Actor best known for playing languorous sportswriter and earnest coroner dies at his home, with family by his side
The actor Jack Klugman died late on Monday, at the age of 90, in Los Angeles, with his wife at his side. His sons called on his fans to embrace their father's tenacious and positive spirit.
"He had a great life and he enjoyed every moment of it, and he would encourage others to do the same," his son Adam Klugman said.
The cause of Klugman's death was not immediately known. Adam Klugman said his father had been slowing down in recent years, but was not battling cancer, which robbed him of his voice in the 1980s. Klugman taught himself to speak again, and kept working.
For many, Klugman will always be the messy one. His portrayal of sloppy sportswriter Oscar Madison on TV's The Odd Couple left viewers laughing but it also gave Klugman the leverage to create a more serious character, the gruff medical examiner in Quincy, ME. His everyman ethos and comic timing endeared him to audiences and led to a prolific, six-decade acting career that spanned stage, screen and television.
He remained popular for decades simply by playing the type of man you could imagine running into at a bar or riding on a train with – grumpy, but down-to-earth, his tie stained and a little loose, a racing form under his arm, a cigar in hand during the days when smoking was permitted.
Off-screen, Klugman owned racehorses and enjoyed gambling, although acting remained his passion.
The Odd Couple, which ran in the mid 1970s, was based on Neil Simon's play about mismatched roommates – divorced New Yorkers who end up living together. The comedy came from their opposite personalities – Klugman playing a writer whose sloppiness consistently irritated Tony Randall's fussy photographer character.
Fans and fellow actors agreed it worked, posting clips of their favourite Klugman roles on Twitter and other social networking sites late on Monday.
"RIP Jack Klugman. You made my whole family laugh together," actor-director Jon Favreau wrote on Twitter.
"He was a wonderful man and supremely talented actor," wrote actor Max Greenfield, who worked with Klugman several years ago. "He will be missed."
In Quincy, which aired in the late 70s and early 80s, Klugman played an idealistic, tough-minded medical examiner who tussled with his boss by uncovering evidence of murder in cases where others saw natural causes.
"We had some wonderful writers," he said in a 1987 Associated Press interview. "Quincy was a muckraker, like Upton Sinclair, who wrote about injustices. He was my ideal as a youngster, my author, my hero.
"Everybody said: 'Quincy'll never be a hit.' I said: 'You guys are wrong. He's two heroes in one, a cop and a doctor.' A coroner has power. He can tell the police commissioner to investigate a murder. I saw the opportunity to do what I'd gotten into the theatre to do – give a message."
The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Klugman was born in Philadelphia and began acting in college at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. After serving in the army during the second world war, he went on to summer stock and off-Broadway, rooming with fellow actor Charles Bronson as both looked for paying jobs. He made his Broadway debut in 1952 in a revival of Golden Boy.
His film credits included Sidney Lumet's 12 Angry Men and Blake Edwards's Days of Wine and Roses, and an early television highlight was appearing with Humphrey Bogart and Henry Fonda in a production of The Petrified Forest.
In February 2008, at the age of 85, Klugman married his longtime girlfriend Peggy Crosby, who was by his side when he died on Monday..
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/tv-and-radio/2012/dec/25/jack-klugman-quincy-odd-couple
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