Joseph Bologna
Actor who established a comedy partnership with his wife
JOSEPH BOLOGNA, the American character, actor who has died aged 82, was best known for his role as Stan “King” Kaiser in the 1982 comedy, My Favorite Year; he was also half, with his wife, the actress Renée Taylor, of one of the most enduring professional and romantic partnerships in showbusiness.
As King Kaiser, Bologna played a tyrannical 1950s television variety-show host with maniacal tendencies, modelled on Sid Caesar, the compère of Your Show of Shows. The film also starred Peter O’toole as an alcoholic former matinee idol due to appear on the show.
Bologna’s other film roles included the middle-aged adulterer whose teenage daughter has an affair with his best friend, played by Michael Caine, in Blame It on Rio (1984), a mad scientist in Transylvania 6-5000 (1985) and Adam Sandler’s father in Big Daddy (1999).
Bologna met Renée Taylor in the early 1960s while moonlighting from his job in an advertising agency as a joke writer for comedians. “We spent most of our courting in Sardi’s,’’ he recalled. “I don’t think I made her laugh on our first date. I made her cry. I brought her cannoli. ‘Other guys bring roses,’ I told her. ‘Italians bring you pastry.’”
They stayed up all night talking. “I was, what, 27, 28? That had never happened to me,” Bologna recalled. “I was like a virgin having sex for the first time. I could talk to this woman. I mean, really talk.”
The couple celebrated their marriage in 1965 on the Merv Griffin Show, on which Renée Taylor had often been a guest, in a ceremony attended by the bridegroom’s rowdy Italian-american family and Renée Taylor’s more reserved Jewish clan. Over the years they would frequently renew their vows on television, each time observing a marriage ceremony from a different culture to mark the occasion.
Over more than 40 years the culture clash at the heart of their relationship provided material for some 22 romantic comedies, which they co-wrote and in which they often co-starred.
They earned an Oscar nomination in 1971 for the screenplay adaptation of their hit 1968 Broadway show, Lovers and Other Strangers (the film version featuring the screen debut of Diane Keaton), and won an Emmy for their television special Acts of Love and Other Comedies (1973). They wrote and starred together in the 1971 film Made for Each Other (1971), a comedy about a couple who meet at a group-therapy session. “I’m an Italian guy from Brooklyn,” Bologna’s character notes. “We grew up repressing our subdominant feminine side.”
Their other film scripts included Love Is All There Is (1996), in which Angelina Jolie made an early appearance, and stage plays included the 1996 comedy Bermuda Avenue Triangle and If You Ever Leave Me … I’m Going With You! an affectionate look at their marriage which enjoyed a brief run on Broadway in 2001.
Asked in 1984 to explain the secret of their relationship, Bologna joked, “I was a hedonist, and she was a sufferer. I taught her pleasure, and she taught me to suffer.’’
Joseph Bologna was born on December 30 1934 in Brooklyn, New York. Both his father and grandfather worked as shoeshine boys, his grandfather, Giuseppe, publishing a memoir, At the Feet of the Mighty: A Bootblack’s Biography, in the 1930s.
After taking a degree in Art History at Brown University, Joseph served in the Marines, then found a job at a New York advertising agency, working his way up to direct television commercials.
In February this year he was given a lifetime achievement award at the Night of 100 Stars for the Actors’ Fund of America.
He died two days after his 52nd wedding anniversary and is survived by his wife and son.