Burgess Meredith: A Prolific Pro -- From Broadway To `The Twilight Zone,' Actor-Writer Did It All

Burgess Meredith displayed his versatile acting wares in a series of always refreshing but generally eccentric roles that kept him before cameras or onstage for more than 70 years.

The raspy-voiced character actor with unruly hair and a grimacing yet humorous manner was 89 when he died Tuesday.

He was at home in Malibu, Calif., said his son, Jonathan. Other survivors include his wife, Kaja, and daughter, Tala.

The short, wiry Meredith whose early credits included "Hamlet" and "Macbeth" found an entire new career late in life after he was seen on television as a scheming penguin and in films as Rocky Balboa's crusty fight manager.

"I disappear from the public eye and get rediscovered quite often," Meredith would say over the years. His most recent dramatic resuscitation didn't appear to impress him any more than had his earlier revivals.

Yesterday, Sylvester Stallone, star of "Rocky," said in a statement that "without (Meredith's) participation in the film it would never have had its emotional core."

If the phrase "actor's actor" has any validity, then Meredith was its prototype.

Nicknamed "Buzz," he was known among his peers and to critics as one of the most versatile thespians ever to grace a stage or a film set. His roles ranged from the idealistic and protective migrant worker forced to kill his retarded cousin in "Of Mice and Men" to "Hamlet," which he performed on national radio in 1937.

Later would come the Meredith of advancing years who played Mickey, the aging boxing manager who fulfills the dream of his youth through the over-the-hill fighter Rocky. Or the fiendish Penguin, one of Batman's prime adversaries on the campy and popular TV series of the 1960s.

Privately, he was an avid environmentalist who complained about a neighbor cutting down a favored tree to build a tennis court.

Publicly, his credits include director, actor, writer and producer. The range of his efforts stretched from plays as obscure as "The Green Cockatoo" to films as famous as "Rocky."

In one TV season alone (1963) he portrayed a mad pacifist, a botanist whose specialty was man-eating plants, a father with incestuous tendencies and a diabolical brother who hated his sibling.

He was an early and inveterate cross-country airline passenger, juggling films between stage appearances and managing, generally, to keep his sense of humor.

Even through four marriages.

He told a Los Angeles Times interviewer in 1976, "I'm not the nostalgic type. I hardly visit my ex-wives." (Among them actress Paulette Goddard.)

His professional recognition was out of proportion to his prodigious output. He was nominated twice for an Academy Award ("The Day of the Locust" in 1975 and "Rocky" in 1976) but didn't win; won one Emmy (for his portrayal of attorney Joseph Welch on a TV special about U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy); was nominated for a second ("The Last Hurrah"); won a special Tony Award for his 1960 staging of "A Thurber Carnival." He also was nominated for a Tony for directing "Ulysses in Nighttown."

Meredith began life as George Burgess, son of a Cleveland doctor. The family dissolved early on, and Meredith said he took solace in acting in school plays.

He mastered the leads in "Peter Pan" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and was accepted into Amherst College on scholarship in 1926. But finances forced him to leave school, and he worked alternately as a merchant seaman, a tie salesman and peddler of vacuum cleaners before drifting to New York and actress Eva La Gallienne's Student Repertory Group.

"I had no money," Meredith said in a 1976 interview. "But Eva took me in."

He left her group for roles in "Threepenny Opera" and "Little Ol' Boy," "The Barretts of Wimpole Street" and many other Broadway and off-Broadway productions of the early 1930s.

Playwright Maxwell Anderson became aware of his talents and with Meredith in mind wrote a play called "Winterset." It was a forlorn melodrama of a son out to avenge his father's death, and it became not only a Broadway hit in 1935 but a motion picture a year later with Meredith re-creating his role as the son, Mio.

His New York stage performances included such classics as "The Playboy of the Western World," "The Fourposter" (succeeding Hume Cronyn), "The Teahouse of the August Moon" (succeeding David Wayne), and "Major Barbara." He went on the road with "Teahouse," and the tour included a stop at Seattle's Moore Theatre in 1955.

On the screen, however, he struggled through such clinkers as "Spring Madness," "San Francisco Docks" and "Joe Butterfly."

Indicative of the type of curious roles he continued to accept over more than 120 films was among his last - the Ancient Elf in "Santa Claus: The Movie" in 1985.

He reverted more to type in 1993, however, as the grumpy-codger father of Jack Lemmon in "Grumpy Old Men" and its 1995 sequel "Grumpier Old Men."

In 1994 he wrote a memoir, "So Far, So Good," in which he reminisced about the giants who had walked through his theatrical world.

Meredith's first TV assignment had come in 1952, and he subsequently became producer and host of "Junior Ford Omnibus" and "Excursion." As with his films, his television appearances cut a wide critical swath and ranged from Eugene O'Neill's "Ah, Wilderness" on the Hallmark Hall of Fame to guest shots on "Laredo" and "McCloud."

He had been a regular on the old "Mr. Novak" and "Search" television series, and hosted TV's "Those Amazing Animals" in 1980. Perhaps the television role that may linger longest with viewers was the ironic episode of "The Twilight Zone" he did in the early 1960s. In "Time Enough at Last," Meredith played a bank teller who preferred reading to the company of people. One day he had retreated to the bank's vault to eat his lunch and read in peace when a nuclear attack killed everyone else in the world.

In an interview he granted in conjunction with the release of "The Day of the Locust" in 1975, which was a box-office disaster, Meredith - in what could have been an assessment of his professional life - said his portrayal of a broken-down vaudevillian selling miracle drugs door to door was "as good as I can be."

He always was.