Mexican comic actor with iconic show

Roberto Gomez Bolanos, a Mexican comic actor, writer and director familiar around the world for his iconic characters El Chavo and El Chapulin Colorado, died Friday in Cancun, according to the Mexican television network Televisa.

He was 85. No cause of death was immediately announced by the network.

Bolanos — known by his nickname “Chespirito,” or “Little Shakespeare” — was on Mexican television for more than 40 years. His situation comedy El Chavo del Ocho (The Boy from No.8) was first produced by Televisa in 1971 and remains one of the network’s most famous and lucrative franchises.

Bolanos was born Feb. 21, 1929, in Mexico City. His father, Francisco Gomez Linares, was a noted painter and illustrator.

Bolanos started writing when he was 22, and by the late 1950s, he had begun contributing to the highest-rated television shows in Mexico.

By 1970, Bolanos was acting and directing in his own sketch comedy hour with his character El Chapulin Colorado, or the Crimson Grasshopper. Bolanos played a cocky but dimwitted superhero who always caught the bad guys through sheer luck.

El Chavo del Ocho appeared in 1971. Bolanos played a freckled 8-year-old orphan who lived in a barrel and was constantly getting into trouble. The show relied heavily on physical comedy, but it also had instructive story lines that touched on friendship, family and class.

El Chavo, which ceased production in 1992, continues to average millions of daily viewers in all of the markets where it is distributed in the Americas, according to a report by Forbes.