‘Sesame Street’ puppeteer Caroll Spinney dies at 85
Caroll Spinney, who gave Big Bird his warmth and Oscar the Grouch his growl for nearly 50 years on “Sesame Street,” died Sunday at 85 at his home in Connecticut, according to the Sesame Workshop.
The legendary puppeteer lived for some time with dystonia, which causes involuntary muscle contractions, the Sesame Workshop said in a statement.
Spinney voiced and operated the two major Muppets from their inception in 1969 when he was 36, and performed them almost exclusively into his 80s on the PBS kids’ television show that later moved to HBO.
His death came on the same day that “Sesame Street” was honored for lifetime achievements in the arts as a Kennedy Center Honors recipient.
“Before I came to ‘Sesame Street,’ I didn’t feel like what I was doing was very important,” Spinney said when he announced his retirement in 2018. “Big Bird helped me find my purpose.”
Through his two characters, Spinney gained huge fame that brought international tours, books, record albums, movie roles, and visits to the White House.
“Caroll was an artistic genius whose kind and loving view of the world helped shape and define Sesame Street from its earliest days in 1969 through five decades, and his legacy here at Sesame Workshop and in the cultural firmament will be unending,” the Sesame Workshop said.
But he never became a household name.
“I may be the most unknown famous person in America,” Spinney said in his 2003 memoir. “It’s the bird that’s famous.”
Spinney gave “Sesame Street” its emotional yin and yang, infusing the 8-foot-2 Big Bird with a childlike sweetness often used to handle sad subjects, and giving the trashcan-dwelling Oscar, whose voice Spinney based on a New York cabbie, a street-wise cynicism that masked a tender core.
To colleagues there was no question which character the kindly Spinney resembled.
“Big Bird is him and he is Big Bird,” former “Sesame Street” head writer Norman Stiles said in a 2014 documentary on Spinney.
Born in 1933 in Waltham Massachusetts, Spinney had a deeply supportive mother who built him a puppet theater after he bought his first puppet, a monkey, at age 8.