(1 April 1935 - 18 May 2021)
The American actor-writer-producer-director was born Charles Grodinsky to a Russian and Polish family in Pittsburgh. After dropping out of university, he studied at the Actors’ Studio in New York. In his first film, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) he played a drummer boy. After a few television appearances from 1958 he had a part in Sex and the College Girl (aka The Fun Lovers, 1964), a mild comedy set in a Puerto Rican hotel. Better films included Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby, Mike Nichols’ Catch-22, Elaine May’s The Heartbreak Kid, Aram Avakian’s 11 Harrowhouse and John Guillermin’s King Kong (1976). Heaven Can Wait was Warren Beatty and Buck Henry’s adaptation of the play about a man who goes to heaven too early. In Albert Brooks’ Real Life, Grodin played the head of a family taking part in a TV reality show. Sunburn was a comedy mystery about a private eye investigating a businessman’s death in Acapulco, with Farrah Fawcett-Majors and Joan Collins. Grodin was a district attorney in Neil Simon’s screenplay of Seems Like Old Times with Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase. From the 1980s Grodin appeared in a range of films, mostly comedies, such as The Great Muppet Caper, The Woman in Red directed by and starring Gene Wilder, The Couch Trip with Dan Aykroyd and Midnight Run, a very popular comedy-drama with Robert De Niro. Another hit was Beethoven, about a big dog and, so successful was it that Beethoven’s 2nd was born. Then the good films dried up. However, Grodin was popular on television in The Young Marrieds, The Paul Simon Special which he co-wrote, Fresno, Louie, Madoff and many other one-off appearances. Charles Grodin, who has died at the age of 86 from bone marrow cancer, made his last film, James Toback’s An Imperfect Murder with Sienna Miller in 2017. He was married to Julia Ferguson and then to Elissa Durward and has one child with each wife, a son, Nicholas, and a daughter, Marion.
MICHAEL DARVELL
