Word: grizzard
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...best ones make it look easy. Acting is a business of a thousand tiny judgments and intuitions, all to make the craft disappear and the character materialize. George Grizzard, who died this week at a much-too-young 79, had that gift. Of course he was Nick in the original production of Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Of course he was John Adams in the PBS miniseries The Adams Chronicles. When he played any number of brash young men in TV anthology series, he was those men, as just as easily, or magically, the flinty gents...
...have known who George Grizzard was; renown on the stage (he won a Tony for Best Actor in A Delicate Balance) doesn't translate to mass fame as it once did. But whether you saw him as an oilman in Comes a Horseman with Jane Fonda, as an imperious lawyer on Law and Order or the ghost of Rue McClanahan's husband (a recurring role!) on The Golden Girls, you knew that that actor was those people. As Andre Bishop told the Los Angeles Times, "What was remarkable about his acting was he didn't seem to be acting...
...fellow thugs was the young Paul Newman, who told the Times this week, "When we were on the stage together, he was the best thing around.") He lightened up in his next play, The Happiest Millionaire, then played opposite the luminous Rosemary Harris in The Disenchanted. (Grizzard and Harris would team again in the '0s, for a revival of The Royal Family, and in the '90s for A Delicate Balance.) In all he graced 21 Broadway plays over 51 years, his reputation escalating until he was one of the few acting eminences around whom a producer could build an important...
...Senator, trying to blackmail a colleague for an early brush with homosexuality. In my innocent appreciation, I didn't think he was good at playing bad guys; I thought he was a bad guy. Maybe that's why I also assumed that his surname rhymed with lizard. (It's GrizZARD.) Later, catching up with his early work, I wondered if studio casting directors were as naive as I was - if they saw some steely sang-froid in his playing of these roles that persuaded them he was too chilly a presence for Hollywood stardom...
...familiar face to contemporary audiences from his roles on TV (Law & Order) and in film (Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks), but the critically acclaimed actor George Grizzard made his name onstage with complex, emotionally demanding roles in plays by Neil Simon, Clifford Odets and, most famously, Edward Albee. As the assaulted Nick in the original 1962 production of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Grizzard, wrote a critic, "shifted from geniality to intensity with shattering rightness." Fittingly, when he took home the Best Actor Tony in 1996, it was for his insightful portrayal of patriarch Tobias...