Tony Randall, the deft comedic actor best known for playing fastidious Felix Unger on the 1970s sitcom “The Odd Couple” during his more than six-decade career on stage, screen and television, has died. He was 84.
Randall died in his sleep Monday evening at NYU Medical Center of complications from a months-long illness, according to his publicist, Gary Springer.
Randall had developed pneumonia after undergoing triple heart-bypass surgery in December. At the time, he had just completed a month starring in “Right You Are,” a revival of Luigi Pirandello’s play for the nonprofit National Actors Theatre, which Randall founded in 1991.
As a tribute to Randall, Broadway theaters dimmed their lights at 8 p.m. Tuesday. “I tell you, that’s a tribute he deserves,” Jack Klugman, Randall’s “Odd Couple” co-star, told the Los Angeles Times Tuesday. “I didn’t think they recognized how important he was, and I’m glad they’re doing it.”
Above all, Klugman said, Randall “loved the theater, and his love and dedication to it is what created the energy and the talent.”
Jed Bernstein, president of the League of American Theatres and Producers, said in a statement Tuesday: “Tony Randall’s passion for live theater was unmatched. He was a vociferous advocate for the proposition that serious plays are the lifeblood of our culture.”
“We’ve lost a great actor, a great comedian, and a great role model,” David Hyde Pierce, who spent 11 years playing the pompous psychiatrist Niles Crane on the NBC sitcom “Frasier,” said in a statement.
A versatile Broadway and radio actor who made his New York stage debut in 1941, Randall first gained national fame on television in the early 1950s with “Mr. Peepers.”
The popular situation comedy, which aired on NBC from 1952 to 1955, starred Wally Cox as the shy and quiet Midwestern high school science teacher Robinson Peepers. Randall played Peepers’ brash and self-confident best friend, history teacher Harvey Weskit.
Randall’s success in television and on Broadway in the 1950s – including playing the cynical reporter in “Inherit the Wind,” Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee’s long-running dramatization of the Scopes “monkey” trial – paved Randall’s way to Hollywood.
Slim, with close-cropped dark brown hair and an Ivy League, junior executive look, Randall has been described as personifying the era’s urbane and somewhat confused and neurotic white American male.
In 1957, he starred in the title role of the hapless TV ad man in the film adaptation of George Axelrod’s satirical “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” co-starring Jayne Mansfield as the Hollywood sex symbol he enlists for a lipstick campaign.
Randall’s comedic talent continued to shine in a series of supporting movie roles.
The part of a millionaire Broadway producer in the 1959 Rock Hudson-Doris Day romantic comedy “Pillow Talk” earned Randall praise from Time magazine for being “one of the funniest young men in movies today.”
“Tony was so brilliant, funny, sweet and dear, that it was as if God had given him everything,” Day said in a statement Tuesday. “He was the funniest man in movies and on television, and nothing was as much fun as working with him.”
Randall appeared in two other Hudson-Day comedy hits, “Lover Come Back” (1961) and “Send Me No Flowers” (1964). Also in 1964, he starred in the film fantasy “7 Faces of Dr. Lao,” an acting tour de force in which he played six elaborately made-up and accented roles.
But Randall achieved his most enduring fame on television, as Felix Unger, the obsessive-compulsive neat freak photographer opposite Klugman’s slovenly sportswriter, Oscar Madison, in the TV version of Neil Simon’s hit Broadway play “The Odd Couple.”
“Am I a neat freak, like Felix? No, not at all,” Randall told the Los Angeles Times in 1985. “I realize that’s a compliment, to be so identified with a character. But it can be annoying. It puts you in the position of being typecast.”
“He was the best Felix that ever was; he was so brilliant,” Klugman, who won two Emmys for playing Oscar, told the Times Tuesday. “When I watch the show, I realize how wonderful he was.”
Working with Randall, Klugman said, “was always a rewarding experience because he gave you everything he ever had. He never cared about stardom or taking the top position. He gave me the funniest lines. He just wanted the show to be good.”
Associated Press
TV’s “Odd Couple,” Tony Randall (left) and Jack Klugman, arrive at NBC’s 75th anniversary celebration in 2002.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
