Bob Dorian — host for historic movies on AMC
Bob Dorian, who displayed his lifelong zest for old Hollywood films as the easygoing primetime host of the American Movie Classics cable channel for nearly two decades, died June 15. He was 85.
His daughter Melissa Parish confirmed the death but did not specify the cause or say where he died. He had been living in Palm Coast, Fla.
Dorian was the undisputed star of AMC from 1984 to around 2000, before the channel changed its focus to original series like “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.” He preceded by a decade the arrival of Robert Osborne as the popular host at rival channel Turner Classic Movies. Osborne died in 2017.
Working from a cozy set with a smattering of Hollywood trinkets, Dorian introduced films from the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, offering anecdotes of revered classics, Bmovies and serials.
He told stories — how director Frank Capra had pitched James Stewart on starring in “It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946), the trouble Orson Welles had wearing the peg leg he used when he portrayed Long John Silver in “Treasure Island” (1972).
Dorian was more a wellinformed fan than a movie historian.
“The reason they hired me,” he told The Washington Post in 1998, “is there aren’t too many films that I don’t like. I can say something good about most of them.”
Dorian was an actor and magician whose role as Dracula in a commercial for a video game in the early 1980s led to the AMC job. The producer of the commercial, who had moved on to AMC, suggested that Dorian audition for the host job.
“I never realized it was going to last 10 years,” he told The HeraldNews of New Jersey in 1994.
“He was unequivocally the face of AMC,” Joshua Sapan, president and chief executive of AMC Networks, said in a phone interview.
Robert Paul Vierengel (he changed his name professionally in the 1950s) was born April 19, 1934, in Manhattan and raised in Brooklyn at a time when movie fans flocked to ornate cinema palaces. He went as frequently as he could, starting at age 7 or 8, often staying all day for as little as a dime.
“When I was 9, I went for my first suit,” he recalled in a 1995 interview with The Baltimore Sun. “I wanted a black suit, and my father said, ‘Why do you want a black suit?’ I said, ‘It looks like a tuxedo; I’ll look like Fred Astaire.’ ”
As a teen he worked as a theater usher. That allowed him to see “Cyrano de Bergerac” (1950), starring José Ferrer, 86 times by his count.
He was a magician, a bass player, a disc jockey on radio stations in the New York City area and an actor who did commercial voiceovers.
In his years at AMC, he came to understand the part he played in reviving movies had made a cultural impact.
“I think I made some sort of contribution, in a small way, to society,” he told The HeraldNews.
Dorian continued acting while working at AMC. His credits included a role in several episodes of “Remember WENN,” the network’s first original scripted series, about a radio station in Pittsburgh in the 1930s, and both Uncle Henry and the Winkie general in a production of “The Wizard of Oz” at the Theater at Madison Square Garden in 1998.
After leaving AMC, Dorian acted in the Woody Allen films “The Curse of the Jade Scorpion” (2001) and “Hollywood Ending” (2002). He also appeared in regional theater productions.