Actor David Schramm of TV’s ‘Wings’ dies
David Schramm, an acclaimed stage and television actor best known for his role as the irascible owner of a small airline on the long-running sitcom “Wings” in the 1990s, has died. He was 73.
Margot Harley, a founder of the Acting Company, where Schramm was an original member, announced his death Sunday. She did not give a cause or say where and when he died.
Though well-known from his signature television role, Schramm was first and foremost a stage actor. He was drawing attention in New York while still a student at the Juilliard School, where he was a member of the first graduating class of the drama division.
That division was created in 1968 under John Houseman, and its first class of students, graduating in 1972, also included Kevin Kline, Patti LuPone and David Ogden Stiers.
The students’ work was so well-received that Houseman and Harley, the drama division’s administrative director, formed the Acting Company, a professional troupe, in 1972, with the new graduates at its core. By 1973 the company was on Broadway with five plays in repertory, Schramm appearing in all of them.
He was often, as Mel Gussow put it in The New York Times in 1978, “the company’s resident old character man.” That year, at age 30, he was playing King Lear. Previously for the company, he had played an aging wanderer in Maxim Gorky’s “The Lower Depths,” the philosophical old doctor Chebutykin in Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” and the father of one of the young lovers in Molière’s “Scapin.” After five years with the Acting Company, Schramm became a regular on regional stages as well as in New York. A turning point in his career came in 1988, when he played the male lead in the Garson Kanin comedy “Born Yesterday” opposite Rebecca de Mornay at the Pasadena Playhouse in California. The production drew rave reviews.
“His portrayal is a true heir to Jackie Gleason: loud, blustery, swift, an ungrammatical ball of suet, as unaware of his arrogance as of his limitations,” Sylvie Drake wrote in a review in The Los Angeles Times.
The television industry took note.
“Because of those reviews, I landed in every casting office in town,” Schramm told that newspaper in 1989.
And then, in 1990, came “Wings.” Schramm was cast as Roy Biggins, whose tiny airline shared a terminal on Nantucket Island in Massachusetts with one owned by two brothers, played by Tim Daly and Steven Weber.
On Twitter, Weber remembered the skill that Schramm had brought to the role.
“His timing was never less than perfect,” Weber said, “his professionalism was always on display.”
David Schramm was born Aug. 14, 1946, in Louisville, Kentucky. In school he won trophies for public speaking, and at 17 he was an apprentice at the Actors Theater of Louisville.