Buck Henry
Actor and writer acclaimed for his work on The Graduate
BUCK HENRY, who has died aged 89, was a performer, screenwriter and director who burst out of the American counterculture to generate many of screen comedy’s most memorable characters, scenes and lines.
His break came working alongside Mel Brooks on the long-running television spy spoof Get Smart (1965-70), but it was Henry’s work on The Graduate (1967) that would position him close to the heart of the iconoclastic “New Hollywood”.
Henry was the fourth writer hired to adapt Charles Webb’s novel, but the first to grasp the director Mike Nichols’s aims. It was Henry who added the discussion between Ben Braddock and a pompous family friend (“Just one word … plastics”); he also engineered the bittersweet ending, delaying Ben’s arrival at the church until after Elaine has married another man (in Webb’s book, he arrives just in time).
Henry and his co-writer Calder Willingham won the Best Screenplay Bafta and gained an Oscar nomination, losing out to In the Heat of the Night. Nevertheless, Henry’s close association with the film (he even wrote himself a cameo as the owlish hotel clerk making Dustin Hoffman squirm) launched him to prominence as both a writer and performer.
In the former capacity, he made a slightly underrated stab of adapting Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1970), again for Nichols; handed Barbra Streisand and George Segal snappy lines for The Owl and the Pussycat (1970); and contributed the polish that gave Peter Bogdanovich’s What’s Up, Doc? (1972) its sparkle.
As a performer, he was the prematurely middleaged hero of Milos Forman’s Taking Off (1971), conspired with David Bowie as the patent attorney Farnsworth in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), and hosted the new Saturday Night Live 10 times in its first five years.
He rounded off the decade as a writer-director, with Warren Beatty, on the fantasy Heaven Can Wait (1978). Yet by the time of his last directorial credit, First Family (1980), Hollywood was pivoting away from irreverence.
He was born Henry Zuckerman on December 9 1930 to the former silent screen actress Ruth Taylor and Paul Zuckerman, an Air Force general turned Wall Street stockbroker. A creative child, Henry joined the ensemble of Life with Father on Broadway aged 16, before touring Germany with the Seventh Army Repertory Company.
At Dartmouth, where he studied English Literature, he cut an eccentric figure, wearing his pyjamas at all times.
After graduation, Henry won a measure of notoriety as a hoaxer, appearing on several television shows in the guise of G Clifford Prout, president of the Society for Indecency in Naked Animals, trumpeting the slogan “A nude horse is a rude horse”. Surprisingly, he was taken at face value by several media figures and some viewers, who began sending in donations to the SINA cause.
In 1960, just before his move to Los Angeles, Henry set up the off-broadway improv group The Premise: “If you’re up onstage every night for a year … with the audience yelling suggestions at you like: ‘Do Chekhov, but do it with Chinese characters’, you get used to an immediate commitment to lunatic ideas.”
Later he enjoyed a renaissance as a character actor in such cultish titles as Eating Raoul (1982) and Albert Brooks’s Defending Your Life (1991). He appeared as himself in Robert Altman’s Hollywood satire The Player (1992), pitching a Graduate sequel in which Ben and Elaine are forced to cohabit with an ailing Mrs Robinson.
He wrote the black comedy To Die For (1995), and was recruited by the news spoof The Daily Show (2007) to serve as their “Senior Historical Perspectivist” in a segment titled “The Henry Stops Here”.
He is survived by his wife Irene, and by a daughter from an earlier relationship.
Buck Henry, born December 9 1930, died January 8 2020