Orson Bean

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Bean

Orson Bean (born Dallas Frederick Burrows; July 22, 1928 – February 7, 2020) was an American film, television, and stage actor, and a comedian, writer, and producer. He appeared frequently on televised game shows from the 1960s through the 1980s and was a long-time panelist on the television game show To Tell the Truth. He was a favorite of Johnny Carson, appearing on The Tonight Show 128 times, with 91 of the appearances during Johnny's tenure as host. He was a veteran actor of stage, television and cinema, and a game show host.

Early life

Bean was born Dallas Frederick Burrows in Burlington, Vermont, the son of Marian Ainsworth (née Pollard) and George Frederick Burrows. His father was a co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, a fund-raiser for the Scottsboro Boys' defense, and a 20-year member of the campus police of Harvard College.[1] Bean graduated from the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is a first cousin twice removed of Calvin Coolidge, who was President of the United States at the time of Bean's birth.[2]

Acting career

In 1952 Orson Bean made a guest appearance on NBC Radio's weekly hot-jazz series The Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. His vocal mannerisms were ideal for the mock-serious tone of the show, and he became the show's master of ceremonies ("Dr. Orson Bean") for its final season.

Bean guested on The Tonight Show (with both Jack Paar and Johnny Carson), and appeared on game shows originating from New York. He was a regular panelist on To Tell the Truth in versions from the late 1950s through 1991. During this time, his father appeared as a subject of the panel and he had to disqualify himself from participating. Apparently no one knew his real name was Burrows.[3] He also appeared on Super Password among other game shows. He hosted a pilot for a revamped version of Concentration in 1985 which was picked up later on in 1987 as Classic Concentration with Alex Trebek.

He played the title character in the 1960 Twilight Zone episode "Mr. Bevis". In 1961, for the CBS anthology series The DuPont Show with June Allyson, he starred as John Monroe in "The Secret Life of James Thurber", based on the works of the American humorist James Thurber.

Bean greatly admired movie comedians Laurel and Hardy and was one of the founding members of The Sons of the Desert, the international Laurel and Hardy Society.

On Broadway, he was the star of the original cast of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? (1955), and was featured in Subways Are For Sleeping (1961), for which he received a Tony Award nomination as Best Featured Actor in a Musical, as well as Never Too Late (1962). He also starred in Illya Darling, the 1967 musical adaptation of the film Never on Sunday. In 1964 he produced the Obie Award winning Home Movies and appeared on Broadway in I Was Dancing.

He was a regular on both Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and its spin-off, Fernwood 2Nite, and also played the shrewd businessman and storekeeper Loren Bray on the television series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman throughout its six-year run on CBS in the 1990s. He played John Goodman's homophobic father on the sitcom Normal, Ohio. He played the main characters Bilbo and Frodo Baggins in the 1977 and 1980 Rankin/Bass animated adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, and The Return of the King. He also played Dr. Lester in Spike Jonze's 1999 film, Being John Malkovich.

In 2005, Bean appeared in the sitcom Two and a Half Men, in an episode entitled "Does This Smell Funny to You?", playing a former playboy whose conquests included actresses Tuesday Weld and Anne Francis. He appeared in a 2007 episode of How I Met Your Mother.

In 2009, he was cast in the recurring role of Roy Bender, a steak salesman, who is Karen McCluskey's love interest on the ABC series Desperate Housewives.

Personal life

Bean was blacklisted by the Hollywood movie studios in the 1950s for attending two Communist Party meetings, but made numerous appearances on television and in the theater.[4] A conservative Christian, he came out in support of the Proposition 8 ballot initiative in California.[5][6] He is father-in-law to Andrew Breitbart and jokingly describes his own children, who are all married, as "little communists[7]". He was once a proponent of Orgone therapy and published a book about it titled Me and the Orgone.

Bean has been married three times. His first wife was actress Jacqueline de Sibour (stage name Rain Winslow),[8] whom he married in 1956 and divorced in 1962. She was the daughter of Vicomte Jacques J. de Sibour, a French nobleman and pilot, and his wife, Violette B. Selfridge (later Mrs Frederick T. Bedford), who was a daughter of British department-store magnate Harry Gordon Selfridge.[9][10] Jacqueline and Bean had one child, Michele.

His second wife was fashion designer Carolyn Maxwell.[11] They married in 1965 and divorced in 1981. They had three children: Max, Susannah, and Ezekiel.

He now lives in Los Angeles with his third wife, actress Alley Mills, who is twenty-three years his junior and whom he married in 1993.

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Orson Bean, Free-Spirited Actor of Stage and Screen, Dies at 91
After finding success on television and Broadway, he established a progressive school and later wandered around America as a late-blooming hippie.

Image: The actor and comedian Orson Bean in 1980. Early in his career he was ubiquitous on television, but he then took a long hiatus. Credit...Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

By Robert D. McFadden Feb. 8, 2020

Orson Bean, the free-spirited television, stage and film comedian who stepped out of his storybook life to found a progressive school, move to Australia, give away his possessions and wander around a turbulent America in the 1970s as a late-blooming hippie, was killed in a traffic accident on Friday in Venice, Calif. He was 91.

His death was confirmed on Saturday by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. Capt. Brian Wendling of the Los Angeles Police Department said Mr. Bean was struck by a car while crossing the street.

Early in his career, in the 1950s and ’60s, Mr. Bean, a subtle comic who looked like a naïve farm boy, was ubiquitous on TV. He popped up on all the networks as an ad-libbing game-show panelist (a mainstay on “To Tell the Truth”), a frequent guest of Jack Paar and Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” a regular on drama anthology shows and, in 1954, the host of his own CBS variety show, “The Blue Angel.”

He also starred on and off Broadway, made Hollywood films, founded a society of Laurel and Hardy aficionados, amassed a fortune and was blacklisted briefly as a suspected Communist.

In 1964, captivated by a progressive-education theory, he created a small school in Manhattan, the 15th Street School, that made classes and most rules optional, letting children pretty much do as they pleased. For the remainder of the decade Mr. Bean devoted himself to the school, paying its bills, covering its deficits and working harder and harder.

Image: Mr. Bean in 1964 at the 15th Street School in New York, which he founded with the goal of teaching self-reliance by making lessons and most rules optional.Credit...David Pickoff/Associated Press

He was often seen on five television panel shows a week, squeezed in nightclub acts and a Broadway show, married (for the second time) and added more children to his growing family. But he felt overwhelmed by the trappings of success and by turmoil in a nation caught up in conflicts over the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the assassinations of leaders and a political drift to the right.

“We were having babies and the money was rolling in so fast we had to push it out,” he recalled in an interview with The New York Times years later. “We had a four-story townhouse and a live-in maid. We loved it, but I was starting to freak out. I became convinced that the country was going fascist.”

Believing that America’s generals were planning an imminent coup d’état, Mr. Bean abandoned his thriving career and moved his family to Australia in 1970. He became a disciple of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and wrote a book about his psychosexual theories, “Me and the Orgone.” (Orgone is a concept, originally proposed by Reich, of a universal life force.)

When the book appeared in 1971, Mr. Bean returned to America with his wife and four children. For years he led a nomadic life as an aging hippie and self-described househusband, casting off material possessions in a quest for self-realization.

“We were so sure we didn’t want to be possessed by things and so intent on not having them that we gave away almost everything we owned,” he wrote in a 1977 Op-Ed in The Times. “We entered what I now call our late hippie stage. We tossed the kids into the van, bummed around the country, sponging on our friends and putting the kids in school wherever we happened to light.”

In his dropout years, as he recalled in a memoir, he experimented with psychedelic drugs, communal sex and other excursions into self-discovery. His peripatetic family collected driftwood and books, and at night read aloud to one another. When he had to, Mr. Bean scratched out a living by making commercials and doing voice-overs for animated films.

Image: Top theater personalities joined a protest in Times Square against the resumption of nuclear testing in 1962. From left: Maureen Stapleton, Manning Gurian, Julie Harris, Shelley Winters, Mr. Bean, Milton Kramer, Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis.Credit...Matty Zimmerman/Associated Press

By 1980, he was bored with inactivity. Moving back into the public spotlight, he reappeared in television movies, soap operas, game shows and episodic series. Over the next three decades, he took recurring roles in “Murder, She Wrote,” “Normal, Ohio” and “Desperate Housewives.” He also appeared in many movies, notably “Being John Malkovich” (1999), in which he played the eccentric owner of a mysterious company.

While he eventually performed in some 50 television series and 30 films, he may be best remembered for his appearances on early panel shows, which, in contrast to the greed, noise and kitsch of many modern game shows, were low key, relatively witty and sophisticated.

“We were much more intelligent then,” Kitty Carlisle Hart, a frequent panelist with Mr. Bean, told The Times in 1999. “It sounds like an awful thing to say, but it’s true.”

Mr. Bean was born Dallas Frederick Burrows on July 22, 1928, in Burlington, Vt., to George and Marian (Pollard) Burrows. His father, a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, was a Harvard campus police officer. His mother, a cousin of President Calvin Coolidge, killed herself when Mr. Bean was a teenager.

After graduating from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in 1946, Mr. Bean was drafted into the postwar Army and served with occupation forces in Japan. He was an accomplished magician, and after being discharged he changed his name to Orson Bean and worked Boston nightclubs with tricks and gags that evolved into comedy routines.

He was blacklisted for attending two Communist Party meetings, but that blew over and hardly slowed his career. Nightclub work in Baltimore and Philadelphia finally landed him in New York at the Blue Angel and the Village Vanguard, joining a comedic pantheon that included Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and, a little later, Woody Allen.

Fame followed him onto the Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen and Merv Griffin shows. He was on “The Tonight Show” so often that he became a vacation substitute for Jack Paar and Johnny Carson. He appeared on “Playhouse 90,” “Studio One” and other television drama series, and starred on Broadway with Jayne Mansfield in the 1955 comedy “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” and with Melina Mercouri in the 1967 musical “Illya Darling,” based on the movie “Never on Sunday.”

Mr. Bean married the actress Jacqueline de Sibour in 1956. They had a daughter, Michele, and were divorced in 1962. He and his second wife, Carolyn Maxwell, were married in 1965, had three children, Max, Susannah and Ezekiel, and were divorced in 1981. He married the actress Alley Mills in 1993, and lived for many years in Venice, Calif. His son-in-law was Andrew Breitbart, the conservative blogger who died in 2011.

Survivors include his wife and his four children.

Taken with the unorthodox ideas of A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School in England, Mr. Bean, who never got beyond high school, bought a building in Chelsea in 1964, hired four teachers and opened the 15th Street School with 40 pupils in the nursery, kindergarten and lower elementary grades. It taught self-reliance by making lessons and most rules optional, hoping to instill responsibility.

In 1964, Mr. Bean also helped found the Sons of the Desert, an international fraternal organization devoted to the films and lives of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Named for the duo’s 1933 movie, it has a Latin motto: “Duae tabulae rasae in quibus nihil scriptum est” (“Two blank slates on which nothing has been written”).

Mr. Bean wrote a memoir, “Too Much Is Not Enough” (1988), and a humorous book, “25 Ways to Cook a Mouse for a Gourmet Cat” (1994), which included recipes for Corned Mouse and Cabbage, Burritos con Raton, Mouse Bourguignon and Souris Printemps.

Elian Peltier and Yonette Joseph contributed reporting.

Source: Obituary in the New York Times, February 8, 2020