Robert Morse, Impish Tony Award-Winning Comedy Star, Dies at 90


Television proved more hospitable. In addition to making guest appearances on variety shows in the 1960s and ’70s, he co-starred with actress EJ Peaker in “That’s Life,” an offbeat hybrid of the 1968 sitcom and variety show that tells the story of a young couple’s courtship. and marriage through sketches, monologues, singing and dancing. Perhaps too ambitious for his own good – “We produce enough to have a new musical every week,” Mr. Morse told an interviewer – it only lasted one season.

Mr. Morse returned to Broadway in 1972 with “Sugar”, a musical about two Chicago musicians called “Some Like It Hot” by Billy Wilder. The role of Jack Lemmon – those who, disguised as women, escape from the local gangsters and join a group of girls who go to Miami. It brought Mr Morse another Tony nomination and was a modest success that lasted for over a year.

But his next show was the 1976 musical “So Long, 174th Street” adapted from the play “Enter Laughing” – Mr. Morse still had a boyish appearance as an aspiring actor at 45, roughly half his age. harsh criticism and it was closed within a few weeks. This was Mr Morse’s last appearance on Broadway in over a decade.

He continued to engage in the following years, but his electoral roles were scarce and he battled depression. He also had problems with drugs and alcohol, but claimed that these problems did not hinder his work; Looking back at 1989, told The Times“It was the other 22 hours that I had trouble.”

He starred in a number of uptown revivals, including the production of “How to Succeed” in Los Angeles. She was a familiar face on TV series like “Love, American Style” and “Murder, She Wrote” and a familiar voice in cartoons like “Pound Puppies”. But she desperately wanted to escape a casting pigeonhole she knew she had helped create.

“I’m the short, funny guy,” he said ruefully in an interview with the 1972 Times. “It’s so hard to get rid of it.” Eight years ago he told another interviewer: “I think of myself as an actor. I have a funny talent, but that doesn’t mean I plan to spend my life as a comedian.”

It took some time to find the perfect dramatic spectacle, but in 1989 Jay Presson Allen found it in “Tru,” a one-man show about Truman Capote. Nearly unrecognizable in her heavy make-up, completely believable in her voice and demeanor, Capote brooded over friendships she had lost after the publication of excerpts from the ongoing gossip novel “Prayers Answered,” which was embodied alone in her apartment in 1975. Mr. Morse’s performance brought him his second Tony Award. In 1992, the television adaptation of “Tru” for the PBS series “American Playhouse” also earned him an Emmy.



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