The Scotsman

ON COMEDY

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Joseph Bologna, actor. Born: 30 December 1934 in Brooklyn, New York City. Died: 13 August 2017, in Duarte, California

Joseph Bologna, who looked like the quintessen­tial tough guy but couldn’t seem to resist writing and playing sensitive male characters who longed for love and commitment in films like Lovers and Other Strangers and Made for Each Other, died on Sunday in Duarte, California. He was 82.

His death was confirmed by his publicist, Dick Guttman. Bologna learned he had pancreatic cancer three years ago.

Bologna’s fame, like his onscreen persona, had its roots on the Broadway stage. He was 34 when Lovers and Other Strangers, four short plays about couples of various ages and situations that he wrote with his wife, Renée Taylor, opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. Clive Barnes of The New York Times praised it as a “sprightly quartet of revue-style playlets,” written with “compassion, insight and irony”.

The production, in which Taylor starred, ran for just two months, but Bologna and Taylor sold the film rights. Lovers and Other Strangers the movie (1970) was a box-office hit, earning roughly three times its production cost in North America alone and garnering the couple a shared Oscar nomination (with a co-writer, David Zelag Goodman) for best adapted screenplay.

That bought the Bolognatay­lor team major credibilit­y, which they turned into their next film, Made for Each Other (1971), a satire based on their own love story. Bologna made his screen debut, starring opposite his wife as an Italian-american bachelor who meets a neurotic Jewish actress in an encounter group and does psychologi­cal battle with self-esteem issues and a fear of intimacy.

“It’s a deep, loving character study and manages to make us laugh while demonstrat­ing how much the truth can hurt,” Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-times.

As soon as Hollywood casting directors met Bologna, they saw him as a gangster. He was cast as the mobster Joe Bonanno in the TV movie Honor Thy Father and as a police officer turned thief in Cops and Robbers (1973).

He combined comedy and 0 The Dalai Lama gave a special marriage blessing in the Tibetan Buddhist rite to Joseph Bologna and Renee Taylor in 1989 the tough-guy personalit­y, and received the best reviews of his career, in My Favorite Year (1982), as King Kaiser, a tyrannical 1950s TV varietysho­w host modeled on Sid Caesar. Kaiser may have been a law-abiding citizen, but his ego was criminal.

The typecastin­g took only partial hold, as Bologna made a film career in varied comedy roles. In Blame It on Rio (1984) he starred as a middleaged adulterer whose teenage daughter had an affair with his best friend, played by Michael Caine. He was a mad scientist in Transylvan­ia 6-5000 (1985) and Adam Sandler’s father in Big Daddy (1999). He and Taylor continued to make films together, including Love Is All There Is (1996), a Romeo and Juliet story about dueling catering families.

In 2001, Bologna and Taylor – in their 60s – wrote and starred in If You Ever Leave Me … I’m Going With You!, a Broadway show that consisted largely of anecdotes about their marriage. It closed after eight weeks, but they publicised it beforehand by interviewi­ngeachothe­rforthenew York Times. Asked how he felt about working with his wife so often, Bologna declared the arrangemen­t “very practical”.

“I can have an affair with my director, writer and co-star at the same time,” he said. “That saves a lot of wear and tear at my age.”

Joseph T Bologna was born on 30 December 1934, in Brooklyn, the son of Peter and Antonett Bologna.

“You have to have surprise and inevitabil­ity at the same time. That’s what makes you laugh”

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