Master comic was ‘different’
GINA PICCALO
LOS ANGELES— Fred Willard was an improv comedy master whose star shone brightest in the satire of writer-director Christopher Guest, playing a goofball so straight it wasn’t always clear he was in on the joke.
Willard died Friday evening in Los Angeles of natural causes at 86, his agent Mike Eisenstadt said.
In the 1996 film that launched him into the mainstream, “Waiting for Guffman,” Willard was a small-town amateur actor opposite Catherine O’Hara. With utter sincerity, the duo auditioned in matching tracksuits for a Taster’s Choice commercial performed to the 1973 hit song “Midnight at the Oasis.” It killed. The film became an instant comedy classic and earned Willard an American Comedy Award nomination and a Screen Actors Guild award nomination.
Around 1965, Willard moved to Chicago to spend a year training with the groundbreaking improv group “The Second City.” Then he returned to New York and co-founded his own troupe, the Ace Trucking Co., which spent years performing on high-profile TV variety shows, opening for Tom Jones in Las Vegas and eventually releasing a comedy album.
Along the way, Willard costarred in an off-Broadway black comedy with a 20-yearold Guest, a connection that would later change the course of his career.
“I knew something was off when Fred started doing lines that weren’t actually in the play to me,” Guest said in a TV interview in 2007. “I didn’t know what to make of it. I said to myself, ‘You’re different.’ ”
But it was Willard’s mastery of the mockumentary, starting with the 1984 film “This Is Spinal Tap,” that first earned him widespread notice. In that film, he played an Air Force officer trying to prove his hipster cred with a series of cringe-worthy jokes. And though it was years before the film reached cult status, Willard had discovered his place.
Willard appeared in higherprofile film roles in “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy” and the 2008 animated film “WALL-E.”