Actor Robert Morse dies at 90
robert Morse died at 90 recently, on april 20. decades before introducing himself to millions as the eccentric, bow-tied, frequently barefoot advertising honcho in
Mad Men, he built a zigzagging, often frustrated career on a particular mad charm entirely his own.
an imp’s imp, Morse was one of the screen’s handful of hallowed, indelible gap-toothed comic personalities (the British actor terry-thomas was another), though he was most at home on stage. six years and an entire cultural epoch separated Morse’s tony award-winning turn as j. pierrepont Finch, the beguilingly inhuman success story driving the 1961 musical How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, and the Broadway show’s film version.
the movie is worth seeing simply because it captures so many elements of the stage success, as well as a time when jokes about secretaries being toys (courtesy of the song “a secretary is not a toy”) weren’t yet out of fashion. even so, in the year of The Graduate and
In the Heat of the Night, How to Succeed already felt like a curio from another era. on the other hand, the movie has Morse and rudy Vallée and Michele lee and Maureen arthur and Bob Fosse’s original choreography.
and this is why film history will forever be a complicated matter of loving some things about a film and wrestling with others.
By 1967, Morse had parlayed his stage triumph into a film career in a variety of comedies
(Quick, Before It Melts, the los angeles skewering The Loved One). But as early as 1965, Morse told one reporter, “the parts i could play, they give to jack lemmon.” he was a lot on camera. a lot. on stage, too. the theater’s dimensions accommodated his squirrelly energy more comfortably, though audiences grew to know him primarily through television.
Morse’s private demons, depression, alcohol and drugs among them, made things unpredictable and difficult. Much later, he originated roles in two big stage musical projects – the Wizard of oz in Wicked, in tryouts, and Cap’n andy in the toronto launch of harold prince’s epic Show Boat
revival – but did not continue in the roles for long.
But near the end, along came a wonderful, prolonged valediction. Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner cast Morse as Bertram Cooper, Mr. Big in Mad Men, a role consciously evoking fond memories of how he’d succeeded in How to Succeed.
We first encounter our stars when fate decrees it. i was age 10 or 11 when the film version of How to Succeed premiered on prime-time tV. i was sold by the 45-second mark, with the cartoon sun rising on Mad Menera Manhattan, backed by nelson riddle’s arrangement of the Frank loesser hit “i Believe in you.” the fairy tale, with its baked in adolescent-male wish fulfillment, had everything i wanted. Morse, mugging ferociously before a gobsmacked, too-close camera, was a perfect Machiavellian role model: insanely lucky in work and, though Finch doesn’t care about anything other than work, love.
reviewing the Broadway original, critic howard taubman described Morse’s portrayal as that of “a rumbled, dimpled angel with a streak of lucifer.”
Boy-men, however, have a hell of a hard time aging into a more seasoned, mature version of themselves, especially in hollywood. this was the marvel of Morse on Mad Men:
By 2007 – he taped his final episode in 2015 – he’d settled into a new and pleasingly mellow final-act phase, both ageless (he still had that gaptoothed smile and unpredictable timing) and eternally boyish. Mad Men gave the old pro the best kind of curtain call: after the character’s death, he reappeared to jon hamm in a vision, singing and dancing to “the Best things in life are Free,” a song from the 1927 Broadway musical Good News.
Was Morse’s long-running success in How to Succeed a curse as well as a blessing? probably. But some actors are so magically right for some roles, the casting is more than luck or fate. the role is a magnet, and the performer cannot resist the pull. in the whole of his career, Morse showed the world how to play a fabulously sly manipulator in more than one key. he won his second tony award as truman Capote in Tru.
unlike his tonys, however, the hearts and laughs and, now, the tears of what we remember of the actor’s work cannot accurately be counted. (Chicago tribune/tns)*