Scolari, “Bosom Buddies” and “Newhart” actor
Peter Scolari, a familiar face on “Bosom Buddies,” “Newhart,” “Girls” and other television shows, and in Broadway, offbroadway and regional theater productions, died Friday in the New York borough of Manhattan. He was 66.
His management company, Wright Entertainment, said the cause was cancer.
Scolari had done some stage work but was easing into television when he was cast alongside Tom Hanks in 1980 as one of the two principal characters on “Bosom Buddies,” an ABC comedy about two men who pretend to be women so they can live in a low-cost, all-female apartment complex. The show, Hanks’ first prominent assignment, lasted only 37 episodes, but it has gained a sort of kitschy cachet over the years thanks to some witty touches in the scripts and the subsequent careers of the two stars.
“A lot of television was about bosoms in 1980, when ‘Buddies’ began its two-year run,” Susan Stewart wrote in The New York Times in 2007, assessing a DVD release. “‘Three’s Company’ was 3 years old; ‘Charlie’s Angels’ was flying high. Compared to those exemplars of ‘jiggle TV,’ ‘Buddies’ was practically the Algonquin Round Table.”
Perhaps Scolari’s best-known role came soon after, when he was cast in “Newhart,” on which Bob Newhart played an innkeeper in Vermont who has a local TV show. Scolari, who became a regular in the show’s second season, played his producer. Scolari ultimately appeared in more than 140 of the show’s 184 episodes, earning three Emmy nominations for best supporting actor in a comedy.
More than 20 years after “Newhart” went off the air in 1990, Scolari became familiar to a different generation through a recurring role on the HBO series “Girls,” playing the father of the character portrayed by Lena Dunham, the show’s star and creator. He won an Emmy for the role in 2016.
Among the other actors nominated in his category — outstanding guest actor in a comedy series — was Newhart (for “The Big Bang Theory”).
From 1997 to 2000, Scolari also played the father on a television series based on the family movie “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.”
“When people say, ‘I know you; what have I seen you in?,’ I respond, ‘Well, it depends on how old you are,’” Scolari told The Kansas City Star in 2019.
Scolari’s stage work over the years included two Broadway plays in which he portrayed sports figures. In “Magic/bird” (2012), about basketball stars Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, he played several characters, including coaches Pat Riley and Red Auerbach and team owner Jerry Buss.
Two years later, he played New York Yankees star Yogi Berra in “Bronx Bombers,” a role that required him to spout Yogi-isms.
In 2013, between the two sports plays, he made another Broadway appearance in the Nora Ephron play “Lucky Guy.” The role garnered particular attention because it reunited him with Hanks, who, in his Broadway debut, played the lead role, newspaper columnist Mike Mcalary. Scolari played another columnist, Michael Daly.
It wasn’t the first time they had worked together since “Bosom Buddies.” Scolari, for instance, was in the 1996 movie “That Thing You Do!” alongside Hanks, who also wrote and directed the film. And both men provided voices in the 2004 film “The Polar Express.”
In a joint interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2010, the two talked about their long friendship and their early days cross-dressing on “Bosom Buddies.”
“We really took a beating in the press, got hammered for it the first few weeks,” Scolari said. “But when Dustin Hoffman comes out with ‘Tootsie’” — the 1982 film — “everyone goes, ‘Ooooh, masterpiece.’ ”
Peter Scolari was born Sept. 12, 1955, in New Rochelle, N.Y. He became interested in acting while in high school; as a junior, he played the lead in “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” His father, a lawyer, invited a friend who was an entertainment lawyer to the show.
“He was going to give my father the lowdown about whether I was wasting my time,” Scolari told Gannett News Service in 1987. “And the lawyer said, ‘No, he’s great. He’s going to be wonderful.’ ”