Obituraries

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The Tony-winning actor who was a Broadway staple

George Grizzard

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1928–2007

George Grizzard always had a fertile imagination—born, he said, of loneliness. “I was an only child and very lonely,” he recalled, “so I made up children to play with—Gene and Bounds and Mrs. Pig and Mrs. Hog and their children, and a town called Scottina. That just kind of developed into wanting to create people.” It also developed into an acting career that spanned more than 50 years, mostly on the Broadway stage, where he won a Tony Award at the age of 68. He died last week of lung cancer at 79.

Born in Roanoke Rapids, N.C., Grizzard grew up in Washington, D.C., and worked briefly in advertising, said Variety. But he found his passion when he began performing in local theater. In 1954, he moved to New York to study acting with Sanford Meisner, the legendary acting coach. The next year, he played Paul Newman’s younger brother on Broadway in The Desperate Hours and, despite his minor role, was voted best newcomer in a Variety poll of drama critics.

The accolades started piling up quickly, said The Washington Post. He received Tony nominations as a supporting player in The Disenchanted (1959), in which he played a naïve literary acolyte, and in Big Fish, Little Fish (1961), as a brash novelist. But it was as Nick the biology professor in the original Broadway production of Edward Albee’s “scorching marital drama” Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) that Grizzard made his biggest mark. He and Melinda Dillon “played a young and seemingly golden husband and wife” who spend a night engaging in “hard drinking and psychological warfare.” But though he received great reviews, he left the show after only three months, saying he was exhausted and depressed. “That’s the guy Edward wanted destroyed,” Grizzard explained, “and he did a pretty good job of doing that.”

“In all, he graced 21 Broadway plays,” said Time, “his reputation escalating until he was one of the few acting eminences around whom a producer could build an important revival.” It was as the star of one such revival, Albee’s A Delicate Balance in 1996, that Grizzard won his only Tony. But he also built up a solid repertoire of TV and movie appearances. On the small screen, he portrayed John Adams in the 13-part PBS miniseries The Adams Chronicles (1976) and won an Emmy playing Henry Fonda’s son in The Oldest Living Graduate (1980). In the film Advise and Consent (1962), he portrayed “a snaky” Wyoming senator trying to blackmail a colleague for an early brush with homosexuality. His final film role was in Clint Eastwood’s 2006 Flags of Our Fathers. Onstage, Grizzard last appeared as a gay fashion designer in Paul Rudnick’s Regrets Only (2006).

He is survived by his longtime partner, William Tynan, whom he met while performing in the gay-themed The Boys in the Band, 40 years ago.

The B-movie writer who created The Little Shop of Horrors

Charles B. Griffith

1930–2007

By late 1959, Charles Griffith had already written several exploitation flicks for famed B-movie director Roger Corman, including Ski Troop Attack and A Bucket of Blood. It was time to discuss their next project. “Roger and I talked over a bunch of ideas, including gluttony,” Griffith recalled. “The hero would be a salad chef in a restaurant who would wind up cooking customers and stuff like that. We couldn’t do that, though, because of the code at the time. So I said, ‘How about a man-eating plant?’ And Roger said, ‘Okay.’ By that time, we were both drunk.” The result was The Little Shop of Horrors, which became a cult classic and one of 25 films the two would ultimately make together.

Griffith came from a show business family, said the Los Angeles Times; his mother and grandmother played the title characters on the popular 1930s and ’40s radio serial The Story of Myrt and Marge. Born in Chicago, he “arrived in Hollywood in the early ’50s to help his grandmother write scripts in a failed attempt to move the show to television.” His first screen credit was the Corman-produced and -directed Gunslinger, a 1956 Western about a female sheriff played by Beverly Garland. Griffith then proceeded to knock off a series of quick, cheap titles for Corman, including Naked Paradise, Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Undead, and Teenage Doll, all released in 1957.

By far, The Little Shop of Horrors was his masterpiece, said the London Independent. Reportedly, it was “only made because Corman had access for a couple of days to some sets left standing on the Hollywood film lot where his production company, American International Pictures, was based.” Griffith not only wrote the film’s most famous line—Feeeeeed Meee!, spoken by Audrey Junior, the carnivorous plant—but he provided Audrey’s voice and played several bit parts. The $27,000 picture “originally played drive-ins and fleapits as a second feature,” but in later years it became the basis for a hit off-Broadway musical and a 1986 remake starring Rick Moranis, Bill Murray, and Steve Martin. Griffith, who got $800 for the script, “was originally left out of any subsequent rights agreement. He sued everyone involved.”

As he recounted in 1999, “It took forever, but the Warner Bros. remake was held up by the case, so they settled. I get one-fourth of 1 percent, and it has kept me going since 1983.” Despite occasional creative and financial tensions, Griffith stuck with Corman; their other work included such titles as the biker films The Wild Angels (1966) and Devil’s Angels (1967). “I was lazy,” Griffith admitted. “Instead of trying to write an A-picture and sell it on the market, I’d just go back and get another assignment from Roger.”