Actor best known for Eddie Haskell role
LOS ANGELES — Ken Osmond, who on TV’s Leave It to Beaver, played two-faced teenage scoundrel Eddie Haskell, a role so memorable it left him typecast and led to a second career as a police officer, died Monday.
Osmond died in Los Angeles at age 76, his family said. No cause was given. “He was an incredibly kind and wonderful father,” son Eric Osmond said. “He had his family gathered around him when he passed. He was loved and will be very missed.”
Ken Osmond’s Eddie Haskell stood out among many memorable characters on the classic family sitcom Leave It to Beaver, which ran from 1957 to 1963 on CBS and ABC, but had a decades-long life of reruns and revivals.
Eddie was the best friend of Tony Dow’s Wally Cleaver, big brother to Jerry Mathers’ Beaver Cleaver. He constantly kissed up to adults, flattering and flirting with Wally and Beaver’s mother, and kicked down at his peers, usually in the same scene. He was the closest thing the wholesome show had to a villain, and viewers of all ages loved to hate him.
“He was a terrific guy, he was a terrific actor and his character is probably one that will last forever,” Dow said Monday.
“He was one of the few guys on the show who really played a character and created it,” Dow added, chuckling as he mimicked the evil laugh Osmond would unleash when his character was launching one nefarious scheme or another and trying to pull Wally and his younger brother Beaver into it.
Mathers said he will greatly miss his friend of 63 years. “I have always said that he was the best actor on our show because in real life, his personality was so opposite of the character that he so brilliantly portrayed,” he said on Twitter.
Osmond was born in Glendale, California, to a carpenter father and a mother who wanted to get him into acting. He got his first role at age four, working in commercials and as a film extra, and got his first speaking role at nine, appearing mostly in small guest parts on TV series.
The role of Eddie in season one of Leave It to Beaver was also supposed to be a one-off guest appearance, but the show’s producers and its audience found him so memorable, he became a regular, appearing in nearly 100 of the show’s 234 episodes.
Osmond returned to making guest appearances on TV shows including The Munsters in the late 1960s, but found he was so identified with Eddie Haskell that it was hard to land roles.
He soon gave up acting and become a Los Angeles police officer for more than a decade. “I was very much typecast. It’s a death sentence,” Osmond told radio host Stu Stoshak in a 2008 interview. “I’m not complaining because Eddie’s been too good to me, but I found work hard to come by.”
He would return to TV in 1983, appearing in the TV movie Still the Beaver. The New Leave It to Beaver, came next, with Osmond reprising the role of Haskell alongside Dow and Mathers from 1983 to 1989.