Film

Charles Grodin, star of Midnight Run and Heartbreak Kid, dies aged 86

Broadway, film and television actor was known for his deadpan comic delivery

Charles Grodin during an interview in New York around 2000. Photograph: Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

Wed May 19 2021 - 14:25

American actor Charles Grodin – known for his deadpan comic delivery in Broadway, film and television roles – died on Tuesday at age 86.

The versatile actor was familiar from Same Time, Next Year on Broadway; popular films like The Heartbreak Kid, Midnight Run and Beethoven; and numerous television appearances. He died on Tuesday at his home in Wilton, Connecticut.

His son, Nicholas, said the cause was bone marrow cancer.

With the kind of everyman good looks that lend themselves to playing businessmen or curmudgeonly fathers, Grodin found plenty of work as a supporting player and the occasional lead.

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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.

Grodin was a writer as well, with a number of plays and books to his credit.

Although he never won a prestige acting award, he did win a writing Emmy for a 1977 Paul Simon television special, sharing it with Simon and six others.

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.

Later in his career, Grodin 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.

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 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.

What may have been Grodin’s best-known role, however, found him working with a St Bernard dog in the film Beethoven, a family-friendly hit in 1992.

Grodin played a cranky father who did not exactly warm to the new household pet. 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.

Nicholas Grodin said his father had particularly been proud of his work for the Innocence Project, the prison justice organisation, and related causes – and of his work for groups that help homeless people.

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.

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