well that sucks.
Emmy Winning Actor Jack Warden Dead at 85
By Valerie J. Nelson
Times Staff Writer
3:21 PM PDT, July 21, 2006
Jack Warden, the gravely voiced character actor and two-time Oscar nominee who appeared in almost 100 feature films, has died. He was 85.
Warden, who won an Emmy award for his portrayal of crusty football coach George Halas in the 1971 television movie "Brian's Song," died Wednesday at a New York City hospital, Sidney Pazoff, his Los Angeles-based business manager, said today.
Pazoff said he did not know the exact cause of death but said that Warden, who was living in Manhattan, had been in failing health for several months.
Warden first made his mark in the movies in 1957 as the sports-obsessed juror in "12 Angry Men" and received two Academy Award nominations for his work on two Warren Beatty vehicles, "Shampoo" (1975) and "Heaven Can Wait" (1978).
His small-screen resume was just as deep with featured roles in a dozen series and appearances in about 100 shows and made-for-TV movies that stretched back to television's golden age and included "Mr. Peepers" (1952-55) on NBC, "N.Y.P.D." on ABC (1967-69) and "Crazy Like a Fox" (1984-86) on CBS.
From the moment Warden broke through on Broadway in 1955 in Arthur Miller's "A View From the Bridge," he said he never stopped working.
"I still panic sometimes when it comes down to 20 minutes between jobs," Warden told the Los Angeles Herald Examiner in 1984. "I love what I'm doing."
The gruff yet often engaging characters he became known for playing could have been lifted from his rough-and-tumble early life.
By age 17, the red-headed teen from Newark, N.J. was a ranked professional middleweight boxer who billed himself as Johnny Costello — the last name was his mother's — and reportedly once fought on the same card as another future actor, Charles Durning, in Madison Square Garden.
Warden often said he got kicked out of high school for boxing professionally, so he joined the Navy and patrolled the Yangtze River.
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-072106warden,0,3320805,print.story?coll=la-headlines-entnews
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