DeForest played wacky Larry ‘Bud’ Melman

Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Calvert DeForest, the roly-poly character actor with the black-framed glasses and seemingly clueless delivery who developed a cult following as Larry “Bud” Melman on “Late Night with David Letterman” in the 1980s, has died. He was 85.

DeForest, who continued appearing with Letterman under his own name after the late-night comedian moved from NBC to CBS in the ’90s, died after a long illness Monday at a hospital in Babylon, N.Y., said a spokesman for Letterman’s production company.

“Everyone always wondered if Calvert was an actor playing a character, but in reality he was just himself – a genuine, modest and nice man,” Letterman said in a statement Wednesday. “To our staff and to our viewers, he was a beloved and valued part of our show, and we will miss him.”

A struggling sometime-actor from Brooklyn, DeForest was working part time as a receptionist in a drug rehabilitation center when his role as a deranged studio mogul in a student film caught the attention of Letterman and head writer Merrill Markoe.

“What we liked about Calvert was, he had this very odd, naive quality, almost like a kid,” Markoe told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday.

“We always had him reading cue cards, because of the way he read. It’s like what kids do at a grade-school play – that kind of drone. There was just something intrinsically hilarious about it. He didn’t have a satiric edge at all; it was a kind of sweet, naive quality that made it very funny.”