Buck Henry

Screenwriter

BUCK HENRY, who has died at 89, was an icon of American comedy, having co-written The Graduate and a raft of other classics. He also carved a niche for himself as a wit and frequent host of Saturday Night Live.

His credits included the 1960s sitcom Get Smart, which he created with Mel Brooks; the Mike Nichols film adaptation of Catch-22; Barbra Streisand’s The Owl and the Pussycat and What’s Up, Doc; and the Nicole Kidman vehicle, To Die For.

With Warren Beatty, he codirected and appeared in the 1978 remake of Heaven Can Wait. The film earned nine Oscar nominations, including one for Henry and Beatty as best directors.

But it was The Graduate that cemented Henry’s reputation.

It made a star of Dustin Hoffman, who played a young man involved in an affair with Mrs Robinson, one of his parents’ friends (played by Mel Brooks’ wife, Anne Bancroft). Henry created a role for himself as a hotel clerk.

For decades afterwards, Henry was plagued by people asking him if there would be a sequel. He tried to stop the talk by improvising a scene in Robert Altman’s 1992 Hollywood satire, The Player, in which he plays himself trying to pitch The Graduate, Part II, even though Mrs Robinson has had a stroke.

Born in New York, in December, 1930, Buck Henry Zuckerman was the son of actress Ruth Taylor, a Mack Sennett performer who starred in the silent film version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. His father, Paul Zuckerman, was a stockbroker and retired Air Force general. Henry divided his

boyhood between Hollywood and New York, listening to the sophisticated chatter of his mother’s friends and co-workers.

“I saw how silly and funny and trivial these stars could be,” he said in 1997. “But I also remember thinking ‘Gee, this would be a good way to live’. These people are not responsible for anything except their own talents and their own vices.”

He came to attention in the 1950s when he and a friend launched a Society for Indecency to Naked Animals, a satire on puritanism.

On the back of that stunt, Henry began selling jokes to Steve Allen, Garry Moore and other American TV hosts of the time. His breakthrough came when he and Brooks wrote the TV pilot for Get Smart, as a satire on the James Bond franchise. It was popular on both sides of the Atlantic from 1965 to 1970.

His later work included playing Tina Fey’s father in her sitcom, 30 Rock.

Henry is survived by his wife, Irene Ramp, and by a daughter.