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  A tribute to Tony Randall May 23, 2004 Reporter :Robert Penfold  They were The Odd Couple: the flatmates, Felix Unger, fastidious photographer, and Oscar Madison, slovenly sportswriter, thrown together like Oscar's meals, always consumed with a can of beer. In real life, they were Tony Randall and Jack Klugman and the television series they starred in was based on Neil Simon's play and movie. It became more popular than the original, especially with all the reruns.Well, The Odd Couple is one less now. Tony Randall died this week at the age of 84 at the NYU Medical Centre in New York City, after a long illness following complications from heart bypass surgery in December. He acted until near the end. He went into hospital after starring for a month in Right You Are, a revival of Pirandello's play by the National Actors Theatre, which he founded. Randall once said, "I love acting better than anything in the world. Shaw said 'the only happiness is working yourself to death in something you love'. I am doing something I love..." And the public loved him. Randall won an Emmy, the US equivalent of a Logie, for his role as Felix Unger. The original television series ran from 1970-75, but Randall picked up the award after the show had been cancelled, prompting him to come up with the line that brought down the audience at the ceremony: "I'm so happy I won. Now if I only had a job." The show worked because of the chemistry between Randall and Klugman and their characters, forced to share an apartment after both men were divorced. Felix and Oscar were the quintessential odd couple. Klugman told Reuters, "There never was another Felix like him, he was wonderful, but he was more serious and much deeper and a better actor than that. His love of the theatre was so great that it really gave him an energy that was very attractive." Tony Randall was born Leonard Rosenberg in 1920 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He attended Northwestern University in Chicago before heading to New York at age 19, where he made his stage debut in 1941. After army service during World War II from 1942 to 1946, he returned to New York, where he appeared on radio and television. He got his start in the movies in 1957. Randall played an Unger-like character in three Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedies, Pillow Talk (1959), Lover Come Back (1961) and Send Me No Flowers (1964). Doris Day said, "Tony was so brilliant, funny, sweet and dear, that it was as if God had given him everything." His quick wit earned him many guest spots on late night talk shows, particularly The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson and David Letterman. Letterman said, "I was lucky enough to know Tony as an actor and friend. He appeared on our show over 100 times. Whenever we needed a big laugh, we would bring in Tony. He always made us better for having worked with him. We will miss him very much." In 1991, Randall founded the National Actors Theatre, a non-profit company dedicated to staging classics by playwrights like Pirandello, Shakespeare, Chekov and Arthur Miller. Randall's first wife, Florence Gibbs Randall, died in 1992 after 54 years of marriage. He became a father for the first time at age 77 after marrying his second wife Heather, 50 years his junior. They had two children, Julia, seven, and Jefferson, five. His wife told CNN's Larry King, "Tony had such a beautiful spirit... He had 10 times more energy than I did ... up until the day he went to the hospital, he was performing eight shows a week." Randall told Reuters in 1998, "Maybe I'm an old fool, but I can't look at it that way. I'm having the most wonderful experience of my life." Randall joked last September about how he saw his funeral: 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 told the National Funeral Directors Association that funerals should be a celebration of life and "a touch of humour doesn't hurt a bit." In a tribute to the actor, lights at all the Broadway theatres were dimmed at 8pm on the night after his death. |
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