Tony Randall _ 1920-2004 // After a six-decade career, he'll always be known as Felix

Tony Randall, the sardonic actor immortalized for his portrayal of neat-freak Felix Unger in The Odd Couple, died Monday (May 17, 2004) after a long illness. He was 84.

Mr. Randall had been battling pneumonia, which he contracted in January after undergoing a triple heart bypass late last year. He died in his sleep at NYU Medical Center in New York. His wife, Heather Harlan Randall _ who had made him a father for the first time at age 77 _ was by his side.

The dedicated theater advocate entered the hospital after starring in a revival of Luigi Pirandello's play Right You Are, the 20th production of the National Actors Theatre, which Mr. Randall founded.

Broadway's marquee lights were dimmed in his honor Tuesday night.

"I tell you, that's a tribute he deserves," Jack Klugman, Mr. Randall's The Odd Couple co-star, told the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday. "I didn't think they recognized how important he was, and I'm glad they're doing it."

After Mr. Randall's death, Klugman, 82, canceled the remaining Milwaukee performances of An Evening With Jack Klugman, his one-man show, and flew to New York.

Doris Day remembered Mr. Randall as being "so brilliant, funny, sweet and dear, that it was as if God had given him everything." Mr. Randall played the fussbudget pal in Rock Hudson-Day movies such as 1959's Pillow Talk and 1961's Lover Come Back.

"He was the funniest man in movies and on television, and nothing was as much fun as working with him," said Day, 80. "I'm so glad that his last few years with his wife and children were so happy. I loved him very much and miss him already."

In his six-decade career, Mr. Randall was the rare performer who found success on radio, in the theater, on TV and in the movies. He also moved back and forth between drama and light comedy, from the suburban California angst of 1957's No Down Payment to the fluff of 1960's Let's Make Love, with Marilyn Monroe.

Still, he'll always be best known as Felix, whose maniacal cleanliness clashed with the sloppiness of roommate Oscar Madison, played by Klugman.

Last year, Mr. Randall told AP Radio that, thanks to reruns, it was no surprise most people knew him as Felix Unger.

"It's on all the time," he said. "People on the street say, "Hello, Felix' to me, except for those who say, "Hello, Oscar.' "

"Am I a neat freak, like Felix? No, not at all," Mr. Randall told the Los Angeles Times in 1985. "I realize that's a compliment, to be so identified with a character. But it can be annoying. It puts you in the position of being typecast."

The Odd Couple ran from 1970-75, but Mr. Randall won an Emmy only after it had been canceled. At the awards ceremony he quipped: "I'm so happy I won. Now if I only had a job."

Mr. Randall's other famous television persona was as a fixture on late-night talk shows, appearing on David Letterman's Late Night and Late Show more than 100 times. He also had more appearances than any other actor on Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show, according to his publicist, Gary Springer.

From 1981-83, he played the title role in the sitcom Love, Sidney, as a single, middle-aged commercial artist helping a female friend care for her young daughter. The show was based on a TV movie in which Sidney was gay; in the TV show, the character's sexual orientation was implied, but never specified.

"People have to remember this was 1981? '82? '83?" said Swoosie Kurtz, his Love, Sidney co-star. Being gay "was unacceptable on network television."

In an effort to bring classic theater back to Broadway, Mr. Randall founded and was artistic director of the nonprofit National Actors Theatre in 1991, using $1-million of his own money and $2-million from corporations and foundations. The first production was a revival of Arthur Miller's The Crucible, which hadn't been staged on Broadway in 40 years.

Mr. Randall made clear, whenever he was asked, that his favorite role in more than 50 years of acting was that of a middle-aged American diplomat in the Broadway stage production of M. Butterfly, David Henry Hwang's 1988 Tony winner. In it, Mr. Randall's character fell in love with a gorgeous Japanese woman who turned out to be a male spy in disguise.

"It was the closest I ever came to being the kind of actor I believe in," he informed reporters on more than one occasion.

He also was socially active, lobbying against smoking in public places, marching in Washington against apartheid in the '80s, and helping raise money for AIDS research in the '90s.

Tony Randall was born Leonard Rosenberg in Tulsa, Okla., on Feb. 26, 1920. He was the son of Mogscha Rosenberg, a dealer in artworks and antiques, and the former Julia Finston.

He was drawn to acting as a child. He had a most expressive, elastic face and used it in class when he was not expected to, with the result that one of his grade school teachers sent a note home, asking his parents to order him to stop making funny faces. He appeared in his first production in grade school and liked it so much that he decided acting was what he would do with the rest of his life.

But when he went to Tulsa's Central High School, he was unsuccessful when he tried out for school plays, perhaps because he had a childhood stammer.

As a teen, he went to see plays whenever he could and on one occasion, the renowned Katharine Cornell came to town in a touring company production of Romeo and Juliet. Mr. Randall went backstage to get her autograph, for which he was asked to pay 25 cents (Cornell informed him that such money went to charity). She borrowed the boy's pen to write her name.

"Someday," Mr. Randall said, "I'll give you mine."

"Autograph or pen?" Cornell tartly inquired.

After high school, Mr. Randall enrolled as a speech and drama major at Northwestern University, but dropped out after a year and moved to New York. His childhood stammer finally went away in the early 1940s and he was able to find work in radio.

After Army service during World War II from 1942-46, he returned to New York, where he appeared on radio and early TV.

In the early 1950s, he landed a role on television that in a sense would presage his Felix Unger portrayal in that people began to feel that Mr. Randall and this first character, a schoolteacher named Harvey Weskit, were really the same.

The show was called Mr. Peepers. It starred Wally Cox as Peepers, a sweet, shy, somewhat befuddled teacher. As Weskit, Mr. Randall was cast as Peepers' posturing, swaggering sidekick. It lasted for four years and earned Mr. Randall an Emmy nomination.

By the late '50s, Mr. Randall was swamped with work. He briefly substituted for Steve Allen on the Tonight Show and for Arthur Godfrey, who then had a popular daytime show.

He started to make Hollywood pictures, too. He appeared in the film version of Oh, Men! Oh, Women! and he was an advertising man in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? That same year, 1957, Twentieth Century-Fox asked him to appear as an alcoholic car salesman in Jerry Wald's No Down Payment, a soaper about young marrieds.

Mr. Randall married Florence Gibbs, his college sweetheart, in 1939. She died of cancer in 1992. They had no children.

He married Heather Hanlan, a former intern with the National Actors Theatre, in 1995 when he was 75 and she was 24.

The couple had two children: 7-year-old Julia Laurette and 5-year-old Jefferson Salvini. Mr. Randall told AP Radio that he couldn't believe he had become a father for the first time in his 70s.

"It's amazing. I haven't heard anyone have a life like that," he said last year. "The most amazing, wonderful things in my life have happened since I was 70. I think that's unique."

Mr. Randall actively fought the aging process. When he was approaching his 80th year, his wife introduced him to inline skating, which he thoroughly enjoyed until some young woman passed him, turned around and yelled, "You must be out of your mind." He decided she was right and immediately turned to bicycle riding.

In September, during a speech to the National Funeral Directors Association, Mr. Randall joked about how he envisioned his own ceremony: President Bush and Vice President Cheney would show up to pay their respects, but they'd be turned away because his family knows he didn't like them.

He said funerals should be planned as a celebration of life _ and "a touch of humor doesn't hurt a bit."

_ Information from the Associated Press, New York Times and Boston Globe was used in this report.

Looking back

Highlights of Tony Randall's film and television career:

Films

Down With Love, 2003

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, 1972

Fluffy, 1965

7 Faces of Dr. Lao, 1964

Send Me No Flowers, 1964

Lover Come Back, 1961

Pillow Talk, 1959

The Mating Game, 1959

No Down Payment, 1957

Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? 1957

Television

Love, Sidney, 1981-83

The Tony Randall Show, 1976-78

The Odd Couple, 1970-75

Mr. Peepers, 1952-1955