Buck Henry, who has died
aged 89, was an idiosyncratic performer, screenwriter and director who burst
out of the American counterculture to generate many of screen comedy’s most
memorable characters, scenes and lines.
His break came working alongside
Mel Brooks on TV’s long-running spy spoof Get Smart (1965-70), but it
was Henry’s work on The Graduate (1967) that would position him close to
the heart of the iconoclastic New Hollywood.
Henry was the fourth
writer hired to adapt Charles Webb’s source novel, but the first to fully synch
with director Mike Nichols’ leftfield sensibility. It was Henry who added the oft-quoted
discussion between dreamy Ben Braddock and a pompous family friend (“Just one
word… plastics”); he also engineered the subversive, bittersweet ending,
delaying Ben’s arrival at the church until after Elaine
had pledged her troth to another man. (In Webb’s book, he arrives just in
time.)
Henry and co-writer
Calder Willingham won the Best Screenplay BAFTA; the pair also gained an Oscar
nomination, but lost out to In the Heat of the Night. Nevertheless, Henry’s
close association with an era-defining film (he even wrote himself a funny
cameo as the owlish hotel clerk making Dustin Hoffman squirm) launched him to
newfound prominence as both a writer and performer.
In the former capacity, he
made a slightly underrated stab of adapting Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1970),
again for Nichols; handed Barbra Streisand and old friend George Segal snappy
lines for The Owl and the Pussycat (1970); and contributed the polish
that gave Peter Bogdanovich’s Streisand-starring screwball homage What’s Up,
Doc? (1972) its enduring sparkle.
As a performer, he was
the prematurely middle-aged hero of Milos Forman’s sleeper hit Taking Off
(1971), conspired with David Bowie as the patent attorney Farnsworth in The
Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), and nurtured an enthusiastic younger
following by hosting the new Saturday Night Live ten times in its first
five years.
He rounded off the decade
as a writer-director, care of a fraught (albeit Oscar-nominated) collaboration
with Warren Beatty on the fantasy Heaven Can Wait (1978). Yet by the
time of his second and last directorial credit, First Family (1980), it
was clear that some creative freedoms were slowly being revoked. The success of
the ultra-merchandisable Star Wars meant Hollywood was pivoting away
from irreverence and towards a vastly more profitable market: plastics.
He was born Henry
Zuckerman on December 9, 1930 to former silent screen actress Ruth Taylor and
Paul Zuckerman, an Air Force general turned Wall Street stockbroker. A creative
child, Henry joined the ensemble of Broadway’s Life with Father at
sixteen, before touring Germany with the Seventh Army Repertory Company. At Dartmouth,
where he studied English literature, he cut an eccentric figure, wearing his
pyjamas at all times.
Upon graduation, Henry
won a measure of notoriety as a hoaxer, appearing on several TV shows in the
guise of G. Clifford Prout, president of the Society for Indecency in Naked
Animals, insisting that all large animals should be clothed and trumpeting the slogan
“A nude horse is a rude horse”. Surprisingly, he was taken at face value by
several media figures (including Walter Cronkite, who never forgave Henry) and
some viewers, who began sending in donations to the SINA cause.
In 1960, just before his
decisive move to L.A., Henry set up the off-Broadway improv group The Premise:
“If you’re up onstage every night for a year… with the audience yelling
suggestions at you like ‘Do Chekhov, but do it with Chinese characters’, you
get used to an immediate commitment to lunatic ideas.”
Once the sun set on New
Hollywood, he enjoyed a renaissance as a character actor in such cultish titles
as Eating Raoul (1982) and Albert Brooks’ Defending Your Life
(1991). He appeared as himself in Robert Altman’s Hollywood satire The
Player (1992), pitching a Graduate sequel in which Ben and Elaine
are forced to cohabit with an ailing Mrs. Robinson, and later reported that an
actual studio executive had approached him with an eye to developing the idea.
He wrote the smart black
comedy To Die For (1995), and appeared on TV’s 30 Rock (2007-10)
as Liz Lemon’s wide-eyed father Dick, before being recruited by news spoof The
Daily Show (2007) to serve as their “Senior Historical Perspectivist” in a
segment titled “The Henry Stops Here”. Asked to justify the title, he insisted
“It’s because my name is Henry, and I’m stopping right here”.
He is survived by his
wife Irene Ramp, and by an unnamed daughter from an earlier relationship.
Buck Henry, born December 9, 1930, died January 8, 2020.
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