R.I.P. Jack Warden
For me, I'll always remember him in two very different performances: as the easy-going coach in Heaven Can Wait, and (in a marvelously over-the-top performance) as the nutsy German doctor in Death on the Nile.
"...it is the weak who are cruel, and...gentleness is only to be expected from the strong." - Leo Reston
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
"Cruelty might be very human, and it might be cultural, but it's not acceptable." - Jodie Foster
From the Los Angeles Times
Emmy Winning Actor Jack Warden Dead at 85
By Valerie J. Nelson
Times Staff Writer
3:21 PM PDT, July 21, 2006
Jack Warden, the gravely voiced character actor and two-time Oscar nominee who appeared in almost 100 feature films, has died. He was 85.
Warden, who won an Emmy award for his portrayal of crusty football coach George Halas in the 1971 television movie "Brian's Song," died Wednesday at a New York City hospital, Sidney Pazoff, his Los Angeles-based business manager, said today.
Pazoff said he did not know the exact cause of death but said that Warden, who was living in Manhattan, had been in failing health for several months.
Warden first made his mark in the movies in 1957 as the sports-obsessed juror in "12 Angry Men" and received two Academy Award nominations for his work on two Warren Beatty vehicles, "Shampoo" (1975) and "Heaven Can Wait" (1978).
His small-screen resume was just as deep with featured roles in a dozen series and appearances in about 100 shows and made-for-TV movies that stretched back to television's golden age and included "Mr. Peepers" (1952-55) on NBC, "N.Y.P.D." on ABC (1967-69) and "Crazy Like a Fox" (1984-86) on CBS.
From the moment Warden broke through on Broadway in 1955 in Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge," he said he never stopped working.
"I still panic sometimes when it comes down to 20 minutes between jobs," Warden told the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in 1984. "I love what I'm doing."
The gruff yet often engaging characters he became known for playing could have been lifted from his rough-and-tumble early life.
By age 17, the red-headed teen from Newark, N.J. was a ranked professional middleweight boxer who billed himself as Johnny Costello the last name was his mother's and reportedly once fought on the same card as another future actor, Charles Durning, in Madison Square Garden.
Warden often said he got kicked out of high school for boxing professionally, so he joined the Navy and patrolled the Yangtze River.
He came home in 1941, shoveled coal on tugboats in the East River and a year later joined the merchant marine.
His romance with the sea ended, he said, while he worked in the engine room of a freighter that was repeatedly attacked by German bombs. Every explosion sounded like a direct hit.
After the vessel made it to port, he demanded a job above deck. When the merchant marine wouldn't comply, Warden said he went across the street and joined the Army's 101st Airborne Division as a paratrooper.
"I figured anything was better than being trapped in the boiler room of a sinking ship," Warden said in 1984.
During a practice jump while preparing for the Normandy invasion, his chute failed to fully open. His broken leg required a steel plate and a lengthy hospital stay that had an unexpected side benefit.
A friend suggested he read plays, and among the first Warden tackled was Clifford Odets' "Waiting for Lefty." Warden identified with the play's striking cabdrivers and the way the story was told.
"That year in the hospital was the turning point in my life," Warden told the Herald Examiner. "After eight months of that diet, I thought I was an actor and headed straight for New York."
It was 1945 and a series of jobs bouncer at a dime-a-dance hall, shirt salesman, dockworker, roofer and semi-pro football player would come first.
"Warden's done it all," Jack Ging, an actor and friend, told TV Guide in 1979. "He's the kind of guy that Spencer Tracy played."
While working as a lifeguard in 1946 at a hotel pool in New York, Warden met Margo Jones, manager of the well-regarded Alley Theater in Dallas. She asked him to join the company and he spent five years there.
He debuted on television in 1950 in "The Philco TV Playhouse" production of "Ann Rutledge" on NBC and began appearing regularly in drama anthologies that often aired live.
He found live television exciting the next best thing to the stage.
With a bit of bluster, he captured a Broadway role in 1955 that became the springboard of his career.
Weeks went by as playwright Miller, who had cast approval for "A View From a Bridge," kept calling back Warden and others for readings. Finally, Warden improvised a scene as Marco, the Italian immigrant.
"That's it! That's exactly what I want!" Miller exclaimed, according to a 1966 TV Guide story.
The actor also would play a handful of roles in other Broadway productions, beginning with Odets' "Golden Boy" in 1952 and including "The Man in the Glass Booth" in 1969.
Warden worked mainly and steadily in television and film through the 1990s, often playing the heavy in movies before inhabiting more comedic roles.
He was the scruffy outlaw in "The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing" (1973), the cab-driving father in "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" (1974), the hard-nosed city editor in "All the President's Men" (1976) and Paul Newman's friend and conscience in "The Verdict" (1982).
He played a rich husband in "Shampoo" opposite Beatty and Julie Christie, and in "Heaven Can Wait" he played a coach for the Los Angeles Rams. One of his final film credits was in another football movie, "The Replacements."
"Brian's Song," the television movie that garnered him an Emmy, was story of the bond that developed between Chicago Bears teammates Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo after Piccolo learned he was dying.
When he played the suicidal judge in " And Justice for All" (1979), Warden reportedly asked the makeup artist to sharpen the angle of his eyebrows so he would appear more deranged.
The New York Times called Warden a "fine farceur" as twin salesmen in "Used Cars" (1980) and said he played Ryan O'Neal's father "hilariously" in "So Fine" (1981).
After he portrayed a U.S. president influenced by an unlikely political insider played by Peter Sellers in the black comedy "Being There" (1979), Warden recalled how President Jimmy Carter told him, over lunch at the White House, how much he liked the performance.
"He thought I'd made the president very human," Warden told The Times in 1980.
Warden wasn't as enamored of the role, but said he was rarely satisfied with his work.
His versatility appealed to the creators of "The Wackiest Ship in the Army" (1965-66), and NBC cast him as the show's star.
"Warden can play intense melodrama, yet he plays farce with infallible timing," said Danny Arnold, who told TV Guide that he wrote the part of the gruff and cynical major on "Wackiest" with Warden in mind.
In 1979, Warden made a reported $40,000 a week to star in "The Bad News Bears" on CBS but claimed he would rather take the bus to the studio than drive.
He was a complex man, several friends from his heyday in TV have said, who used his lightning-quick humor to entertain and keep the world at a distance.
Yet Warden kept a Greenwich Village apartment as a permanent residence, partly for friends to stay in, and the late actor Rod Steiger once pronounced him "one of the few human beings I know who still understands what friendship and honor mean."
Jack Warden Lebzelter was born Sept. 18, 1920, to John Warden, an engineer and technician, and Laura Costello. His father left the family when Warden was 8 and, after a brief return, died while his son was in the Navy.
In 1958, Warden married Vanda Dupre, a 27-year-old French actress who had been married twice before. Comedian Red Buttons, who died last week at age 87, was best man at the Las Vegas wedding.
"I'm teaching her how to water-ski and fish. She's teaching me French and cooking. It's a great basis for a marriage," Warden joked in 1959.
Within a few years, the couple had a son, Christopher, and had moved from Laurel Canyon to the Malibu Colony. Nearby was a tennis court Warden owned with Steiger.
By the mid-1970s, Warden and his wife had separated but, according to Pazoff, never divorced.
He said one of the benefits of making "Crazy Like a Fox" in the mid-1980s was that he got to see more of his son, then a student at UC Berkeley, because the show often filmed in San Francisco.
Separated from his wife, Warden is survived by his companion Marucha Hinds, his son and two grandchildren.
Emmy Winning Actor Jack Warden Dead at 85
By Valerie J. Nelson
Times Staff Writer
3:21 PM PDT, July 21, 2006
Jack Warden, the gravely voiced character actor and two-time Oscar nominee who appeared in almost 100 feature films, has died. He was 85.
Warden, who won an Emmy award for his portrayal of crusty football coach George Halas in the 1971 television movie "Brian's Song," died Wednesday at a New York City hospital, Sidney Pazoff, his Los Angeles-based business manager, said today.
Pazoff said he did not know the exact cause of death but said that Warden, who was living in Manhattan, had been in failing health for several months.
Warden first made his mark in the movies in 1957 as the sports-obsessed juror in "12 Angry Men" and received two Academy Award nominations for his work on two Warren Beatty vehicles, "Shampoo" (1975) and "Heaven Can Wait" (1978).
His small-screen resume was just as deep with featured roles in a dozen series and appearances in about 100 shows and made-for-TV movies that stretched back to television's golden age and included "Mr. Peepers" (1952-55) on NBC, "N.Y.P.D." on ABC (1967-69) and "Crazy Like a Fox" (1984-86) on CBS.
From the moment Warden broke through on Broadway in 1955 in Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge," he said he never stopped working.
"I still panic sometimes when it comes down to 20 minutes between jobs," Warden told the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in 1984. "I love what I'm doing."
The gruff yet often engaging characters he became known for playing could have been lifted from his rough-and-tumble early life.
By age 17, the red-headed teen from Newark, N.J. was a ranked professional middleweight boxer who billed himself as Johnny Costello the last name was his mother's and reportedly once fought on the same card as another future actor, Charles Durning, in Madison Square Garden.
Warden often said he got kicked out of high school for boxing professionally, so he joined the Navy and patrolled the Yangtze River.
He came home in 1941, shoveled coal on tugboats in the East River and a year later joined the merchant marine.
His romance with the sea ended, he said, while he worked in the engine room of a freighter that was repeatedly attacked by German bombs. Every explosion sounded like a direct hit.
After the vessel made it to port, he demanded a job above deck. When the merchant marine wouldn't comply, Warden said he went across the street and joined the Army's 101st Airborne Division as a paratrooper.
"I figured anything was better than being trapped in the boiler room of a sinking ship," Warden said in 1984.
During a practice jump while preparing for the Normandy invasion, his chute failed to fully open. His broken leg required a steel plate and a lengthy hospital stay that had an unexpected side benefit.
A friend suggested he read plays, and among the first Warden tackled was Clifford Odets' "Waiting for Lefty." Warden identified with the play's striking cabdrivers and the way the story was told.
"That year in the hospital was the turning point in my life," Warden told the Herald Examiner. "After eight months of that diet, I thought I was an actor and headed straight for New York."
It was 1945 and a series of jobs bouncer at a dime-a-dance hall, shirt salesman, dockworker, roofer and semi-pro football player would come first.
"Warden's done it all," Jack Ging, an actor and friend, told TV Guide in 1979. "He's the kind of guy that Spencer Tracy played."
While working as a lifeguard in 1946 at a hotel pool in New York, Warden met Margo Jones, manager of the well-regarded Alley Theater in Dallas. She asked him to join the company and he spent five years there.
He debuted on television in 1950 in "The Philco TV Playhouse" production of "Ann Rutledge" on NBC and began appearing regularly in drama anthologies that often aired live.
He found live television exciting the next best thing to the stage.
With a bit of bluster, he captured a Broadway role in 1955 that became the springboard of his career.
Weeks went by as playwright Miller, who had cast approval for "A View From a Bridge," kept calling back Warden and others for readings. Finally, Warden improvised a scene as Marco, the Italian immigrant.
"That's it! That's exactly what I want!" Miller exclaimed, according to a 1966 TV Guide story.
The actor also would play a handful of roles in other Broadway productions, beginning with Odets' "Golden Boy" in 1952 and including "The Man in the Glass Booth" in 1969.
Warden worked mainly and steadily in television and film through the 1990s, often playing the heavy in movies before inhabiting more comedic roles.
He was the scruffy outlaw in "The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing" (1973), the cab-driving father in "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz" (1974), the hard-nosed city editor in "All the President's Men" (1976) and Paul Newman's friend and conscience in "The Verdict" (1982).
He played a rich husband in "Shampoo" opposite Beatty and Julie Christie, and in "Heaven Can Wait" he played a coach for the Los Angeles Rams. One of his final film credits was in another football movie, "The Replacements."
"Brian's Song," the television movie that garnered him an Emmy, was story of the bond that developed between Chicago Bears teammates Gale Sayers and Brian Piccolo after Piccolo learned he was dying.
When he played the suicidal judge in " And Justice for All" (1979), Warden reportedly asked the makeup artist to sharpen the angle of his eyebrows so he would appear more deranged.
The New York Times called Warden a "fine farceur" as twin salesmen in "Used Cars" (1980) and said he played Ryan O'Neal's father "hilariously" in "So Fine" (1981).
After he portrayed a U.S. president influenced by an unlikely political insider played by Peter Sellers in the black comedy "Being There" (1979), Warden recalled how President Jimmy Carter told him, over lunch at the White House, how much he liked the performance.
"He thought I'd made the president very human," Warden told The Times in 1980.
Warden wasn't as enamored of the role, but said he was rarely satisfied with his work.
His versatility appealed to the creators of "The Wackiest Ship in the Army" (1965-66), and NBC cast him as the show's star.
"Warden can play intense melodrama, yet he plays farce with infallible timing," said Danny Arnold, who told TV Guide that he wrote the part of the gruff and cynical major on "Wackiest" with Warden in mind.
In 1979, Warden made a reported $40,000 a week to star in "The Bad News Bears" on CBS but claimed he would rather take the bus to the studio than drive.
He was a complex man, several friends from his heyday in TV have said, who used his lightning-quick humor to entertain and keep the world at a distance.
Yet Warden kept a Greenwich Village apartment as a permanent residence, partly for friends to stay in, and the late actor Rod Steiger once pronounced him "one of the few human beings I know who still understands what friendship and honor mean."
Jack Warden Lebzelter was born Sept. 18, 1920, to John Warden, an engineer and technician, and Laura Costello. His father left the family when Warden was 8 and, after a brief return, died while his son was in the Navy.
In 1958, Warden married Vanda Dupre, a 27-year-old French actress who had been married twice before. Comedian Red Buttons, who died last week at age 87, was best man at the Las Vegas wedding.
"I'm teaching her how to water-ski and fish. She's teaching me French and cooking. It's a great basis for a marriage," Warden joked in 1959.
Within a few years, the couple had a son, Christopher, and had moved from Laurel Canyon to the Malibu Colony. Nearby was a tennis court Warden owned with Steiger.
By the mid-1970s, Warden and his wife had separated but, according to Pazoff, never divorced.
He said one of the benefits of making "Crazy Like a Fox" in the mid-1980s was that he got to see more of his son, then a student at UC Berkeley, because the show often filmed in San Francisco.
Separated from his wife, Warden is survived by his companion Marucha Hinds, his son and two grandchildren.
-
Franz Ferdinand
- Adjunct
- Posts: 1457
- Joined: Mon Nov 22, 2004 3:22 pm
- Location: Calgary, Alberta
- Contact:
A great late 20th century character actor.
He lived a few blocks away from me and I would occasionally see him in the neighborhood. My favorite memory is of him walking down 9th Avenue snd a guy in the passenger side of a truck yelling, "Hey, Jack! Jack Warden!" Warden smiled and waved and the guy yelled, "Hey, Jack. When they made you they broke the mold!"
He lived a few blocks away from me and I would occasionally see him in the neighborhood. My favorite memory is of him walking down 9th Avenue snd a guy in the passenger side of a truck yelling, "Hey, Jack! Jack Warden!" Warden smiled and waved and the guy yelled, "Hey, Jack. When they made you they broke the mold!"
"Y'know, that's one of the things I like about Mitt Romney. He's been consistent since he changed his mind." -- Christine O'Donnell
-
Big Magilla
- Site Admin
- Posts: 19336
- Joined: Wed Jan 01, 2003 3:22 pm
- Location: Jersey Shore
-
Aceisgreat
- Temp
- Posts: 459
- Joined: Thu Jan 02, 2003 7:56 am
LOS ANGELES - Jack Warden, an Emmy-winning and Academy Award-nominated actor who played gruff cops, coaches and soldiers in a career that spanned five decades, has died. He was 85.
ADVERTISEMENT
Warden, who lived in Manhattan, died Wednesday at a hospital in New York, Sidney Pazoff, his longtime business manager, said here Friday.
"Everything gave out. Old age," Pazoff said. "He really had turned downhill in the past month; heart and then kidney and then all kinds of stuff."
Warden was nominated twice for best supporting actor Oscars — for the 1975 movie "Shampoo" and in 1978's "Heaven Can Wait."
He won a supporting actor Emmy for his role as a coach in the 1971 TV movie "Brian's Song" and was twice nominated in the 1980s for best leading actor in a comedy for his show "Crazy Like a Fox."
ADVERTISEMENT
Warden, who lived in Manhattan, died Wednesday at a hospital in New York, Sidney Pazoff, his longtime business manager, said here Friday.
"Everything gave out. Old age," Pazoff said. "He really had turned downhill in the past month; heart and then kidney and then all kinds of stuff."
Warden was nominated twice for best supporting actor Oscars — for the 1975 movie "Shampoo" and in 1978's "Heaven Can Wait."
He won a supporting actor Emmy for his role as a coach in the 1971 TV movie "Brian's Song" and was twice nominated in the 1980s for best leading actor in a comedy for his show "Crazy Like a Fox."