicles, and in 2003 led a cross country caravan of them from Los Angeles to Washington D.C.

Dennis Weaver died on Friday of complications from cancer. He is survived by his wife of over 60 years Gerry Stowell, three sons and three grandchildren.

What A Lousy Day!

I hate doing obituaries.

I had planned to take a quick look at the new contestants in this season of The Apprentice so I could also with good conscience look at the contestants for The Amazing Race, the reality show I really like. Then I heard about the death of Don Knotts. This was followed very quickly by learning of the death of Darren McGavin.

Let's start with Don Knotts. He died late on Friday night of pulmonary and respiratory complications related to lung cancer. Knotts was a TV fixture, and what you knew him as depended on the period in which you saw him. Starting in TV on the soap opera Search For Tomorrow, in 1956 he joined the cast of Steve Allen's Sunday night variety show. This was followed in 1957 by his role as Barney Fife in The Andy Griffith Show. Knotts and Griffith had first met as part of the cast of the Broadway hit No Time For Sergeants in which Griffith played hillbilly recruit Will Stockdale and Knotts played Corporal Manual Dexterity. As Griffith described it this was the beginning of a lifelong friendship, and when Griffith got his own show in 1960 he picked Knotts to play the bumbling Deputy Barney Fife. While Barney was scarcely the most effective member of any police force - he got the job of deputy because he was Andy Taylor's cousin - he had an air of a man not exactly corrupted by power but rather one who has allowed power to inflate his sense of importance. This is despite the fact that Andy only allowed him to carry one bullet...in his shirt pocket. Knotts won five Emmys for playing Barney Fife.

Knotts left the Griffith show in 1965. Reportedly he was under the impression that Griffith intended to end the show after five seasons. They had both signed five year contracts, and by the time Knotts was offered a three year contract to match the one Griffith had signed to continue the show, Knotts was under contract to Universal to do movies. The first part of his movie career included such family films as The Incredible Mr. Limpet, The Ghost And Mr. Chicken, The Reluctant Astronaut, and The Love God?. The latter was something of a failure at the box office and Knotts returned to TV in 1970 with The Don Knotts Show. The comedy-variety show only lasted one season despite a cast that included a young Gary Burghoff, and John Dehner. He returned to films in the 1970s, mostly in Disney films like The Apple Dumpling Gang, Gus, and Herbie Goes To Monte Carlo. In many of these movies he was teamed with Tim Conway.

In 1979 he joined the cast of Three's Company, replacing Audra Lindley and Norman Fell. His character in the show, Ralph Furley, managed the apartment building where Jack, Janet and Chrissy lived for his unseen brother Bart. In some ways Ralph was like Barney Fife, a man who allowed a little power to inflate his sense of self-importance, at least when he wasn't confronted on the phone by his brother Bart. Ralph fancied himself a ladies man - but was about the only one who did - and dressed in what he thought would attract the ladies. This included a wide selection of leisure suits and ascots. Knotts stayed with the show until it ended in 1984. Following the end of Three's Company Knotts did a number of guest appearances on TV shows including one on Suzanne Somers' series She's The Sheriff however health concerns limited his involvement. He was added as a recurring character in Andy Griffith's series Matlock but most of his later work was voice work for animation, although he made one memorable cameo in Pleasantville as the TV Repariman. His last credit is as the voice of Mayor Turkey Lurkey in the animated feature Chicken Little, although he made an on screen appearance as himself on a 2005 episode of Las Vegas.

Then there's Darren McGavin. McGavin started his career in the movies primarily in uncredited roles and working in live theatre. In 1951 he replaced Richard Carlyle in the short-lived TV version of the radio series Casey Crime Photographer. He spent much of the 1950s doing parts in anthology series including Tales of Tomorrow, The Philco Television Playhouse, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Robert Montgomery Presents and Studio One. At the same time he was working in movies such as The Man with the Golden Arm. His first series role was in the syndicated Mike Hammer in 1956 playing Mickey Spillane's tough private eye. He followed that with the 1959 series Riverboat in which he appeared opposite Burt Reynolds. During the 1960s he made a lot of guest appearances before playing the loner private eye in The Outsider.

Probably his best known series role was in the original Kolchak: The Night Stalker where he played the somewhat seedy tabloid reporter Carl Kolchak. Kolchak was the perpetually dishevelled protagonist who was continually investigating supernatural events like vampires, werewolves and zombies, all while trying (and failing) to convince his incredulous editor played by Simon Oakland. While Kolchak: The Night Stalker only survived for a single twenty episode season it earned cult favourite status and served as an inspiration for The X-Files as well as the 2005 remake called The Night Stalker. McGavin made two appearances on The X-Files, playing retired FBI Agent Arthur Dales, and more appearances were planned but McGavin's failing health made him unavailable. He also made an appearance in Chris Carter's other series Millenium. Computer sampling from the original Kolchak series was used to allow a young McGavin to make an appearance in the pilot of the new show.

McGavin's last series was the incredibly bad Small & Frye in which he played yet another private eye. Movie and TV movie appearances became a major aspect in his career. This included two Disney films with Don Knotts, No Deposit, No Return and Hot Lead and Cold Feet. Probably his most famous movie role is as "The Old Man" in Christmas Story, a film which has become a Christmas classic. He was 61, old enough to be Melinda Dillon's father and Peter Billingsley's grandfather (they played his wife and son respectively). That and Kolchak are probably the roles he's best known for today. In the late 1980s and early '90s he appeared in guest roles in a number of series, most notably as Candace Bergen's father in Murphy Brown.

According to the AP wire service report of his death McGavin could be difficult to deal with. He said about the Mike Hammer series, "Hammer was a dummy. I made 72 of those shows, and I thought it was a comedy. In fact, I played it camp. He was the kind of guy who would've waved the flag for George Wallace." He also clashed with the network over Riverboat. On the other hand when his role in The Natural expanded to the point where union rules required negotiations over money and billing, he fought over money but was willing to go uncredited to keep the production going.

One interesting thing in the obituary is a statement by McGavin's son Bogart stated that his father was separated from his second wife Kathie Brown. In fact Kathie Brown passed away in April 2003.

Grandpa We Hardly Knew You

It seems that there's considerable controversy about exactly how much of the biography of Al Lewis is true. Virtually everyone believed that Al Lewis, who played Grandpa on The Munsters (and no it wasn't Grandpa Munster - he was Lily's father not Herman's - but Grandpa Sam Dracula) was born in 1910, was active in the efforts to free Sacco & Vanzetti, was a circus clown, got a PhD in Child Psychology in 1941, ran for Governor of New York at age 88. Now it appears as if it may all have been a house of cards.

Media outlets are updating their obituaries of Lewis when Lewis's son Ted stated that his father was born in 1923, not 1910. This throws a considerable amount of the "Al Lewis Legend" into disarray. Did he get a degree in Child Psychology? If so then he was highly precocious since he would only have been 18 at the time. Of course that's to be expected from a youth who had been an activist for Sacco and Vanzetti at age 4. He would have been a youth of 75 when he ran for governor and forget working in the circus or as a medicine show performer - if he was going to get that PhD at 18 he'd have to be glued to the books 24/7.

I'm not calling Ted Lewis a liar however this whole thing stinks like one of Al's cigars. I tend to distrust memoirs from family members. All too often a family member has an axe to grind - if you don't believe I cite Gary Crosby (son of Bing and author of Going My Own Way), Christina Crawford (daughter of Joan and author of Mommy Dearest), B.D. Hyman (daughter of Bette Davis and author of My Mother's Keeper), and Maria Riva (daughter of Marlene Dietrcih and author of Marlene Dietrich). I'm not asking for a lot but taking either Al Lewis or Ted Lewis entirely at their words has now at the very least become difficult. I need documentation.

Of course none of this takes away from the fact that Al Lewis was a very funny and fascinating man or that Sam Dracula was a great comic creation. In fact sifting the truth and the fiction to reveal the real Al Lewis might make him more interesting. Or it might be a case where, when given the choice between the truth and the legend it is better to - as the newspaper man in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance said "Print the legend."

Al Lewis - April 30, 1910-February 3, 2006

One of the most amazing figures in TV history was Al "Grandpa" Lewis. Very few other actors parlayed a character on a show that lasted only two years into both a career and a persona, but once Al Lewis found Grandpa Munster in The Munsters he was set for life.

Al Lewis was born in Woolcott New York, but his family moved to Brooklyn as a child and he was a New Yorker from that point on. He worked as a hot dog vendor at Ebbetts Field and, in the 1920s, as a cricus performer before returning to college. He graduated from Columbia in 1941 with a PhD in Child Psychology. He returned to acting in 1949, working in Burlesque and the last days of vaudeville. His first TV role was in an episode of a series called Decoy, and he appeared in a number of dramas over the years. However it was his work in comedies that really caught people's attention. He appeared in a couple of episodes of The Phil Silvers Show (aka Sergeant Bilko).

Still it was Car 54 Where Are You? that brought him to general notice. Although the role of Officer Leo Schnauser was a supporting part to the main characters of Gunther Toody (Joe E. Ross) and Francis Muldoon (Fred Gwynne). He would later portray Leo Schnauser in the 1994 film remake of Car 54 Where Are You? The relationship with Gwynne continued when the two were cast in The Munsters. Gwynne played the Frankenstein-like Herman Munster while Lewis played the cigar smoking mad scientist vampire known as Grandpa. Grandpa was - allegedly - the smart one in the relationship. Of the character of Grandpa, Lewis once said "The role of Grandpa is not complicated because you're wearing odd makeup or bizarre costumes. That's not what complicates a role. What makes Grandpa a little odd is the fact that he had no prototype. When I approached this role, I knew that whatever I was doing was original. So no director could say to me, 'Listen, remember how he did it, this is how I want it done.' I worked very hard creating that character. I made those lines work. The walk and the posture all fit the character. As to the character itself, you might say that Grandpa was a kind of Dracula-type Major Hoople."

Car 54 Where Are You? and The Munsters were Al Lewis's only regular TV roles. The two series lasted a total of four years. He would continue to act for many years - his last credit was in 2002 as Father Hanlon in a movie called Night Terror - but all of his later TV appearances were guest appearances. Yet over the years he remained a familiar figure who came to look like Grandpa, with his bushy sideburns and receding hairline. He actively promoted this image. At one point he owned a Greenwich Village restaurant called "Grandpa's" and he'd make personal appearances at the drop of a cigar. This attachment to the "Grandpa" character caused something of a rift between him and Fred Gwynne for a number of years because the Harvard educated Gwynne desperately want to put The Munsters behind him and be regarded as a serious actor.

In later years Al Lewis's political activities caught public attention when in 1998, at age 88, he ran for Governor of New York on the Green Party ticket against George Pataki - he won 52,000 votes which was enough to earn the Greens a line on the state ballot for the next four years. It really shouldn't have come as a surprise - Lewis's involvement in political causes went back to at least 1927 when he was involved in the unsuccessful efforts to gain clemency for Sacco and Vanzetti. For a number of years he hosted a politically oriented radio show in WBAI-FM, a non-commerical listener supported radio station in New York. He once said about his politics that "if anything I consider myself an anarchist." During the 1990s he was a frequent guest on Howard Stern's radio show and Stern once had to censor Lewis when Al led on an obscene chant directed at the FCC.

Besides politics Lewis - who was 6'1" but looked shorter (probably because he was usually seen alongside Fred Gwynne who was 6'5" and wore special boots as Herman which made him taller) - was passionate about basketball and for many years was a basketball scout for Red Auerbach of the Boston Celtics.

In June 2003, Al Lewis underwent his third angioplasty. Complications occurred and his right leg below the knee and the toes on his left foot were amputated, and he spent the next month in a coma. Al Lewis passed away on Friday but his death was announced by WBAI-FM program director Bernard White during the time slot which had been home to Lewis's radio show. White said of Lewis, "To say that we will miss his generous, cantankerous, engaging spirit is a profound understatement." Indeed.

Shelley Winters - 1920-2006

I once said told Stephen Cooke and Tom Sutpen that if you saw Joan Blondell at the stage of her career when I first encountered her, you would never have thought of her as a sex symbol. The same holds true of Shelley Winters. She was a sex symbol at one point in her career. She was a blonde bombshell before Marilyn Monroe - who was her one-time room mate and who by all reports she taught to hold her head in a particularly sexy way - but she tired of it and became what Monroe later wanted to become, a damned good actress with two Oscars and a host of roles in the 1950s that were important and influential. But that wasn't my Shelley Winters.

My Shelley Winters was Mrs. Rosen in the original Poseidon Adventure (her fourth Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor - the photo I have here is of Shelley with her Poseidon Adventure "husband" Red Buttons on the Oscar red carpet many years later), and Julie Andrews (probably bisexual) superagent in S.O.B. (and yeah I watched that movie to see Julie Andrews's boobs, and yeah it was worth it). It was the Shelley who did one shot guest appearances in a variety of unworthy TV shows starting in around 1966 with Batman (as "Ma Parker"). She was apparently memorable in her final major TV role as Nana Mary in Roseanne where she played Estelle Parson's mother despite being only seven years older than her (I never watched Roseanne mainly because I loathe Roseane Barr). But most of all my Shelley Winters was the queen of the talk show. Take a look at her IMDB filmography. Go below the 130 listed parts in movies (mostly theatrical), 20 appearances as herself - several as an Oscar presenter - to her "Notable TV Guest Appearances". There they sit, her talk show appearances on both sides of the Atlantic. These started in 1957 when she did The Steve Martin Show, and included appearances in Britain on something called Late Night Lineup, on Parkinson and it's successor at the BBC Wogan twice each, and even on Ruby Wax's The Full Wax twice. Her last "chat show" appearance - I suppose his qualifies - was on Inside The Actors Studio (something for which she was eminently more qualified than most people who appeared on the show - not only had she attended the Actors Studio, she taught there). She did one episode of the NBC Letterman series Late Night with David Letterman, but her true venue was The Tonight Show With Johnny Carson. Between March 1970 and March 1991 she made twenty-one appearances on the show. Twelve of these appearances occurred between March 1970 and July 1973. She was a much less frequent guest in the 1980s and early 1990s when I saw her.

Shelley Winters was in her element on Carson. She was outrageous. When I saw her, it always seemed as though she's lubricated herself very well with the backstage booze supply. She'd come out and usually talk about Hollywood in the old days and talk about sex lives - her own and others. They played up her often imperfect memory - I remember one sequence where she couldn't remember the name of one of Johnny's wives, which was important to the story. But some of her most memorable performances occurred before I was able to see the show. In 1969 she was responsible for spreading the incorrect rumour that Jerry Mathers (from the movie The Trouble With Harry and the TV series Leave it to Beaver) had died in Vietnam. But perhaps her most infamous performance was when she dumped an ice bucket full of ice and water over the head of Oliver Reed after Reed made some remarks about women that Shelley took exception to. (I have a suspicion that this tape no longer exists, erased as so many of those early shows were. Too bad - Reed got what he deserved and she was the perfect person to give it too him.) It's worth noting I suppose that that was Reed's first - and last - appearance on The Tonight Show while Shelley made a dozen more appearances, the last just a few months before Johnny's final show

Shelley Winters was a great actress, a great character actress, and a great character. Expect TCM to do a retrospective sometime this week, much to the irritation of people who foolishly believe that a schedule should be sacrosanct.

John Spencer 1946 - 2005

I hate writing obituaries but sometimes there are people who you just have to write about. John Spencer, who died late on Friday, was one of those. He would have been 59 on Tuesday.

On TCM they sometimes have a brief segment following some of their movies called Damned Good Actors. It think that this is a description that fit John Spencer to a T. He made his television debut as a teenager on the second season of The Patty Duke Show. His character disappeared when production of the show moved from New York to Hollywood after Patty Duke turned 18 (New York Law was less restrictive with regard to the hours a juvenile actor could work than California law). He was a student at New York's Professional Children's School where some of his fellow students were Liza Minelli and Pinchas Zuckerman. Spencer worked in regional theatre and off-Broadway productions for much of the 1970s and '80s, winning an Obie for his role in the play Still Life and a Drama Desk nomination for The Day Room.

His film career began in the early 1980s with small parts, like one of the airman at the missile silo at the start of War Games, and often parts in cheap movies. In 1990 he had a major supporting role in the Harrison Ford movie Presumed Innocent which probably led to his first major break, the role of Tommy Mullaney on L.A. Law. He was perfectly cast as the gruff former prosecutor whose alcoholism had led to the end of his marriage and nearly the end of his career before he got a second chance with Mackenzie Brackman. Adding Spencer was a major - and positive - addition to the cast of L.A. Law and he was one of the outstanding figures on the show particularly after Susan Dey, Harry Hamlin and Jimmy Smits left the cast. Spencer's role on L.A. Law helped his career insofar as it got him a better class of supporting roles including parts in forget Paris, The Rock, Copland and The Negotiator although he still appeared in some pretty awful movies. In 1998 he was one of the leading characters in the short-lived NBC series Trinity, co-starring as Jill Clayburgh's husband.

It was with The West Wing that actor and character came together in one of those perfect fits that happen so rarely. Although Spencer said of Leo McGarry "He has qualities that I wish I had more of. I often say to Aaron [Sorkin], 'You're writing the man I'd like to be.' " the two men were close in a lot of ways. Like McGarry, Spencer was an alcoholic and a workaholic. In an interview for AP he said "Like Leo, I've always been a workaholic, too. Through good times and bad, acting has been my escape, my joy, my nourishment. The drug for me, even better than alcohol, was acting.'' Spencer was nominated for five Emmy Awards as Best Supporting Actor and won once in 2002. It always seemed to me to be a bit of a snub to nominate him in the Supporting Actor category as it always seemed to me that the role of Leo was very much the equal of Martin Sheen's Josiah Bartlett, and it seemed particularly strange in those years when Stockard Channing was nominated as Best Supporting Actress for doing far less. True, Bartlett was the showier part but in so many ways Spencer was the glue who held the show together, who linked Bartlett with the bulk of his staff. Indeed, if the original plan for the series had proceeded, where the President either wasn't seen or rarely seen, McGarry would have been the principal character even if Rob Lowe was getting more money per episode. Spencer brought the proper weight to the tough brilliant and occasionally troubled character of Leo. There are so many great scenes with Leo that John Spencer made live. My favourite Leo scene was one where Spencer made the words seem like his own experience. He's explaining to his lawyer - played by Joanna Gleason - that he can't have just one drink, that he can't understand people who can only have just one drink. It's a rivetting near soliloquy and one of his best performances on the show.

There is a certain irony to a couple of events on the show in light of John Spencer's death. In the sixth season episode "Birnam Wood" Leo suffered a near fatal heart attack which took him away from his job at the White House. The episode seemed to have an impact on Spencer. He stated that "I do not want to have a heart attack. Since (I shot that episode) I have taken much better care of myself. I did the thing I have been trying to do for years - I stopped smoking." Reportedly the next episode of The West Wing which was to air on January 6 was to feature Leo in a Vice-Presidential debate where the issue of health care comes up. Reportedly the character was supposed to say "By an overwhelming percentage, the first warning symptom of a heart attack is death. I'm fortunate to be here." There are no reports at the moment of how The West Wing will be handling John Spencer's death.

Spencer was an only child who was married and divorced in the 1970s. According to his publicist he is survived by "cousins, aunts, uncles, and wonderful friends." Not to mention a great many stunned fans.

Don Adams - 1923-2005

I hate writing obituaries. I particularly hate it when it's an obituary for an actor who has a special place in my memories. Don Adams was one of those people.

Born Donald Yarmy in the Bronx in 1923, his father was a Hungarian Jew who ran a number of small restaurants, while his mother was Irish. During World War II he served with the Marines and contracted malaria on Guadalcanal. Later during his Marine Corps service he was a Drill Instructor. Following the war he worked as a commercial artist during the day while working as a stand up comedian in clubs at night. He took the professional last name of his first wife, singer Adelaide Adams (born Adelaide Efantis) because his own last name tended to get him in at the end of auditions. In 1954 he won on the Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts series using a routine which he wrote with his boyhood friend Bill Dana (who would gain fame for his own routine as Jose Jimenez). This led to appearances on Ed Sullivan's Toast Of The Town and eventually a regular appearance on Perry Como's Kraft Music Hall, and then costarred with Dana in the latter's own series. He had also started what would become another aspect of his career - voice work for animated cartoons such as Tennessee Tuxedo and later Inspector Gadget.

Of course Don Adams is probably best known for the role of Maxwell Smart, Secret Agent 86 of CONTROL. It was an ideal match of man and part. Get Smart was both witty - thanks in no small part to a huge group of writers which included Buck Henry, Pat McCormick and Adams himself (although Mel Brooks is credited as one of the series creators, Buck Henry has said that he didn't contribute that much after the initial episodes) - and had a considerable amount of physical slapstick comedy in the mix which made it the best satire of the "James Bond" style secret agent movie that could be found. It was certainly more cutting about the absurdities of Bond than either the Matt Helm or the Derek Flint movies (although I have a personal fondness for James Coburn's Flint movies). The character spawned a number of catch phrases including Would you believe..., and of course "Sorry about that Chief" all made more enjoyable by Adams' clipped style of speech which he picked up during his time as a Drill Sergeant. There were also a host of visual gags, like the security systems at Max's apartment, the fact that CONTROL's answer to Q was a woman working as a stripper, and Max's shoe phone (a 9D Florsheim if you're interested). The show ran for only four years on NBC, and after the network dropped it it was picked up for a single season by CBS.

Like Bob Denver, Don Adams never really caught another role as big as the one that made him a household name. He had a single season series called The Partners in 1971, and 1985 he appeared in the atrocious Canadian series Check It Out with Dinah Christie and Gordon Clapp, who would later go on to play Detective Medavoy in NYPD Blue. He also did a number of revivals of the Maxwell Smart role. One was a 1980 feature film The Nude Bomb which tossed out just about everything about the character and the original show (Barbara Feldon was nowhere to be seen and was replaced by Sylvia Kristel - yes Emmanuelle herself) - Don hated it. There was also a 1989 made for TV movie with Barbara Feldon which thankfully ignored The Nude Bomb, and finally a 1995 Fox series with Don as Chief of CONTROL and his wife, 99, as a congresswoman. The show was meant as a springboard for Andy Dick, but whenever Adams and Feldon were on screen they dominated. Finally, starting in 1999 Don Adams did some commercials for a Canadian long-distance phone service as Maxwell Smart. For a number of years he had wanted to do serious acting and a part in the revived Alfred Hitchcock Presents was written specifically for him, however the producers didn't believe that he could be anything but funny and the part went to Martin Landau.

Don Adams was married and divorced three times, and was the father of seven children. Although Maxwell Smart wasn't, the actor who portrayed him was a well read amateur expert on both Lincoln and Hitler, as well as a talented painter and poet. He also enjoyed gambling on horses and playing cards with friends like James Caan, Don Rickles and Hugh Hefner at the Playboy Mansion. According to his son-in-law Jim Beaver (who is a frequent poster to various movie newsgroups as well as one of the major characters on Deadwood), Don Adams had been suffering from Lymphoma for a number of years but his health took a serious turn for the worse after his daughter Cecily (Jim's wife) past away last year. According to Jim: "In recent weeks he had declined to continue medications or treatment for his ailments. Following his emergency hospitalization on September 24, he was unable to breathe on his own. As per his instructions, life-support systems were turned off Sunday night. Two of his former wives and three of his children, as well as other family members, were with him when he died."

Bob Denver - 1935-2005

Bob Denver may have been one of the best known actors for someone whose career stalled. Certainly every true Child of Television knew and loved him. He died September 2 of complications from cancer treatment.

Born in New Rochelle New York, it was while he was attending Loyola-Marymount University in Los Angeles, were he was in pre-Law, that he first began acting. Although he initially resisted it he eventually decided to make it his career. Before winning the role of Maynnard G. Krebs in The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis he worked as a mailman and a teacher. Krebs was an iconic role, and gave him a chance not only to work with his Loyola-Marymount classmate Dwayne Hickman, but also with Tuesday Weld, Michael J. Pollard and Warren Beatty.

Still it is as Gilligan, the lead character in Gilligan's Island that he's best known today. While the show ran only three years it managed to typecast Bob Denver so strongly that in later years he usually found acting roles on TV either reprising the Gilligan role - as in an episode of Baywatch - or playing himself as he did in an episode of Evening Shade. Following Gilligan's Island there were a couple of series that didn't take off. One was The Good Guys in which he costarred with Herb Edelman and which was, on the whole a pretty good show that never really clicked with the audience. Another was Dusty's Trails, which was nowhere near a pretty good show. It was a "revision" of Gilligan's Island that had everything but the island - a one wagon wagon train with five travelers a wagon master (played by Forrest Tucker) and a scout (Bob Denver) who gets them hopelessly lost. Does this sound at all familiar? Mark Evanier has a couple of stories about encounters with Bob Denver when they were both working on an attempt to revive The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis under the misdirection of James Komack (the less said about Komack the better except to remind you that he was the one who caused the on set feud between Gabe Kaplan and Marcia Strassman on the set of Welcome Back Kotter - there are a lot of people who didn't like Komack). Apparently it was at about this time that he'd abandoned Hollywood and moved to West Virginia, returning occasionally for guest roles and of course fan appearances. He worked extensively with the handicapped in West Virginia. He also hosted a radio show in West Virginia. In recent years his name came up when he was arrested after a parcel of marijuana was delivered to his home. He received six months probation. In May of this year he underwent quadruple bypass surgery and it was at around this time that his cancer was diagnosed.

Gilligan's Island was a blessing and a curse for Bob Denver. It made him a household name in a way that not even The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis didn't but he tended to get typecast as the enthusiastic but bumbling and rather dumb guy who sometimes triumphs in the end. In real life he was well read and extremely helpful to his cast mates. His philosophy was that "when you work to make the other person look good, you end up looking good yourself,". It was Denver who was responsible for the second season addition of "The Professor and Mary-Ann" to the the show's theme song, and for helping to increase Dawn Wells' salary. Unfortunately for the cast members, most of whom were also typecast, although not nearly as much as Denver, TV show contracts at the time only gave actors residuals for five repeats of any given episode. The cast of Gilligan's Island received their last residual checks in 1968.

Peter Jennings - 1938-2005

ABC anchorman Peter Jennings died today at age 65 of lung cancer ending an era in the history of network news in the United States.

Peter Jennings was literally born into broadcasting. He was born in Toronto in 1938 where his father, Charles Jennings, was a staff announcer for the CBC. Among his duties at the time was reading the National News Bulletin at 10 p.m. He also hosted special events and and travelled with King George VI and Queen Elizabeth during the 1939 Royal Tour of Canada. Charles Jennings was eventually replaced as newsreader on the 10 p.m. National News by Lorne Greene but he went on to be a network Vice President at the CBC. Ironically this position hindered Peter's career as a broadcaster. Peter's first job in broadcasting occurred when he was 9 years old. The CBC was doing a Saturday kids show and asked Peter's mother if Peter was available to do it. The show was known as Peter's Program but it nearly ended when Charles Jennings returned from a trip for UNESCO. He was livid that Peter had been approached for the job because to him it represented nepotism. He was only just talked out of shutting down the program entirely. Years later, long after he dropped out of high school, Peter auditioned for an announcer's position at the CBC. This time there was no circumventing the nepotism regulations even though Jenning's audtion was the best of the lot. Charles Jennings did manage to arrange with a family friend for Peter to get a job with a small station in Brockville Ontario. This in turn led to a short stint with the CBC Northern Service followed by a job with CJOH-TV in Ottawa, one of Canada's first private stations, which was in fact owned by a former CBC colleague of Charles Jennings named Ernie Bushnell. When CJOH became one of the founding stations of the CTV Network, Peter Jennings became the network's first Parliamentary correspondent and, with Baden Langton, the first co-anchor of the CTV news.

Jennings' work with CTV attracted the attention of ABC News President Elmer Lower who offered Jennings a contract to work for ABC. In early 1965 Jennings suddenly found himself anchoring the ABC News. He was only 27 and was going up against broadcasting and reporting veterans Chet Huntley and David Brinley at NBC and Walter Cronkite at CBS. Like his father before him, Peter's training had been as an announcer not a reporter (it wasn't until the late 1970s before Canadian news anchors were even allowed to do actual reporting - they were announcers not news men and even belonged to different unions). Jennings' two years as ABC's anchor were horrible. He was grateful when he was relieved of the anchor chair and sent to work internationally. While most of his colleagues did a turn or two in Vietnam, Jennings was sent to a pre-civil war Beirut where he covered the Middle East and South Asia, including the Bangladesh War. He was in the Olympic Village in Munich in 1972 and his expertise in the Middle East proved invaluable in ABC's coverage. He knew everyone who was anyone in the Middle East. He was later reassigned to ABC's London Bureau but was one of the network's chief correspondents.

After ABC's experiment with using Harry Reasoner and Barbara Walters as an anchor team crashed and burned the new head of ABC News, Roone Arledge came up with the idea of using three anchors in different cities - Frank Reynolds in New York, Max Robinson in Chicago, and Jennings in London. This also crashed and burned with Reynolds taking the lead role and Robinson complaining of racism to anyone who would listen (which wasn't many). Five years after Frank Reynolds became ABC's chief anchor he succumbed to Bone Cancer. He was replaced by Peter Jennings. Jennings' second period as anchor was more self assured than his first. By now he was a veteran journalist who, as someone once put it, had been to "every country with a vowel in it". Beginning in the mid-1980s Jennings and ABC News were either first or second in the network ratings for most of the past 20 years. He personally anchored ABC's full 24 hour coverage of the Millennium celebrations on January 1, 2000, and was on the air for 60 hours straight following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center.

Jennings' personal life was tempestuous. He was married four times and divorced three and was the father fo two children. Although he became an American citizen in 2003 (scoring a perfect score on the citizenship test, something he was immensely proud of) he retained dual Canadian citizenship. He received numerous awards in his career including 14 National Emmy Awards, two George Peabody Awards, and the Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award. He was named Anchor Of The Year by the Washington Journalism Review three years in a row.He reportedly started smoking at age 13 and although he quit smoking in 1988 he started again briefly in 2001 at around the time of the terrorist attacks. In April 2005 he announced that he was suffering from Lung Cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy.

James Doohan - 1920-2005

James Doohan, probably best remembered for playing the chief engineer of the original starship Enterprise died today at age 85 of complications from Alzheimer's Disease and Pneumonia. He also suffered from Pulmonary Fibrosis, probably related to exposure to chemicals his service during World War II. Reportedly he will be cremated and his ashes will be sent into orbit.

Born in Vancouver, Doohan grew up in Sarnia Ontario. He attended Sarnia Collegiate and Technical School where he excelled in math and science. He joined the army during World War II. As a Captain in the Royal Canadian Artillery he participated in the D-Day landing at Juno Beach. At 11:30 on June 6, 1944 he was wounded by machine gun fire. He took four wounds to the legs, one to his right hand (which shot off his middle finger) and a bullet to the chest. In the sort of event that is usually thought to be a Hollywood cliche, the bullet that hit him in the chest was stopped by his silver cigarette case. After recovering from his wounds he returned to active service this time as a pilot of an artillery observation plane - he was labelled " the craziest pilot in the Canadian Air Forces."

Following the war Doohan became an actor. His first radio appearance was in January 1946, and he soon became a popular performer. He attended Lorne Greene's legendary Academy of Radio Arts, and along with another Academy student named Leslie Nielsen he won a scholarship to the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York where among his fellow students were Tony Randall and Richard Boone. The immediate postwar period is considered the "Golden Age" of Canadian radio drama, and Doohan was in the middle of it. He appeared in over 4,000 radio programs, which meant working with such actors as Greene, Tommy Tweed, and John Drainie, writer Lister Sinclair, and producer Andrew Allan (trust me these were extremely important people in Canadian radio). In fact Doohan was one of the stars of the notorious CBC drama The Investigator (available from Scenario Productions), written by Allan and starring Drainie and Barry Morse. He was also a mainstay in early Canadian TV. In fact he was one of the stars of one of the first Canadian TV series, 1952's Space Command (of which only one episode apparently survives) and was hired to play "Timber Tom" the equivalent of "Buffalo Bob" in the Canadian version of Howdy Doody; Doohan's agent wanted more money for the role and CBC refused to pay it - the role went to another actor. Before the debut of Star Trek he appeared in over 400 TV parts although only a fraction of those are mentioned in his IMDB filmography. One of the most famous was as the former Spitfire pilot who has to land a commercial airliner in Flight Into Danger by Arthur Hailey. This was later remade as the Hollywood movie Zero Hour with Dana Andrews as Ted Stryker and eventually satirized as Airplane! in 1980.

It was of course for Star Trek that Doohan was best known. When auditioning for Gene Roddenberry Doohan did seven accents and which asked which he thought was best suggested that the ship's engineer should be a Scot. The show reunited him with another actor from the CBC, William Shatner. Doohan and Shatner appeared together in at least one episode of Star Command, and when Doohan was fired from the "Timber Tom" role and Peter Mews, who was supposed to take the part, wasn't available for the first week of the show William Shatner as "Ranger Bob". Much of the rest of his life was involved with Star Trek related projects - one way or another. He did some of the earliest fan conventions, and with his talent for accents and radio training provided many of the voices for the Star Trek animated series. He appeared in all of the "original cast" movies including Star Trek: Generations and also did an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Even his character of "Pippin" in Homeboys From Outer Space was a satire on Star Trek and his relationship with the captain, although he did balk at an appearance in a 2002 episode of the animated series Futurama, the only living cast member who refused to do it. One little known thing is that while Doohan is not credited with it he developed the Vulcan and Klingon languages used in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, with the Vulcan words actually being made to fit the lip movements of the scene which had already been shot in English for the Kolinahr scene. Later, linguist Dr. Marc Okrand who was serving as a dialogue coach on the movie developed the rules of syntax and grammar and added more words to the Klingon language.

Doohan's relationship with Shatner was never good. In his autobiography, Beam me up, Scotty: Star Trek's "Scotty"- in his own words Doohan states that "I have to admit, I just don't like the man. And, as has been well-documented elsewhere, he didn't exactly have a knack for generating good feelings about him." This clearly relates to the various memoirs put out by other cast members, but Doohan had known him longer than any of the others. He added "I like Captain Kirk, but I sure don't like Bill. He's so insecure that all he can think about is himself." If the chapter on Shatner in Knowlton Nash's Cue the Elephant: Backstage Tales at the CBC is to be believed there were a lot of people that he worked with in Canada who didn't care for him either.

James Doohan was married three times (although the IMDB only lists two), first to Judy Doohan with whom he had four children, then to Anita Yagel. His third marriage in 1974 to Wende Braunberger who was 37 years his junior, produced three children including his youngest daughter Sarah, who was born in April 2000, when Doohan was 80. He received an honorary degree in Engineering from the Milwaukee School of Engineering, and many of the students at the school - and indeed at other institutions - stated that they had been inspired to go into the field by "Scotty". He received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in August 2004, shortly after it was revealed that he was suffering from Alzheimers. At the "James Doohan Farewell Star Trek Convention" Neil Armstrong, first man to walk on the moon revealed that he was a Star Trek fan, and a fan of Commander Montgomery Scott.

Fare thee well Mr. Scott.

Dana Elcar - 1927-2005

Dana Elcar, probably best known for playing Pete Thornton for six years on MacGyver died on Monday of complications from pneumonia. His family decided to delay release of the information to keep things quiet. He was 77.

For years before MacGyver Dana Elcar was one of those dependable but anonymous character actors who you always knew but could never quite name. He was "that guy; you know the one who was in ... and he did .... and ..... Now what was his name? Well you'll know him when you see him." He did a lot that would get him recognised if never really becoming a big name before MacGyver. His IMDB lists over 100 guest appearances on TV shows from 1959 when he appeared in the Play of the Week production of John Steinbeck's Burning Bright with Colleen Dewhurst, to his last on-screen appearance in 2002 when he did an episode of ER (actually his first screen appearance was in a 1954 series called A Time to Live that ran 15 minutes an episode on NBC. In between he worked - usually in guest appearances - in a host of TV shows that TV fans are bound to remember, including The Defenders, Gunsmoke, Mannix, The F.B.I., Hawaii Five-0, Ironside, The A-Team, and quite literally a host of others. In some cases he appeared in the same show in different roles - he appeared on three different episodes of Mannix in three different roles over a three year period. Although most of his work was on TV he also appeared in movies, notably as the fake FBI agent in The Sting.

Somehow I always think of Dana Elcar before MacGyver, as yelling. It seems he was always playing some ticked off bureaucrat or commanding officer of something who was usually yelling at someone. In 1975 he was Lieutenant Shiller, and yelling at Robert Blake in Baretta. In from 1976 to 1978 he got to yell at Robert Conrad, playing the base CO in Black Sheep Squadron. However it was MacGyver that made people remember Dana Elcar's name. He appeared in the pilot episode as a minor character named Andy Colson, but when it was decided to have Mac work for the Phoenix Foundation, Elcar was added to the cast as his boss and best friend Pete Thornton. In a statement Richard Dean Anderson, who played MacGyver said "At a time when I had very little business being called an actor, he made things so easy for me. It was a learning experience that was very warm and loving for all seven years."

Dana Elcar was diagnosed with Glaucoma after the fourth season of MacGyver. It was decided that the character of Pete Thornton would also learn that he had glaucoma. By the time the series ended Elcar was nearly totally blind, which in part may explain why he did neither of the two MacGyver TV movies. His post MacGyver appearances, in a 1993 episode of Law & Order and in the 2002 episode of ER were playing blind characters.

(I hate writing obituary posts because sadly I have had to do a number of them for actors I liked a lot.)

Leon Askin - 1907-2005

Leon Askin died in Vienna on Friday at age 97.

Probably best known to North Americans as General Burkhalter, Askin's professional career actually began in Austria in the 1920s. Born Leon Aschkenasy, his first stage appearance was in 1926, and he worked steadily through the 1930s both in theater and doing political and literary caberets in Vienna, Dusseldorf, and after the rise of the Nazis and later the Anschluss in Austria, in Paris. At the start of World War II he was interned in France as "an enemy alien". He emigrated to the United States in 1940 - before the German invasion of France, and did stage work as both an actor and director with Washington DC's Civic Theater. His production of Shakespeare's anti-war play Troilus & Cressida had the misfourtune to open on December 5 1941. Following the U.S. entry into the war, Askin joined the U.S. Army Air Force and rose to the rank of Technical Sergeant writing orientation material for soldier going overseas, and eventually serving in England. During this period he became an American citizen. At the end of the war he was able to travel to France in an effort to locate members of his family. He learned that his parents had been sent to the concentration camp at Teresienstadt and later learned that they had been executed. Returning to the United States, Askin returned to directing this time on Broadway, where he was also a founding member of Actors Equity.

In 1952 Askin went to Hollywood to work in the Columbia film Assignment Paris. He remained in Hollywood until 1993 and appeared in over 60 movies, usually as a foreign "villain". Among the films he was in were Road To Bali with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, The Robe with Richard Burton, Knock on Wood with Danny Kaye, Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three with James Cagney. He also worked in Germany in the period, notably in the 1962 remake of the Fritz Lang classic The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. His IMDB entry lists over 60 TV appearances, including The Adventures of Superman, My Favorite Martian, Daniel Boone, a two part episode of Switch (with Eddie Albert), Happy Days, and Three's Company. He did voices on Scooby and Scrappy Doo. His last American TV appearance was in an episode of Different Strokes, although his final TV appearance was in an Austrian miniseries, Alma - A Show biz ans Ende. In 1993 Askin returned permanently to Vienna where continued to work occassionally in film and theatre with his last film credit coming in 2001. In 2002, at the age of 95 he married media specialist Anita Wicher.

It is a General Burkhalter that Leon Askin is likely to be best remembered. Although most people writing about the series describe Burkhalter as a Nazi, it is more complex than that. Burkhalter would probably be better described as an old imperial officer who just happened to be working for the Nazis. He's sufficiently apolitical to not care who is in charge just so long as he has the best wine, the best food and the best women. Burkhalter was an opportunist, but he was also at least vaguely competent, certainly more competent Colonel Klink but it also makes him less sympathetic than Klink, and much less sypathetic than Sergeant Schultz. (Of course Howard Caine's character - Gestapo Major Hochstetter who really was a Nazi - was the least sympathetic of the lot.) Nevertheless Burkhalter was an immensely funny character to watch, alternating between the impeccable Prussian martinet who constantly threatens Klink with a one way trip to the Russian Front, and the jolly aristocrat who is enjoying the war because of the food and the wine and the beautiful women. What made it work of course was that Askin was an excellent actor, and had both the face and voice to make the character work.

Eddie Albert 1906-2005

Eddie Albert passed away of pneumonia on Thursday, a few weeks after his 99th birthday, in was announced on Friday evening. According to his son Edward Albert, Eddie Albert had suffered from Alzheimer's Disease for the past 10 years.

Eddie Albert's life was an eventful one, both inside show business and outside of it. Before World War II he provided intelligence information on German activities in Mexico while working for the Escalante Brothers Circus as a trapeze artist. During World War II he served in the US Navy as a beachmaster and salvage expert. During the Tarawa landings he rescued a number of wounded soldiers from the beaches in the small unarmoured boat he was provided with for salvage operations. For this he was awarded the Bronze Star. He was later assigned to a unit making training films and after the war he took this experience and used it to form a company producing educational films. He was involved as an activist for a number of causes, notably malnutrition - he travelled to the Congo to discuss the issue with Albert Schweitzer in the 1950s - and refugees. However he is most readily identified with the environmental movement. He became an activist in publicising the effects of DDT which led to the eventual ban on its use in the United States. He was also involved in conservation activities, being the chairman of the Boy Scouts of America's tree planting and conservation programs.

Eddie Albert's career in t he entertainment industry began in the 1930s. He started as a singer in night clubs and on the radio. Indeed he dropped his family name - Heimberger - because radio announcers constantly mispronounced it as "Hamburger". He later appeared on Broadway starring in Brother Rat. When the play was made into a movie he was brought to Hollywood to appear in it, and the sequel Brother Rat and a Baby, opposite Ronald Reagan. He went back to Broadway from time to time, including replacing Robert Preston as Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. In his Hollywood career he appeared in over 100 theatrical and TV movies. Among his most important roles were Roman Holiday in 1953 and The Heartbreak Kid in 1972. He earned Oscar nominations for both roles. Other major roles included Ali Hakim in the movie version of Oklahoma, the cowardly officer in Attack!, and the prison warden in the original version of The Longest Yard, a character he reportedly modelled on Richard Nixon. Robert Aldrich, the director of The Longest Yard as well as Attack said of him, "There's no actor working today who can be as truly malignant as Eddie Albert. He plays heavies exactly the way they are in real life. Slick and sophisticated." He was also a veteran television performer. In fact his first television performance occurred in 1936 when he participated in the first private TV broadcast by NBC to its radio licensees in New York. He made a number of guest appearances on dramatic anthology series such as Studio One in the 1950s and was active in TV movies and miniseries as late as 1995 (and did voice work for animated series as late as 1997).

Eddie Albert is best remembered for one series of course and that is Green Acres. He had rejected a number of other series - notably Father Knows Best - the role of Oliver Wendell Douglas, the Wall Street lawyer who decided to escape the rat race by becoming a farmer, appealed to the man who turned his front lawn into a cornfield and grew his own vegetables in a backyard greenhouse. At the time the series was regarded as just another rural comedy on a network which was famous (or infamous, depending on what you thought of the shows) for rural comedies. Today it is regarded as gem of surrealist comedy. Douglas might have seemed sane but in the context of the community where he lived - where pigs were treated as children and the show credits were sometimes read by the characters - he was the odd man out. Even though he did several other TV series including Falcon Crest, General Hospital and Switch (I used the only picture I could find online related to that series), it is Green Acresfor which he is and probably always will be remembered.

Frank Gorshin 1934-2005

I was saddened to learn from Mark Evanier's News From Me that Frank Gorshin has passed away at the age of 72.

Gorshin was a talented comedian and impressionist who was famous for his Kirk Douglas impression. At one time he was regarded as being at the same level of ability as Rich Little. Although Gorshin's acting career began in the mid-1950s, and included a number of dramatic and comedic roles, he is probably best known for two parts - The Riddler in the Batman TV series, for which he earned an Emmy nomination, and Commissioner Bele in the Star Trek episode "Let This Be Your Final Battlefield". Gorshin, a chain smoker, died of a combination of emphysema pneumonia and lung cancer. His final performance will air on Thursday night's CSI: Crime Scene Investigation finale.

Like all of the principal Bat-villains in the series (The Riddler, The Joker, The Penguin and Catwoman) he was perfectly cast. The thing about Gorshin that made him memorable as the Riddler was that his performance put his whole being in play. His voice was a major element of course, going from a low conspiratorial level to loud, triumphal and higher pitched, often in the same scene or even the same sentence. There was also his facial expression and his body language, and of course "The Laugh". All of these elements made the character Gorshin's, something that was proven absolutely when a contract dispute in the second season meant that Gorshin was replaced by John Astin as The Riddler in one episode. Astin is a fine comedic actor but he just couldn't replace Gorshin as The Riddler (an earlier "Riddler" script was rewritten to create a new villain, The Puzzler played by Maurice Evans.

(One curious thing though. All of the obituaries quote his age as 72 but if he was born in April 1934, as all of the obituaries also state, that would make him 71 by my math.)

Mason Adams 1919-2005

Usually when an actor gets "The Big Break" and becomes famous for a role, you suddenly see him everywhere in series that were produced before the big break. Ed Asner suddenly became visible after he became Lou Grant on Mary Tyler Moore, and the same thing happened to Sorrell Booke after he put on the fat(ter) suit and became Boss Hogg on Dukes of Hazard. It wasn't the case with Mason Adams. If you look at his IMDB listing, you'll find a mere seven acting credits including two guest appearances in the 1950s, and a 1947 short about Alexander Graham Bell called Mr. Bell in which he played Thomas Watson. So you won't see Mason Adams in much before his breakthrough role as Charlie Hume in Lou Grant. But you'll hear him everywhere because, in the words of Leonard Cohen, Mason Adams was born with the gift of a golden voice and it was only after Lou Grant that we also saw that he had the sort of face that carried a great deal of authority and wisdom.

Mason Adams did a lot of radio work, starting in 1940 and continuing until pretty much the end of network radio in 1959. The was Pepper Young in Pepper Young's Family and played a lot of villains in other radio shows. He was the Kryptonite Man in The Adventures of Superman with Clayton "Bud" Collier (who hosted of course To Tell The Truth on TV). I recall hearing a comedy skit featuring Adams as an increasingly harried baseball announcer. According to the Internet Broadway Database Adams also appeared in six plays, five of them before Lou Grant.

Charlie Hume on Lou Grant was a breakthrough role of course. Charlie started as a sort of weak yes-man for Mrs. Pynchon, but as time went by he grew "a pair" and became more assertive, to the point where you could understand why Lou respected him and why. One episode I remember in particular had Charlie confronting the clueless wife of a Central American dictator about torture in her country - torture that he himself had been subjected to. Charlie was very much a supporting character but he had his moments, enough that he was nominated for the "Best Supporting Actor in a Drama" Emmy three years in a row. His role wasn't as showy as Nancy Marchand's Margaret Pynchon, or Robert Walden's Joe Rossi who ironically was also nominated for "Best Supporting Actor in a Drama" three years in a row; the same three years as Adams (they lost twice to Stuart Margolin in The Rockford Files and once to Michael Conrad in Hill Street Blues).

After Lou Grant left the air (and I'm one of those who is convinced that the cancellation had more to do with Ed Asner's politics than ratings) Adams went on to a host of appearances in TV movies and miniseries. and a comparatively small number of guest starring roles in TV series. His last listed acting appearance was in an episode of Oz in 2003, although the last part I saw him was as a Supreme Court Justice who takes Bartlett to task for not considering a real liberal as his replacement on the bench. In these roles he usually played a fatherly figure, but someone with a certain amount of authority. An example was his appearance in From The Earth To The Moon as Senator Clinton Anderson, who deflates Walter Mondale's attack on the space program by asking about Gus Grissom. It's a tiny role, but Adams brings the right level of gravity to it to make it believable. But it's as a voice actor that Mason Adams will be best remembered. He was the reader for the books on tape versions of Lillian Jackson Braun's "Cat" mystery novels (and probably many others), and was always in demand as a voice for commercials. For the past 30 years he's been the voice of Smuckers - "With a name like Smuckers, it has to be good."