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      Mary Ahern, Who Produced Early TV and Then Preserved It, Dies at 98

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      Ms. Ahern was a key behind-the-scenes figure in the landmark series “Omnibus” before becoming the Paley Center for Media’s first curator.Mary V. Ahern, who was an important behind-the-scenes figure on the cultural magazine show “Omnibus” and other early television programs, then helped preserve those and similar touchstones of television history as the Paley Center for Media’s first curator, died on May 1 at a care center in Peabody, Mass. She was 98.Her niece Joan Curry said the cause was cancer.Ms. Ahern spent much of her career working with Robert Saudek, an Emmy Award-winning producer whom The New York Times once described as “alchemist in chief of what is often recalled as the golden age of television.” Mr. Saudek, who died in 1997, created “Omnibus” in 1952, when television was new. Ms. Ahern was his valued right hand, as she had been earlier when he worked in radio.“Omnibus” was hosted by Alistair Cooke, who at the time was known primarily from radio, and it cast an incredibly wide net as it explored what could be done on the new medium and whether anyone would watch it.Orson Welles, Yul Brynner, Ethel Barrymore, James Dean and other famous or soon-to-be-famous actors appeared in staged dramas. William Inge and other playwrights unveiled new works. Gene Kelly tap-danced with the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson. There was a segment that explained what an X-ray was. One particularly inspired episode put children’s toys to the adult test: Professional musicians jammed on kiddie instruments, and a professional chef tried to make a dinner for six using a tiny toy oven.At the time, television job titles and duties were less rigidly defined than they are now, but Ms. Ahern was essentially a producer on some episodes, a script writer on others, lead researcher or editor or supervisor on still others, and sometimes all those at once.She was pivotal in bringing Leonard Bernstein to the program, meeting over lunch with him and Paul Feigay, another “Omnibus” producer, who had worked with Mr. Bernstein on the 1944 musical “On the Town.” She and Mr. Feigay showed Mr. Bernstein some Beethoven sketchbooks that had come their way that were filled with the composer’s notes from his writing of the Fifth Symphony, including an assortment of rejected ideas.“Lenny had never seen these sketches at all,” Ms. Ahern said in an oral history recorded by Ron Simon in 2017 for the Television Academy Foundation. As they were leaving the lunch, she said, he was struck with an idea.“I remember coming out on Fifth Avenue with Lenny,” she recounted, “and he said, ‘You know what I could do?’ — because he knew the score, of course, backwards; he’d conducted the Beethoven Fifth many times. He said, ‘I could look at where he would have put those sketches and why he rejected them.’ And that was the first program we did on Bernstein.”That episode, broadcast in November 1954, is regarded as a classic early example of television that both entertains and enlightens. Mr. Bernstein, Howard Taubman wrote in The Times, “made vividly clear how Beethoven fought his way to the right phrase.”The episode’s success led to a series of appearances on the program by Mr. Bernstein, on subjects including opera, Bach and the art of conducting. A Bernstein episode on musical comedy in 1956 included among the cast an unknown singer named Carol Burnett, making one of her first television appearances.But Mr. Bernstein’s television talks weren’t improvised; one of Ms. Ahern’s tasks was working over his proposed scripts, which were full of musical terms of art, to make them more friendly to the general viewer.“He knew so much,” she said. “What he didn’t realize is — and I was the perfect foil for that — that people did not know what he knew.”Leonard Bernstein on the television program “Omnibus” in 1956. Ms. Ahern played a pivotal role in bringing Mr. Bernstein to the program.Yale Joel/The LIFE Picture Collection, via Getty Images“Omnibus,” which began on CBS, moved to ABC and then NBC before finishing its run in 1961 after more than 150 episodes, most of which — these being TV’s early days — were broadcast live. By then Mr. Saudek had formed his own production company and Ms. Ahern had joined him there, where she continued to be a key figure in numerous productions.In the mid-1970s William S. Paley, the chairman of CBS, decided to create the Museum of Broadcasting, dedicated to preserving TV and radio history, and brought in Mr. Saudek to be its first president. Ms. Ahern became curator of the new museum, which opened in 1976 and is now the Paley Center for Media.“That title makes me feel I should have jars with old bones,” she told The Times in 1977, but in fact it made her a foundational figure in documenting and preserving important programs, old TV commercials and assorted broadcasting oddities. Later, from 1986 to 1989, she did similar work as an acquisitions specialist at the Library of Congress.Mary Virginia Ahern was born on Oct. 15, 1922, in Cambridge, Mass. Her father, Thomas, was in real estate and insurance, and her mother, Nora, was a teacher.Ms. Ahern enrolled at Radcliffe College to study anthropology but switched to literature, graduating in 1942. Then, during World War II, she served for three years in the Army’s Chemical Warfare Service.“She supervised the inspection of gas masks and was assigned to the procurement of flame throwers and other deadly weapons,” The Times wrote in a 1959 article about her. “One of her associates has noted that this was an incongruous occupation for a gentle, retiring young woman who had majored in American literature at college. But, he added: ‘I’m sure she was good at it. She knows how to get to the essence of any problem.’”After the war, Ms. Ahern enrolled in a management training course at the Harvard Business School (which was not yet admitting women to its master’s program).“They had internships, which were novel in those days,” she said in the oral history, “and I had an internship to what was the brand-new American Broadcasting Company, in the public affairs department.”The head of that department was Mr. Saudek.Ms. Ahern being interviewed for the Television Academy Foundation in 2017.The Television Academy Foundation InterviewsThey worked together on radio documentaries, taking on weighty subjects like the Marshall Plan and urban slums. In the early 1950s, when the Ford Foundation set itself the task of developing TV programs that would inform and enlighten, it hired Mr. Saudek, by then an ABC vice president, as director of what it called the TV-Radio Workshop. He brought along Ms. Ahern, and she helped him start “Omnibus.” Few women were working as producers at the time.Programs Ms. Ahern worked on after “Omnibus” included the mid-1960s anthology documentary series “Profiles in Courage,” a Saudek production, for which she wrote and edited scripts. In the 1970s she worked with Mr. Bernstein again as one of the producers of his “Norton Lectures” series for PBS. In the 1980s, Ms. Ahern was credited with greatly expanding the Library of Congress’s radio and TV holdings, particularly by acquiring countless programs from the NBC archives.In addition to Ms. Curry, Ms. Ahern is survived by two other nieces, Mary H. Ahern and Sharon A. Ahern.Ms. Ahern’s long association with Mr. Bernstein included traveling to the Soviet Union in 1959 to oversee the filming of “Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in Moscow,” which Mr. Saudek’s company was making for CBS. The Times wrote about her behind-the-scenes role, not only for the Bernstein special, but also for many other programs, saying she “has investigated and become proficient in such diverse subjects as jet aircraft, burlesque and sea horses.”Among the problems she had to solve in Moscow, the article said, was how to translate the title of Aaron Copland’s “Billy the Kid,” which was on the program, into Russian. She consulted a teacher in Kiev.“The closest equivalent the adviser could offer,” the newspaper said, “was ‘Fellow Billy.’” More

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      Jimmy Kimmel Rakes Republicans for Downplaying the Capitol Attack

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      “You know, when a violent mob attacked our embassy in Benghazi, Republicans in Congress investigated it eight times,” Kimmel said. “A violent mob attacked the U.S. Capitol, they’re like: ‘Tourists! What are you gonna do?’”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. We’re all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. More

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      Paul Mooney, Trailblazing Comedian, Dies at 79

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      A comic writer and performer, he was known for his boundary-pushing routines about racism and social justice and for his work with Richard Pryor and Dave Chappelle.Paul Mooney, the boundary-pushing comedian and comedy writer who made his views on race, racism and social justice abundantly clear as Richard Pryor’s longtime behind-the-scenes partner, a contributor to “In Living Color” and a performer and writer on “Chappelle’s Show,” died on Wednesday at his home in Oakland, Calif. He was 79.The cause was a heart attack, said Cassandra Williams, his publicist. Mr. Mooney was found to have prostate cancer in 2014.If you knew Mr. Pryor’s work, you probably knew Mr. Mooney’s words. The two worked together on the short-lived 1977 variety series “The Richard Pryor Show”; “Pryor’s Place” (1984), Mr. Pryor’s unlikely attempt at a children’s show; television specials; the album and film “Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip” (1982); the autobiographical film “Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling” (1986), which Mr. Pryor starred in and directed; and Mr. Pryor’s 1975 appearance as host on “Saturday Night Live.” That episode included a now-famous escalating-racial-insults job-interview sketch with Chevy Chase, written by Mr. Mooney.In an interview with The New York Times after Mr. Pryor’s death in 2005 at 65, Mr. Mooney described himself as Mr. Pryor’s “Black writer.”As a writer on “In Living Color,” Keenen Ivory Wayans’s hit sketch comedy show that had its premiere on Fox in 1990 with a predominantly Black cast, Mr. Mooney was the inspiration for and co-creator of Homey D. Clown, a less than jovial circus-costumed character who was forced to interact with children (part of his parole agreement) and usually ended up frightening them.As a writer and performer on “Chappelle’s Show” in the early 2000s, Mr. Mooney played Negrodamus, a turbaned mystic who foretold the future (Hillary Rodham Clinton’s political prospects, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver’s marriage), appeared as the expert in “Ask a Black Dude” and reviewed movies alongside white female critics. Discussing “Gone With the Wind,” he revealed that Hattie McDaniel, who played the enslaved character known as Mammy, had been reincarnated as Oprah Winfrey — for the money.Mr. Mooney’s film roles included the singer Sam Cooke in “The Buddy Holly Story” (1978) and Junebug, an old-school stand-up comedian with equal amounts of dignity, integrity and genius, in “Bamboozled” (2000), Spike Lee’s dark farce about a television network bringing back the minstrel-show genre.On “Chappelle’s Show” in the early 2000s, Mr. Mooney played Negrodamus, a turbaned mystic who foretold the future.Comedy CentralPaul Mooney was born Paul Gladney on Aug. 4, 1941, in Shreveport, La., to George Gladney and LaVoya Ealy, who were both teenagers. When Paul was 7, he moved with his mother and her parents to Oakland, where he was largely raised by his grandmother, Aimay Ealy.Although some reports said he had taken his stage surname from the Hollywood actor Paul Muni, he corrected that in his 2007 memoir, “White Is the New Black.” His family loved nicknames, he wrote, and his grandmother just started calling him Mooney when he was a child.Paul was 14 when he and his mother moved to nearby Berkeley. There, at a local movie theater, he won his first “hambone” contest, performing an African-American stomping dance that involves slapping and patting the body like a drum. It was then that he realized that he loved applause — and prize money.He had his first taste of fame when he became a teenage regular on a local dance-party television show. After the Army (he was drafted and served in Germany), he came home to all kinds of sales jobs and, even more, to a future in entertainment. He did his first stand-up comedy (alongside friends who were folk singers), created a Black improvisational group called the Yankee Doodle Bedbugs, and joined the noted improv group the Second City. He also took a job for a while as ringmaster of the traveling Gatti-Charles Circus, which, he said, just called for looking good and telling jokes.Mr. Mooney and Richard Pryor (seated) attended the premiere of Spike Lee’s concert film “The Original Kings of Comedy” in Los Angeles in 2000. With them were, from left, Walter Latham, one of the film’s producers, along with Cedric the Entertainer, Steve Harvey, Mr. Lee and D.L. Hughley.Fred Prouser/ReutersHe met Mr. Pryor in the late 1960s at a party, and they soon discovered that their personal lives were antithetical. “Pryor was a self-loathing, drug-addicted genius, Mooney an industrious teetotaler, but they bonded over laughs and a distrust of the white Hollywood power structure,” The Los Angeles Times wrote in 2010.Mr. Mooney continued his comedy career after Mr. Pryor’s death, preserving his routines in documentaries and DVDs like “The Godfather of Comedy” (2012) and “Jesus Is Black — So Was Cleopatra — Know Your History” (2007).In “Jesus Is Black,” his three sons — Shane (whose mother was Yvonne Carothers, whom Mr. Pryor married in 1973) and Daryl and Dwayne (twin sons from an earlier relationship) — appeared as themselves. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Mooney had strong opinions, even about himself.“Whatever that thing is that white people like in Blacks, I don’t have it,” he wrote in his memoir. “Maybe it’s my arrogance or my self-assurance or the way I carry myself, but whatever it is, I don’t have it.”Marie Fazio contributed reporting. More

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      Their Fascination With ‘Real Housewives’ Is Anything but Fake

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      A cadre of Yale drama graduates have followed up a first streaming hit with “This American Wife,” a reality-blurring look at the long-running reality TV franchise.Last fall, the theater company known as Fake Friends had one of the most attention-getting shows of the season, and not just because of its title. The troupe’s livestreamed production “Circle Jerk” was a viral hit, amassing Twitter love from Sarah Paulson, Roxane Gay and Hari Nef, and extending its run before briefly returning on demand in January.Its dynamic use of a real theater space mapped a live experience against a landscape of (literally) inside-the-box Zoom plays, while also tackling those restrictions head-on, thanks to self-aware, meme-ready campiness and sharp commentary on lives lived increasingly online.With a production co-sign from the playwright Jeremy O. Harris and his very digital following, the show propelled two of its members, Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley, into internet fame. They were tapped to adapt “Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical” for the virtual stage, and secured funding to turn their first-ever collaboration into another work of live internet theater.Along with the company’s dramaturges, Catherine María Rodríguez and Ariel Sibert, the two have reworked “This American Wife,” a half-confessional, half-delusional treatise on gay men’s worship of TV’s “Real Housewives” franchise, which they first staged at Yale Cabaret in 2017.Though the company is a four-person operation, they have enlisted a group of “friends of Fake Friends” (as Rodríguez put it) for this production, which begins streaming May 20: the director Rory Pelsue, the performer Jakeem Dante Powell, and Harris as a co-producer — all graduates of the Yale School of Drama.Foley, left, and Breslin say the show will examine the tensions that come with living one’s life significantly on camera.Michael George for The New York Times“We’re all huge theater nerds who can break out deep conversations about ‘Fefu and Her Friends’ in the same breath that we’re talking about Lady Gaga’s last tweet,” Harris, Breslin’s former New Haven roommate, said on a recent FaceTime call. “It’s a real love of high and low, and a rigorous relationship to both.”Breslin and Foley met backstage at a Yale production of Harris’s “water sports; or insignificant white boys” in 2017, where they discovered a mutual love of both experimental theater and the popular Bravo franchise.“Spoiler alert: They’re the same form,” Foley quipped on a recent Zoom call.“We’re really fascinated with what a camera does to a performer,” Breslin added. “What does the presence of a camera change about your behavior, about how you present yourself?”Unlike “Circle Jerk,” a satirical takedown of white gay culture laden with musical theater references, this project takes formal cues from lensed images. It’s styled as an episode of “Real Housewives” run amok, and the team cites French surrealist film, the photography of Man Ray, and the melodramas of Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Douglas Sirk as major inspirations.Foley and Powell being filmed for segments that will be part of the livestream.Michael George for The New York Times“This American Wife” follows autofictional versions of Breslin, Foley and Powell as they arrive at a glamorous McMansion and recount their relationships to reality television and the impulse to humiliate oneself for attention.Fused with a litany of the Housewives’ actual phrases, the three performers detail personal, often traumatic, facts about themselves, echoing the franchise’s televised oversharing.And as their competing narratives become increasingly revealing and damaging, the show becomes a semi-improvised, high-concept dialectic on identity and “realness.”“The show directly confronts this visual internet world of the Housewives and how they’re endlessly used as GIFs, decontextualized from possible tragedies in their lives,” Breslin said.The addition of Powell to the cast allows the creators to surface prickly questions about race that have dogged the “Real Housewives” franchise.Michael George for The New York TimesWhile the “Housewives” shows draw steady social-media chatter, the intensity of attention seemed to reach a fever pitch during lockdown. “Because we’ve had this year off, a lot of people were watching the ‘Real Housewives’ on both a surface and an intellectual level,” Powell said.Queer viewers have a particular interest in debates over how real reality TV really is. “I think queer people have a real stake in this division of reality and fakery — what gets deemed real and what gets deemed fake,” Breslin said.“Within the gay community there’s a big tendency to look at the pre-coming-out period as a dark age — to foster this narrative of being a fake self, or playing a character and telling narratives that weren’t true, while still living a life,” said Foley.“That experience of a lie that is lived-in is integral to me,” he added.Early rehearsals at a West Village townhouse previously owned by Sarah Jessica Parker saw the team spend hours reviewing “Real Housewives” footage, determining which eye-rolls and gestures would best evoke the essence of the conspicuous rich, and which could be included as pre-existing GIFs.There and at the Long Island mansion where the company completed tech rehearsals — and from which it will livestream — flowed a heady combination of after-hours grad school discourse and pure farce. Wigged performers yelled Kandi Burruss quotes at refrigerators and other domestic essentials, which would later be fitted with livestreaming GoPro cameras.The character played by Powell, a Black actor, is new to this iteration — the fourth, following two at Yale and one for Next Door at New York Theater Workshop. It brings race into the former two-man show, responding to a crucial element Breslin and Foley felt missing from their original script.Breslin and Foley said that incorporating Powell — an understudy in Harris’s Tony Award-nominated “Slave Play” on Broadway — was an obvious choice, given his “encyclopedic knowledge” of the franchise, and what his addition would do for the piece’s dramaturgy.Ariel Sibert, left, a dramaturg and Rory Pelsue, to her left, is the director of “This American Wife.” Michael George for The New York Times“I remember talking to them about the Housewives that they gave voice to in the show,” Powell said. “For obvious reasons, there were voices that were not there, but who were alluded to in the text.”“There is something easily identifiable for me with how femininity lives within the body of a Black woman that didn’t resonate with me in the white women,” he added, describing that exploration as “really enticing.”The show, which to him now “feels like a brand-new piece,” aims to critique the role of race, not just within queer fandoms, but within the franchise itself, whose lack of diversity has been called out in major publications, from The New York Times to a Hollywood Reporter essay by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.“We have the first Black woman on ‘The Real Housewives of New York’ in 2021,” Breslin pointed out. “What does that say about what these shows are instructing people on what New York is?”In 2020, the “Real Housewives of Atlanta” star NeNe Leakes called its creator Andy Cohen racist on Twitter, shortly after exiting the show.“The conversation around what’s going on behind the scenes with NeNe and Bravo is fascinating to me,” Powell said. “It’s the same conversation that’s happening around the country — how the tenets of white supremacist culture exist everywhere.”Harris, who has used his recent financial success to fund several, mostly Black-led, theater initiatives, said he finds Fake Friends’ mission “really exciting.”“If you are a person of color, you are generally demanded to write something that puts your entire identity on the line,” he added. “I get very annoyed that it’s very easy for a white person to write something mundane that risks nothing, to get acclaim. Having friends who are so willing to ask hard questions about what their personhood in this country means is exhilarating.”FourthWall Theatrical, a two-woman production company composed of Jana Bezdek and Jen Hoguet, is producing the work with Harris. “This American Wife” will be their inaugural production.According to Breslin, Bezdek introduced herself as a lover of “three things: feminist theater, Brecht, and musicals.”“I used to work in reality TV so I can’t watch it for relaxation,” she said. “But this is such a complex, intelligent piece, that is not just reflecting our obsession with ‘The Real Housewives’ back on us, but reflecting ourselves back on us.”This American WifeThrough June 6; thisamericanwife.live More

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      Billy Porter Reveals He Has Been H.I.V. Positive for 14 Years

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      The actor told The Hollywood Reporter that he had feared disclosing it would give “another way for people to discriminate against me in an already discriminatory profession.”The Tony and Emmy Award-winning actor Billy Porter disclosed in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter published on Wednesday that he learned he had H.I.V. in 2007 and hid the information from colleagues for over a decade, fearing discrimination in the entertainment industry.“I was trying to have a life and a career, and I wasn’t certain I could if the wrong people knew,” Porter, 51, said in the interview. “It would just be another way for people to discriminate against me in an already discriminatory profession.”He also described the shame he felt, having grown up in a Pentecostal church and in a very religious family, and how he had been afraid to tell his mother for 14 years. “It’s time to grow up and move on because shame is destructive — and if not dealt with, it can destroy everything in its path,” he said of his decision to talk about the diagnosis now.Porter said that he was able to “work through the shame” through his role on the FX series “Pose,” which centers on the ballroom scene during the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s in New York City. Porter’s character, a ballroom M.C. and elder of the community, received a diagnosis of H.I.V. in the first season and struggles to share the information with the group.“I was able to say everything that I wanted to say through a surrogate,” Porter said.Porter’s acting career took off after his star turn in the Broadway musical “Kinky Boots,” which earned him a 2013 Tony Award for best actor in a musical for his performance as the drag performer Lola.Porter’s acting career took off after he won a Tony Award for his performance in “Kinky Boots.” He is shown here on the red carpet of the Academy Awards in 2019.Josh Haner/The New York TimesFor years, Porter said, he had resolved to keep his health status a secret until his mother’s death. He changed his mind more recently, and made a plan to tell his mother about the diagnosis with his sister. But one day — which happened to be the last day filming the final season of “Pose” — on a phone call with his mother, she noticed that he sounded off, and he told her.“She said, ‘You’ve been carrying this around for 14 years?’” Porter said. “‘Don’t ever do this again. I’m your mother, I love you no matter what.’” More

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      ‘In Treatment’ Is Back. How Does That Make You Feel?

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      Pandemic tensions led HBO to make a new version of the therapy drama, which stars Uzo Aduba and aims to reduce stigmas about mental health care.The writer Jennifer Schuur (“My Brilliant Friend,” “Unbelievable”) has seen the same therapist every week for 17 years. “It is one of the most significant relationships of my life,” she said. Sometimes friends and family question that longevity. More

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      Trevor Noah Wonders if America Is Ready for a Giuliani Dynasty

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      Rudy Giuliani’s son, Andrew, announced his candidacy for governor of New York on Tuesday. The “Daily Show” host is surprised that he wants the job.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. We’re all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. More

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      Charles Grodin, Star of ‘Beethoven’ and ‘Heartbreak Kid,’ Dies at 86

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      A familiar face who was especially adept at deadpan comedy, he also appeared on Broadway in “Same Time, Next Year,” wrote books and had his own talk show.Charles Grodin, the versatile actor familiar from “Same Time, Next Year” on Broadway, popular movies like “The Heartbreak Kid,” “Midnight Run” and “Beethoven” and numerous television appearances, died on Tuesday at his home in Wilton, Conn. He was 86.His son, Nicholas, said the cause was bone marrow cancer.With a great sense of deadpan comedy and the kind of Everyman good looks that lend themselves to playing businessmen or curmudgeonly fathers, Mr. Grodin found plenty of work as a supporting player and the occasional lead. He also had his own talk show for a time in the 1990s and was a frequent guest on the talk shows of others, making 36 appearances on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and more than 40 on David Letterman’s NBC and CBS shows combined.Mr. Grodin with his co-star, Ellen Burstyn, and his director, Gene Saks, in 1975 at the first rehearsal for the Broadway comedy “Same Time, Next Year.” The play was a hit and a turning point in Mr. Grodin’s career.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesMr. Grodin was a writer as well, with a number of plays and books to his credit. Though he never won a prestige acting award, he did win a writing Emmy for a 1977 Paul Simon television special, sharing it with Mr. Simon and six others.Mr. Grodin, who dropped out of the University of Miami to pursue acting, had managed to land a smattering of stage and television roles when, in 1962, he received his first big break, landing a part in a Broadway comedy called “Tchin-Tchin,” which starred Anthony Quinn and Margaret Leighton.“Walter Kerr called me impeccable,” Mr. Grodin wrote years later, recalling a review of the show that appeared in The New York Times. “It took a trip to the dictionary to understand he meant more than clean.”Another Broadway appearance came in 1964 in “Absence of a Cello.” Mr. Grodin’s next two Broadway credits were as a director, of “Lovers and Other Strangers” in 1968 and “Thieves” in 1974. Then, in 1975, came a breakthrough Broadway role opposite Ellen Burstyn in Bernard Slade’s “Same Time, Next Year,” a durable two-hander about a man and woman, each married to someone else, who meet once a year in the same inn room.“The play needs actors of grace, depth and accomplishment, and has found them in Ellen Burstyn and Charles Grodin,” Clive Barnes wrote in a rave in The Times. “Miss Burstyn is so real, so lovely and so womanly that a man wants to hug her, and you hardly notice the exquisite finesse of her acting. It is underplaying of sheer virtuosity. Mr. Grodin is every bit her equal — a monument to male insecurity, gorgeously inept, and the kind of masculine dunderhead that every decent man aspires to be.”The show ran for three and a half years, with an ever-changing cast; the two original stars left after seven months. Mr. Grodin by that point was in demand in Hollywood. (Ms. Burstyn reprised the role in a 1978 film adaptation, but this time opposite Alan Alda in the Grodin role.)Mr. Grodin with Eddie Albert and Cybill Shepherd in the comic romance “The Heartbreak Kid” (1972), one of his best-known films.20th Century-FoxMr. Grodin had already appeared in Mike Nichols’s “Catch-22” in 1970 and had turned in one of his better-known film performances in the 1972 comic romance “The Heartbreak Kid,” in which he played a self-absorbed sporting goods salesman who marries in haste, immediately loses interest in his bride (Jeannie Berlin), and falls in love with another woman (Cybill Shepherd) on his honeymoon. (Elaine May, Mr. Nichols’s longtime comedy partner and Ms. Berlin’s mother, directed.)In 1978 he had a supporting role in the Warren Beatty vehicle “Heaven Can Wait.” Another signature role was in the action comedy “Midnight Run” in 1988, in which Mr. Grodin played an accountant who has embezzled a fortune from the mob and is being pursued by a bounty hunter, played by Robert De Niro.Though Mr. Grodin acted opposite stars like Mr. De Niro and Mr. Beatty, what may have been his best-known role found him working with a dog. The film was “Beethoven,” a family-friendly hit in 1992, and the dog was a St. Bernard. Mr. Grodin played a cranky father who did not exactly warm to the new household pet. In one memorable scene, he crawls into bed with what he thinks is his wife and is enjoying having the back of his neck licked until he realizes that the dog, not the wife, is his bedmate.“You’ve ruined my life,” he growls at the beast. “You’ve ruined my furniture. You’ve ruined my clothes. My family likes you more than they like me. Why? All you do is drool and shed and eat.”The next year he reprised the role in “Beethoven’s 2nd.” If he was frequently upstaged by the title character in these films, he took it in stride.“I don’t complain when the editor chooses my worst take because it’s the dog’s best take,” he told The Kansas City Star when the sequel came out.Charles Sidney Grodin was born on April 21, 1935, in Pittsburgh. His father, Ted, was a merchant who dealt in sewing notions, and his mother, Lena (Singer) Grodin, was a homemaker.He grew up in Pittsburgh and tried the University of Pittsburgh, thinking he might want to be a journalist. But he soon rejected that idea.“I imagined that someday an editor might tell me to ask someone who had lost a loved one how they felt,” he wrote in a 2011 essay for Backstage magazine. “I see that all the time on the news now. Not for me.”He often said that the 1951 movie “A Place in the Sun,” which starred Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, caused him to shift his focus to acting.“It was two things,” he told the Television Academy Foundation in an oral history. “One is I think I developed an overwhelming crush on Elizabeth Taylor. And two, Montgomery Clift made acting look like, ‘Gee, well that looks pretty easy — just a guy talking.’”Mr. Grodin had a signature role in “Midnight Run” (1988), in which he played an accountant who has embezzled a fortune from the mob and Robert De Niro played the bounty hunter who pursued him.City Light FilmsAfter six months at the University of Miami, he worked at the Pittsburgh Playhouse for a year and a half, then found his way to New York. From 1956 to 1959 he studied with Uta Hagen, though he often found himself questioning her methods, which he said annoyed her.Mr. Grodin made guest appearances on “Shane,” “The Virginian” and other 1960s TV series before landing his first significant film role, as an obstetrician, in the 1968 horror hit “Rosemary’s Baby.”In 1976 he played an unlikable oilman in a remake of “King Kong,” with some reluctance.“I wanted to play the love interest with Jessica Lange,” he said. “I didn’t want to be the guy responsible for the death of the most beloved animal outside of Bambi. But they wanted me for the bad guy.”By popular demand, his character meets a gruesome end.“The only thing they changed after the first screening, I was told, is when Kong got loose and tried to step on me and kill me and missed,” he said. “The audience was so disappointed that they had to recut it.”Mr. Grodin in 2000, not long after his CNBC talk show ended its run. “They brought me in there to be a humorist,” he said, “but pretty quickly I got caught up in social issues.”Suzanne DeChillo/The New York TimesMr. Grodin showed a different side in the mid-1990s when he hosted “The Charles Grodin Show” on the cable channel CNBC.“They brought me in there to be a humorist,” he said in the oral history, “but pretty quickly I got caught up in social issues, and the show became just as much that, if not dominantly that. Some people like it better when you’re funny, and some people prefer that you’re taking cameras up to prisons and trying to help people who shouldn’t be in prison.”Nicholas Grodin said his father had particularly been proud of his work for the Innocence Project, the prison justice organization, and related causes, and his work for groups that help homeless people.After his talk show ended in 1998, Mr. Grodin largely stepped away from show business for a dozen years. Then he began to take roles again, including a recurring one on “Louie,” the comedian Louis C.K.’s series.Mr. Grodin wrote several memoirs full of anecdotes from his career, including “It Would Be So Nice if You Weren’t Here: My Journey Through Show Business” (1989) and “We’re Ready for You, Mr. Grodin: Behind the Scenes at Talk Shows, Movies and Elsewhere” (1994).His first marriage, to Julie Ferguson, ended in divorce. In 1983 he married Elissa Durwood, who survives him, along with his son, who is from his second marriage; a daughter from his first marriage, the comedian Marion Grodin; and a granddaughter.After more than a decade away from show business, Mr. Grodin began to take roles again. He’s seen here in his recurring role as a doctor in a 2014 episode of the comedian Louis C.K.’s series “Louie.”K.C. Bailey/FXA 1985 anecdote Mr. Grodin related on Mr. Letterman’s show was typical of the breath of fresh, if offbeat, air he brought to those appearances. He told Mr. Letterman that he had been gratified when, walking through the lobby on his way to the studio, the crowd that had lined up to get into the show burst into applause.“I turned around to smile,” he said, “and they weren’t applauding me. There was a duck in a tuxedo walking by, and they were applauding the duck.“But,” he added, “for the moment that I thought they were applauding me, it was a lovely, lovely moment.”He offered no explanation for the presence of the duck. More