Modern Family scene-stealing veteran excelled in film mockumentaries
Fred Willard, who has died aged 86, was a comic actor known for his scenestealing, heavily improvised work with filmmaker Christopher Guest and his Emmy-nominated appearances on the sitcoms Modern Family and Everybody Loves Raymond.
Willard was a master at playing ridiculous, slightly smarmy characters prone to rambling monologues. While other performers made a name for themselves as leading men or character actors, he excelled at playing loudmouths – sometimes for just a few minutes in a single scene – who left audiences howling and cast members breaking character.
‘‘Everyone has a little trapdoor in their mind where you go to say something and then you think no, you shouldn’t say this,’’ he told Entertainment Weekly in 2001. ‘‘I just open that door.’’
Willard worked frequently with Guest, who starred in This Is Spinal Tap (1984), a parody of rock documentaries, and who later assembled a loose repertory group that also included Eugene Levy, Michael McKean, Catherine O’Hara and Parker Posey.
Together, they helped popularise the ‘‘mockumentary’’ genre, examining – and skewering – small-town theatre productions in Waiting for Guffman (1996), dog shows in
Best in Show (2000), folk music in A Mighty
Wind (2003) and the Hollywood awards season
in For Your Consideration (2006). Willard’s crowning achievement was arguably Best in Show, as the dog-show announcer Buck Laughlin, who muses about miniature schnauzers: ‘‘You’d think they’d want to breed ’em bigger, wouldn’t you? Like grapefruits or watermelons.’’
Willard appeared in more than 300 movies and television series, and was a fixture of latenight talk shows hosted by Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel. He was initially known for playing a talk-show host character, Jerry Hubbard – the dimwitted sidekick to Martin Mull’s host Barth Gimble – on
Fernwood 2 Night, a satirical series that premiered in 1977 and became known as
America 2-Night during its second season. ‘‘Jerry’s strength was he would say anything that came to his mind . . . . I’m completely the opposite, I hold things in more,’’ Willard said in a 2012 interview with the Television Academy Foundation. ‘‘If I’m in a group of people I’ll just sit back and observe everyone.’’
He later appeared in comedies including
Fun With Dick and Jane (1977), First Family
(1980), Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged
Me (1999) and Anchorman (2004), as a television executive who is always on the phone addressing his son’s behavioural issues, including holding a marching band hostage and ‘‘firing a bow and arrow into a crowd – you know how kids are’’.
Willard also received three Emmy Award nominations for playing strait-laced father-inlaw Hank MacDougall on the CBS sitcom
Everybody Loves Raymond. In 2010, he received a fourth Emmy nomination, for ABC’s Modern Family as Frank Dunphy, the wisecracking father of Ty Burrell’s Phil Dunphy.
Frederick Charles Willard Jr was born in Cleveland. His father worked in finance and died when Fred was 12; after his mother remarried, he was sent to a military school in Kentucky.
Willard played baseball at the Virginia Military Institute, and turned to acting after serving in the army. Performing in a Tennessee Williams one-act play, he inadvertently made audiences laugh with his line deliveries.
Willard also maintained a lasting creative partnership with Mull, appearing with the actor in the documentary parody The History
of White People in America (1985) and partnering with him to play one of TV’s first openly gay couples on the sitcom Roseanne.
In 2012, he made headlines after being arrested for lewd conduct at an adult movie theatre in Hollywood. He denied doing anything wrong and avoided a trial after completing a diversion programme for minor sexual offences. Joking with late-night host Jimmy Fallon after his arrest, he said, ‘‘It’s the last time I’m going to listen to my wife when she says, ‘Why don’t you go out and see a movie?’ ’’
His wife of 50 years, the former Mary Lovell, died in 2018. Survivors include his daughter, Hope Mulbarger, and a grandson.
Willard’s early work included a starring role in the TV movie Space Force (1978), which he spoofed on Kimmel’s late-night show after President Donald Trump announced the creation of a space-warfare branch of the military. A Netflix series of the same name is slated to premiere later this month, with Willard playing the father of Steve Carell.
‘‘If I have to play an obnoxious character, [I] try to find a redeeming feature of him. The most obnoxious people in the world were people and they had had a reason for doing what they did,’’ he told a public-television interviewer in 2012. He added, ‘‘I love to play the character who has no cares, oblivious to everything. It’s a kind of a release. It’s the kind of character I would love to be.’’ –