Urbane or finicky, sophisticated or prissy, depending on your viewpoint, actor Tony Randall transformed the quirky traits of a second banana into stardom, enjoying a career that lasted more than six decades and touched just about every aspect of show business.
For many, of course, Randall, who died of pneumonia at 84 Monday at New York University Medical Center, will always be photographer Felix Unger, the fussy, dilettante-ish neat freak on television’s “The Odd Couple,” co-starring Jack Klugman from 1970 to 1975.
But Randall’s arenas also included radio (“I Love a Mystery”); movies (Hercule Poirot in 1966’s “The Alphabet Murders”); prolific stage roles and even the lead in one Broadway musical, “Oh Captain,” in 1958. He played in four TV sitcoms, beginning with his role in “Mr. Peepers” in the early ’50s and ending with the post-“Odd Couple” venture, “Love, Sidney,” from 1981 to 1983.
He also was familiar as a prim, Noel Coward-like talk-show raconteur. (He appeared more than 100 times each on Johnny Carson’s and David Letterman’s shows). And in his latter years, he served as de facto producer of the National Actors Theatre, a 13-year-old repertory company devoted to classics. To all these credits, he surprised many at age 77 by adding another: father. He leaves behind two children, Julia Laurette, 7, and Jefferson Salvini, 5.
Finely tuned performer
“One director who worked with him said it was like working with a Stradivarius,” movie critic Leonard Maltin said Tuesday. “He hit all the right notes. We think of him as a comic, but that was just the beginning. He got typecast because he was so good as the best friend.”
“In the area of filmed sitcoms, he was a good as it gets,” said J. Fred MacDonald, media historian and president of MacDonald and Associates, a Chicago-based film archive. “He brilliantly played the slightly prissy, unattached, sexually ambivalent urbane man. And America responded. He was wonderfully appreciated.”
“He was a loving, devoted friend,” recalled Sherrill Milnes, professor of music at Northwestern University and a friend of Randall’s for the past 40 years. “People often ask, `Is he Felix offstage?’ Only slightly. He had a deep intellectual side, a knowledge of language and a love for all the fine arts, including symphonies, ballets and, most of all, operas.”
Milnes played a role in persuading Northwestern to award an honorary doctorate in fine arts to Randall, who attended the school for a year as an undergraduate in the late 1930s. Over the years Randall worked with Milnes and his wife, Maria Zouves, and their Chicago-based VOICExperience program for opera singers.
Randall’s success on TV may have stemmed from his guise as a fish out of water: a man of the theater in a less-than-three-dimensional medium. His very eccentricity became his strength. Though not profound or warm, his aloof, slightly mischievous persona proved both endearing and enduring.
“He could be heartbreakingly sad, as in the TV movie that inspired `Love, Sidney,'” MacDonald said. “He could reverse his comic side and be tragic, even though he was much more commercially successful as a light version of Cary Grant.”
Product of Tulsa
Though steeped in New York mannerisms, Randall grew up in Tulsa. Born there as Leonard Rosenberg in 1920, he saw his first play at age 12. But he wasn’t very successful in winning roles in productions at Tulsa Central High School, hampered by a stammer and out-of-town trips with his father, an antiques dealer who often traveled.
Randall attended Northwestern during the 1937-38 school year and then transferred to the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theatre in New York, where his teachers included acting guru Sanford Meisner and choreographer Martha Graham. After early success in radio serials, he made his stage debut in 1941 in the Chinese fantasy “A Circle of Chalk.” Roles in “Candida” and “The Corn Is Green” followed, but, in 1942, while rehearsing Thornton Wilder’s “The Skin of Our Teeth,” he was drafted.
He served as a private and first lieutenant, delivering classified documents for a time. After the war he played on stage in “The Barretts of Wimpole Street” and “Antony and Cleopatra,” among others, before being cast in 1952 in “Mr. Peepers.”
In the late ’50s and early ’60s he made three films with Doris Day and Rock Hudson (including “Pillow Talk”) that heightened his fame and solidified his persona as a squeamish, peevish, mostly sexless eccentric.
The 1981 series “Love, Sidney” attracted complaints from conservatives. In the original made-for-TV movie, also starring Randall, the lead character was gay. In the series that became implied rather than stated.
In his later years, his love of theater reclaimed him. He used $1 million of his own money to launch the National Actors Theatre in 1991 and kept it going despite mixed reviews and box-office response. (In 1997, the company’s production of “The Gin Game,” starring Julie Harris and Charles Durning, played Chicago’s Royal George Theatre.)
In tribute to Randall, Broadway theaters dimmed their lights at 8 p.m. Tuesday.
Randall was married for 54 years to his college sweetheart, Florence Gibbs, until her death in 1992. In 1995 he married Heather Harlan, his surviving wife, mother of his children and 50 years his junior.
Randall was active in show business until the end, but there always was something older, sadder and wiser about him. He could charm Johnny Carson with retrograde ditties or sardonically quip, upon winning an Emmy for “The Odd Couple” after its cancellation, “Now, if only I had a job.”
Like Felix, he seemed to long for a cleaner, neater past.
“What’s happened to the Pump Room?” he asked during a 1997 Tribune interview at that once famed hangout, as he glanced at the mostly empty tables. “Where did all the people go?”
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Screen highlights
Film
“Down With Love,” 2003
“Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask,” 1972
“Fluffy,” 1965
“7 Faces of Dr. Lao,” 1964
“Send Me No Flowers,” 1964
“Lover Come Back,” 1961
“Pillow Talk,” 1959
“The Mating Game,” 1959
“No Down Payment,” 1957
“Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” 1957
Television
“Love, Sidney,” 1981-83
“The Tony Randall Show,” 1976-78
“The Odd Couple,” 1970-75
“Mr. Peepers,” 1952-1955
