‘Eight is Enough’ TV dad Dick Van Patten
Dick Van Patten, a onetime juvenile star of Broadway, radio and TV who played the genteel patriarch on the hit 1970s comedy-drama “Eight Is Enough” and proved his versatility in Walt Disney fare and Mel Brooks parodies, died Tuesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 86.
The cause was complications from diabetes, said a family friend, Daniel Bernstein.
Billed as Dickie Van Patten for much of his youth and adolescence, he appeared on hundreds of radio shows and in such notable Broadway productions as “The Skin of Our Teeth” (1942), Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning allegorical drama about human folly.
As a child, he developed a precocious interest in horse-track betting, which endeared him to his famously world-weary “Skin” co-star, Tallulah Bankhead. “Miss Bankhead said I was the only child actor she liked because I could read the Racing Form,” he quipped.
Mr. Van Patten moved into television work during its infancy. He was a featured performer as the brother Nels on the warmhearted series “Mama” from 1949 to 1956, about a Norwegian-American family in San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century; the show had earlier been a hit play and film under the title “I Remember Mama.”
Future movie stars Paul Newman and Jack Lemmon appeared on the show as friends of Nels, and during a brief Army stint, Van Patten was briefly replaced in his role by the unknown but determined James Dean.
Neither a heartthrob nor a conveying threat, Van Patten became a journeyman TV performer, a familiar round face with piercing blue eyes and a balding pate.
“I wasn’t worried about unemployment,” Van Patten told The Washington Post in 1977. “I was getting tired of failure.”
He came into his own as a television star on “Eight is Enough,” which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1981 and was based on a book by syndicated newspaper columnist Tom Braden about raising eight independentminded children.
As a character named Tom Bradford, Van Patten played an understanding father who endures widowhood and remarriage as well as the major life developments and crises of his sprawling brood.
It was a choice part, which Van Patten said he got only because future network President Fred Silverman grew up “idolizing” him on “Mama.”
“The writers didn’t want me,” he told the Boston Globe. “The production company didn’t want me. For three days, they shot the pilot with another actor in the part. Silverman saw the tapes. ‘Scrap them!’ he said. ‘Either use Van Patten or the pilot is a no-go!’ He insisted on having me. He said I was neither too goody-goody, nor too heavy. He used his power on my behalf. Lucky, lucky, lucky.”
Richard Vincent Van Patten was born in the New York City borough of Queens on Dec. 9, 1928. He began working onstage at 7, and a younger sister, Joyce, followed, pushed by a “stage mother.”
“That aggressiveness broke up my parents’ marriage. They were divorced when I was 14. She was obsessed with my becoming an actor,” he told the Globe. “I remember how my mom would take me on the subway from Queens to Broadway. We’d go to the offices of casting agents. Many doors were slammed in our faces. I was just a boy, but I remember that well.”
He never went to high school, instead attending a professional children’s school for many of his formative years. It was there that he met his future wife, Patricia Poole, who became a dancer with the June Taylor troupe. They married in 1954.
Besides his wife and sister, survivors include three sons: actors Nels Van Patten, James Van Patten and Vincent Van Patten, who was a former world-ranked tennis pro; a half-brother, Tim Van Patten, a noted television director; and several grandchildren.
For Disney, Van Patten appeared opposite Dean Jones, Kurt Russell and Jodie Foster in movies such as “Superdad” (1973), “The Strongest Man in the World” (1975), “The Shaggy D.A.” (1976) and “Freaky Friday” (1976). Meanwhile, he proved a game farceur in Mel Brooks’ Hitchcock satire “High Anxiety” as well as “Spaceballs” (1987) and “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” (1993).