Gone With or Without fanfare

[Rita Hayworth]

Thank you very much for this timely update Moira ...

[sandykaypax]

Yes, thank you! Going to set the dvr for some of these.

Sandy K

[Vecchiolarry]

Hi,

Harry Lewis, the man who started "Hamburger Hamlet" in Hollywood has died. He was 93.

Harry was a minor actor in some films and started the restaurant on Sunset Blvd. with his new wife (I think in the early 50's).... Laughingly, he discovered that she couldn't cook and so he did all the cooking.
Their burgers were great and they did expand to several more establishments.

Hope he gets a cloud up there with red leather seats!!!

R.I.P. dear Harry - - I miss your burgers...

Larry

[Western Guy]

Here's a neat link to Harry Lewis:

http://blog.aarp.org/2013/06/11/harry-l ... ermeister/

[Nick]

Hey! Some of the deaths in 2013 have been forgotten/overlooked in this thread. So I'm gonna provide those names, one at a time. First off is dancer Matt Mattox.
Here's what the New York Times had to say about him, in 24 February 2013.

Matt Mattox, Jazz Dance Pioneer, Dies at 91

Matt Mattox, a dancer, choreographer and teacher who helped shape contemporary jazz dance in the United States and Europe, died in France on Feb. 18. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by Bob Boross, a former student.

Mr. Mattox, who had made his home in France for many years, had a prominent career dancing in films and on Broadway in the 1940s and afterward. Though he was not as well known as some of the celebrated Hollywood dancers of his era, he was by all accounts every bit their peer.

“He was one of the greatest male dancers that ever was on a performing stage,” Jacques d’Amboise, the distinguished dancer and choreographer, said in a telephone interview. “He’s equal to Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.”

As a dancer, Mr. Mattox was celebrated for his “ballpoint ease, pinpoint precision, and catlike agility,” as Dance magazine wrote in 2007. He was perhaps best known to moviegoers as the young, bearded Caleb Pontipee, one of the marriageable frontiersmen at the heart of the 1954 film “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” directed by Stanley Donen and choreographed by Michael Kidd.

In the movie, whose featured dancers also included Russ Tamblyn, Tommy Rall and Mr. d’Amboise, Mr. Mattox performs a dazzling series of leaps and splits above a sawhorse.

On Broadway, Mr. Mattox danced in “Once Upon a Mattress” (1959), in which he created the role of the Jester; and in the 1957 revival of “Brigadoon,” in which he played Harry Beaton.

Jazz dance entails far more than simply dancing to jazz: the genre has its own aesthetic traditions and its own kinetic vocabulary. Building on the work of his mentor, the prominent choreographer and teacher Jack Cole, Mr. Mattox is widely acknowledged as having been a primary shaper of those traditions in the mid-20th century and afterward.

Before that time, what passed for jazz dance was generally indistinguishable from garden-variety, high-energy Broadway hoofing. Mr. Mattox helped conceive a genre that was subtler, more rhythmically complex and far more eclectic, as well-suited for the concert hall as the theatrical stage.

Combining his own extensive training in ballet with tap dance, modern dance and folkloric dance traditions from around the world, he created a new, fluidly integrated art form he liked to call “freestyle dance.” ”

“That elegance of ballet was there, but still, the energy and the shape of the inner body was from jazz,” said Mr. Boross, an assistant professor of dance at Radford University in Virginia.

From the mid-1950s on, Mr. Mattox taught this personal brand of dance to generations of pupils, first in New York and later in Europe.

In both places, students from around the world flocked to study with him; over the years, they included the noted choreographer and theater director Graciela Daniele, and a young woman — about to sing an audition for her first Broadway show and anxious to learn a dance to go with it — named Barbra Streisand. (The show was “I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” and Ms. Streisand got the part.)

Harold Mattox, known as Matt, was born in 1921 in Tulsa, Okla., and moved with his family to Los Angeles when he was about 11. There, he began instruction in ballet, tap and ballroom dance, working with Mr. Cole and others. As a young man, he interrupted his studies for service as a fighter pilot with the Army Air Forces in World War II.

One of Mr. Mattox’s dance teachers, Nico Charisse, had a wife, Cyd, who was a pretty fair dancer herself, and through her connections Mr. Mattox got his start in movies, appearing in films including “Yolanda and the Thief” (1945), “Till the Clouds Roll By” (1946), “Guys and Dolls” (1955) and “Song of Norway” (1970).

On television, Mr. Mattox danced and choreographed for “The Bell Telephone Hour,” broadcast on NBC starting in 1959. He also choreographed the Broadway musical “Jennie,” starring Mary Martin, which opened in 1963; and a Metropolitan Opera “Aida” in 1959.

In the early 1970s, Mr. Mattox moved to London, where he started his own dance company, JazzArt, taking it with him when he moved to Paris in the mid-’70s. Since the early 1980s, he had lived in Perpignan, in the South of France.

Mr. Mattox was married several times. His survivors include his wife, Martine Limeul Mattox; three sons, Matthew, Christopher and Timothy; and grandchildren. Information on other survivors could not be confirmed.

In an interview with Dance magazine in 2003, Mr. Mattox explained the genesis, at midcentury, of his singular style:

“I went home, I sat down, and I drew one line on a blank piece of paper,” he said. “The body is a straight line and you can do everything with it. Then, there was a Life magazine photographer who was experimenting in the early 1950s by shooting a man holding two lamps, which he moved against a black background. When the photo was developed, all you saw were these curving lines of light. And I thought, ‘That’s the way the body should move.’ ”

[sandykaypax]

Thanks for posting that article on Matt Mattox. I didn't realize that he had originated the roles of The Jester and Harry Beaton on Broadway. Once Upon a Mattress is one of my favorite musicals.

Sandy K

[Nick]

No problem, Sandy. Now there's only one original cast member left from Once Upon a Mattress, Carol Burnett.

Another death that occured earlier this year was Allan Arbus, from the tv-series *M*A*S*H. While I don't consider him a classic actor by any means, I'll let him be mentioned anyways.
Here's what the NY Times had to say about him, in 23 April 2013.

Allan Arbus, Psychiatrist With Zingers on ‘M*A*S*H,’ Dies at 95

Allan Arbus, who left the successful fashion photography business he and his wife, Diane, built to become an actor, most memorably playing the caustic psychiatrist Maj. Sidney Freedman on the hit television series “M*A*S*H,” died on Friday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 95.

Amy Arbus, his daughter, confirmed his death.

Mr. Arbus appeared in films like “Coffy” and “Crossroads” and was a TV regular during the 1970s and ’80s, appearing on “Taxi,” “Starsky & Hutch,” “Matlock” and other shows.

But his best-known role was Major Freedman, the liberal psychiatrist who appeared in a dozen episodes of “M*A*S*H.” He treated wounds of the psyche much as Capt. Hawkeye Pierce treated surgery patients: with a never-ending string of zingers.

Alan Alda, who played Hawkeye, recalled Mr. Arbus as a very believable therapist.

“I was so convinced that he was a psychiatrist I used to sit and talk with him between scenes,” Mr. Alda said in an interview with the Archive of American Television. “After a couple months of that I noticed he was giving me these strange looks, like ‘How would I know the answer to that?’ ”

Allan Franklin Arbus was born in New York City on Feb. 15, 1918. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School and entered City College at 15. He left college a year and a half later for a job at Russek’s Department Store, where he met Diane Nemerov, the daughter of the store’s owners.

They married in 1941 and became passionate about photography. They shot fashion photographs for Russek’s before Mr. Arbus left to serve as a photographer in the Army Signal Corps in Burma during World War II. When he was discharged in 1946 the Arbuses established a studio on West 54th Street for fashion photography and soon won a contract from Condé Nast to supply photos for magazines like Glamour and Vogue.

In 1956, Ms. Arbus dissolved their business partnership to work full time on her haunting shots of marginalized people. Mr. Arbus continued to work in fashion photography but also took up acting.

The Arbuses separated in 1959 and divorced in 1969, when Mr. Arbus moved to Los Angeles. Ms. Arbus committed suicide in 1971. In 1976, Mr. Arbus married Mariclare Costello. She survives him, as do his two daughters from his first marriage, Amy and Doon; and a daughter from his second marriage, Arin Arbus.

Mr. Arbus’s last television role was on the HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in 2000.

[JackFavell]

Maybe I'm wrong but I swear we already discussed Mr. Arbus' passing in this thread. He was such an interesting person and such a great actor, I'm happy to see him get double the recognition.

[Nick]

Maybe I'm wrong but I swear we already discussed Mr. Arbus' passing in this thread. He was such an interesting person and such a great actor, I'm happy to see him get double the recognition.

Well, I used the search function and I couldn't find anything mentioned of his death on this site. But yeah, he seemed interesting, partially due to his marriage to the noted photographer Diane.

[JackFavell]

I must be losing my mind, because I cannot find any mention of Arbus in this thread. I was quite sure we talked about his death somewhere, it was only a couple months ago. Perhaps it was posted in a TV thread?

[movieman1957]

We did but it was before his death. You wrote about him and his role on "MASH."

From Dec. 31, 2012: (Must have been a slow New Year's Eve at your house. )

Again, It was still a great show, and I think that episode (was it the final one?) where Hawkeye is suppressing a disturbing memory of something awful was one of the best shows on TV ever. I always liked Allan Arbus, he was the psychiatrist who came on the show many times, he brought back some of the bite for that ep. I just like the nature of the original show a little better.

[RedRiver]

In the episode where the wounded flier thinks he's Jesus Christ, somebody kids the psychiatrist, "Come to see your saviour, Sidney?" The obviously Jewish doctor responds, "Mine? No. Yours?" I'm pretty sure Mr. Arbus played Alvy Singer's neurotic father in the flashback sequence of ANNIE HALL. Lord knows, I hope I'm right about that. I've seen the movie 807 times!

[Nick]

Another person who passed away without much fanfare was former child actor and second unit director Michael D. Moore. Note that they misspelled his nickname "Mickey" and wrote "Micky" instead.

From Mary Pickford to Disney's 102 dalmatians, here's what the NY Times had to say in 10 March 2013:

Micky Moore dies at 98; director and early Hollywood actor

Moore acted in silents as a boy and then for decades worked as a second-unit director, contributing to such works as 'Patton' and three 'Indiana Jones' movies.

Micky Moore and Hollywood grew up together.

He was a toddler in 1916 when he began his career as a child actor in silent films and sat on the laps of such leading ladies as Mary Pickford and Gloria Swanson. As a 5-year-old he worked with legendary director Cecil B. DeMille, who would mentor Moore as he transitioned to directing in adulthood.

As the motion picture industry moved from silent pictures to sound and into the digital era, Moore would contribute to more than 200 movies over nine decades. He experienced so much Hollywood history firsthand that he was moved to preserve it in a memoir published when he was 95. He called it "My Magic Carpet of Films."

When Moore finally retired from the business, in his late 80s, he was regarded as a leading second-unit director for his work on such films as "Patton," "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" and the first three "Indiana Jones" movies.

Moore died March 4 at his longtime home in Malibu of congestive heart failure, his family announced. He was 98.

"He was amazing because the pictures he was second-unit director on, such as 'Patton' and 'Indiana Jones' have the highest reputation for their action. And who did the action scenes?" film historian Kevin Brownlow asked rhetorically in an interview with The Times.

The answer is, of course, Moore.

Over three decades he made nearly 40 films as a second-unit director shooting action and background footage while the primary director was engaged elsewhere. Hewing to another director's vision didn't bother Moore, known for bringing kindness and gentleness to his Hollywood sets. Besides, he said, the top directors had the confidence to take his advice.

"If you are good, you shouldn't even be aware that a second-unit director has been involved," Moore said in 2009 in the Malibu Times. "I just did the best I could possibly do on each shot, so they kept asking me to make more movies."

When filmmakers George Lucas and Steven Spielberg needed a second-unit director for "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (1981), Moore was their first choice, and a perfect one, Lucas later recalled.

"Micky Moore was exceptional.... He was confident behind the camera and knew when to speak up to make things better," Lucas wrote in a foreword to Moore's 2009 book.

After Moore suggested that the truck-chase scene he would direct in "Raiders" could be improved by moving it from an empty desert to narrow tree-lined streets to give it context, the change was made. The results, Lucas wrote of the now-iconic scene, "speak for themselves."

Spielberg wrote in another foreword to Moore's book: "He saw around the corners of my imagination and made significant contributions. For this and for his friendship, I shall always be grateful."

He was born Dennis Michael Sheffield in October 1914 in Vancouver, Canada, one of four children of Thomas Sheffield, a shipbuilder from Britain, and Norah Moore, an actress from Dublin.

After his family arrived in Santa Barbara by boat in 1915, they lived near a branch of the American Film Manufacturing Co., known as the Flying "A" Studio. When a neighbor suggested that brother Patrick, then almost 4, audition there, 18-month-old Micky — with his mop of curls and expressive eyes — was soon employed as well.

To further their careers, the family moved to Los Angeles in 1916, and Micky Moore was making $200 a week in 1920. His mother wanted the boys to use her last name professionally.

Patrick appeared in dozens of silent pictures, including the 1923 version of "The Ten Commandments," and later worked at Paramount Studios in music and sound editing. He died at 91 in 2004.

Their father maintained a lifelong affinity for the water. He was a founder of the original Santa Monica Lifeguard Service in 1916 and helped pioneer the American Red Cross safety program on the West Coast.

Young Micky soon joined the new Lasky studio, known as the Famous Players-Lasky Corp., where he spent much of his childhood. He often played the son in the dozens of silent films he made until the late 1920s.

The first film he made in the emerging Hollywood was "The Poor Little Rich Girl" (1917) with Pickford.

According to Brownlow, some of Moore's more significant films as an actor include 1921's "All Souls' Eve" with Mary Miles Minter; "Abraham Lincoln," a 1924 production lost to history; 1926's "No Man's Gold" with Tom Mix; and "The Lost Romance," a 1921 movie directed by William DeMille, Cecil's brother.

While making "For Better, for Worse," a 1919 movie starring Swanson, Moore came to know director Cecil B. DeMille, who "helped to shape my character and made me the person I am today," Moore wrote in his book.

At 12, Moore was cast in one of his final lead acting roles, as the young apostle Mark in the 1927 biblical epic, "The King of Kings," directed by DeMille.

The difficulty of moving from child actor to more mature roles was compounded by the Great Depression, which hit his family hard just as silent movies were going out of vogue. At 15, he appeared in his final film.

He worked on fishing boats off Santa Monica but didn't like it much, and in 1933 he married Esther McNeil, his sweetheart from Venice High School.

Missing the movie business and needing to support his family, he made an appointment to see the man he always called "Mr. DeMille" and surprised him by asking to work in the property department. Late in life, Moore pointed to DeMille's saying "yes" as the happiest day of his life because it set up the rest of his career.

In the late 1940s, Moore segued to the role of assistant director at Paramount Studios and also worked with DeMille in that capacity, including on his final film, "Ten Commandments" (1956).

As an assistant director, Moore contributed to "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral" (1957), the James Bond film "Never Say Never Again" (1983) and seven Elvis Presley movies. He helmed one Presley movie as director, "Paradise, Hawaiian Style" (1966).

After wrapping up "102 Dalmatians" in 2000, Moore retired.

Since 1955, he had lived in an unassuming house on the beach in Malibu. His daily routine included swimming 40 laps at Pepperdine University's Olympic-size pool, a regimen he maintained until he was 95 1/2.

His first wife, Esther, died in 1992. Five years later he married Laurie Abdo, who had been Howard W. Koch Sr.'s personal assistant at Paramount. She died in 2011.

Moore is survived by his daughters, Tricia Newman of Malibu and Sandra Kastendiek-Drake of Los Angeles; five grandsons; and four great-grandchildren.

Services will be private.

[ChiO]

Although not a performer, few people have had a greater impact on comedy -- film, TV, stand-up and, especially, sketch -- in the past 50 years than Bernie Sahlins. Mr. Sahlins died yesterday at 90.

From today's Chicago Sun Times:

Bernard Sahlins was for years the cigar-puffing patriarch of Chicago’s Second City comedy theater, which he co-founded in Old Town with Howard Alk and Paul Sills more than five decades ago.

Launched on Dec.16, 1959, during a renaissance of American humor, The Second City — whose first incarnation was funded with $6,000 of Mr. Sahlins’ money — quickly gained national notice and was instrumental in establishing Chicago as a top comedy town. Over time, it spawned a multi-million-dollar empire that today is global in scope.

A sampling of the future stars Mr. Sahlins hired and nurtured at Second City during his three decades producing and directing there includes Alan Arkin, Joan Rivers, David Steinberg, Robert Klein, Fred Willard, John and Jim Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, Dave Thomas, John Candy, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Bill Murray, Andrea Martin, Gilda Radner, Shelly Long, Harold Ramis, George Wendt, Joe Flaherty and Martin Short.

Mr. Sahlins, a Chicago native, died Sunday at his Near North Side home after a short illness. He was 90.

“His legacy here will surely be that he was the one who established that actors and creators should work at the top of their intelligence,” says longtime Second City CEO and co-owner Andrew Alexander, who with business partner Len Stuart bought out Sahlins in 1984 after a decade of licensing the Second City name for an outpost in Toronto. (Sahlins stayed on as artistic director until 1988.) “That’s probably the most important thing we have in our arsenal.”

A 1943 graduate of the University of Chicago, Mr. Sahlins was married a year later to his first wife, Fritzie, and became a partner in a small tape-recorder manufacturing company, where he served as production engineer.

In the early 1950s, Mr. Sahlins went from mere theater maven to budding impresario when he became a producer-investor with the scrappy Playwright’s Theatre Club on the city’s Near North Side. Comprised of many University of Chicago graduates, the group staged classics and original works and included several soon-to-be-prominent young thespians such as Ed Asner, Mike Nichols, Elaine May and Joyce Piven. Paul Sills and David Shepherd led the ensemble with the help of a teenage piano prodigy and aspiring theatrical director named Sheldon Patinkin.

As a boss, Patinkin says, Sahlins’ approach “depended on the situation. Our relationship was always very ‘I’m not your boss. I can tell you what to do, but you can argue.’ ”

Mr. Sahlins was always game for an argument, Patinkin says, if it was an intelligent and reasonable one.

In 1954, one year before the struggling Playwrights disbanded, Mr. Sahlins and three other business associates culled investors and made plans to stage plays at the Studebaker Theater in the Fine Arts Building on North Michigan. The venue’s planned 40-week production schedule kicked off on Oct. 2, 1956. But the Studebaker proved difficult to sustain financially, and in April of 1957 Sahlins was forced to seek another $50,000 from donors that never came. Before long, the Studebaker closed.

When Mr. Sahlins partnered with Alk and Sills to found Second City, he wrote in his his 2002 memoir, “Days and Nights at the Second City,” building another theater was the last thing on their minds. “We had been burned enough times doing that. This was still the Beat generation, and we started out to found a coffee house where we idlers, including the actors whom we had worked with for years, could loll around and put the world in its proper place.”

Originally a small and smoky joint at the intersection of Lincoln and Wells, with budget bentwood chairs and decor that included old phone booths, the bastion of satirical hilarity with which Mr. Sahlins would become inextricably linked for the rest of his life emerged during the heyday of and shared an aesthetic with already popular local establishments such as Mister Kelly’s, the Gate of Horn and the London House. This time, though, the timing was right.

While Second City was by all accounts a hit within months of opening, its launch was not hitch-less. There were money problems, attendance problems and other issues. But Mr. Sahlins “never gave up,” Patinkin says. “Never. He always figured, ‘We’ll get through this, and then it’ll be fine.’ And it always worked out eventually.”

In his memoir, Mr. Sahlins recalled the time a fedora-clad thug visited his fledgling establishment a month or so before it opened. “He announced that he was there to ‘help’ us by seeing to it that we would have no ‘trouble’ from unruly patrons or ‘undesirable elements.’ ”

“He spoke softly,” Mr. Sahlins added. “He mispronounced words. The delivery, the syntax, the implied threat came right out of a bad B-movie. … We didn’t know whether to laugh or cower under a table.”

Sparsely filled houses during that first winter convinced Mr. Sahlins and his cohorts the end was nigh, but they soldiered on into a new decade — even opening a new space next door, Playwrights at Second City, in 1961. The ensuing years were increasingly rife with racial strife and cultural upheaval, much of which was reflected in the sketches on Mr. Sahlins’ stage.

During that same period, Mr. Sahlins also directed a movie (“The Monitors”), divorced Fritzie and married an elegant British woman named Jane. As the 1970s dawned, Second City was evolving as well. Thanks to some strategic reshuffling by Mr. Sahlins, cast members (including Harold Ramis and Joe Flaherty) were younger, shaggier and in closer political kinship with their audiences.

That’s when Mr. Sahlins found himself face-to-face with a Wheaton-bred bulldog named John Belushi. He auditioned once, for Mr. Sahlins and the late Second City producer Joyce Sloane, and was hired.

Although Belushi embodied the antithesis of Mr. Sahlins’ preferred comedic style — understated and high-minded, perhaps informed by the works of Kierkegaard or Dostoyevsky, Aristophanes or Albee — he was an undeniably electric performer, and his crowd-luring presence signaled the start of something bigger than anyone could have imagined. Mr. Sahlins has dubbed the significant tonal shift that began shortly before Belushi arrived and continued after he left less than two years later “the end of innocence.”

“[Bernie’s] sense of humor was more literary and more classical,” Patinkin says. “Which is another reason I think he didn’t want to do Second City anymore [in 1985], because the audiences had changed so much and the show had to change to go with them.”

Adds Alexander, “Bernie had a very delightful, impish way about him. And he was an extraordinary wit, with some philosophical life lessons behind that wit.”

As some of his former charges have recalled, Mr. Sahlins’ wit could also be withering.

“Five of you,” he’d say to a six-person cast following a performance, “were terrific.”

Likening Mr. Sahlins to “the Wizard of Oz,” George Wendt recalled a time in the mid-70s when he and some others in a sketch were booed off the stage. “I was so mortified that i walked down the stage door stairs. I was going to leave the building and never come back. And [Bernie] burst backstage and said, “Get back out there! You affected those people!’”

Friend and Second City vet Tim Kazurinsky said Sunday that Mr. Sahlins “was father to us all. So of course, as some sort of cosmic jest, Bernie would choose to leave us on Father’s Day. Such was his style. He took us all in — waifs, rebels, malcontents — and gave us a home. He taught us as best he could, then gave us the boot. But he never forgot a single one. And none of us will ever forget him.”

In 1972, Mr. Sahlins and his wife purchased a 5,000-square-foot home near the foot of Lincoln Park on North Dearborn. Crashers over the years included the actor and erstwhile Second City standout Bill Murray, who took up residency in its basement. The Sahlinses lived there until the summer of 2012, when they sold the property to neighboring Latin School and moved to another residence nearby.

Having proved himself in Chicago, Mr. Sahlins — along with Sloane and improv master Del Close — set off in 1973 to open an outpost in Toronto. Their first effort fizzled in only six months, but Alexander facilitated a regrouping at Toronto’s Old Firehall. This year the institution marks four decades in the Great White North.

Not long after NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” debuted, in the fall of 1975, Mr. Sahlins’ saw his Chicago venue become a poaching ground for TV types. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” he has quipped. (According to Sloane, who died in 2011, Mr. Sahlins once half-jokingly commanded her to lock “SNL” honcho Lorne Michaels out of the building.)

About a year after “SNL’s” premiere, in what some saw as a futile attempt to compete with a well-financed network smash, Mr. Sahlins persuaded Alexander to launch a comedy show in Canada using actors from that nascent troupe. Before long “Second City Television” — eventually known as “SCTV” and starring Ramis, Candy, Levy, O’Hara, Flaherty, Martin and Dave Thomas — was born and initially broadcast in Canada. Mr. Sahlins, however, left its helm after only one bumpy year — well before the program hit U.S. airwaves and became a cult favorite among pre-fame comedy connoisseurs such as Conan O’Brien and Tina Fey.

Of “SCTV’s” initial cast members, Thomas was known to give Mr. Sahlins guff about creative decisions with which he disagreed. One day, as Mr. Sahlins was presiding over the edit of a scene featuring Eugene Levy, the two began to argue about which take was best. Despite Mr. Sahlins’ insistence to the contrary, Thomas was sure he hadn’t screened them all. Growing exasperated, Thomas recalled long after the incident, Mr. Sahlins finally declared, “I don’t need to put up with this s---. I’m rich.”

“That actually made me laugh,” Thomas said in “The Second City Unscripted,” “because that’s a really funny thing to say when somebody’s yelling at you.”

Throughout much of the 1970s and into the 1980s, Second City’s popularity rose and with it ticket sales, but by 1985 Mr. Sahlins had had enough and sold his interest to Alexander for millions. “I was losing contact with the work,” he said in 2008, “and it was time for me to do other things.”

Retirement wasn’t an option. With wife Jane, he’d already begun envisioning and planning for a theater extravaganza in Chicago, and in the spring of 1986 the Chicago International Theatre Festival was finally born.

Only a couple of weeks after it ended, the Sahlinses began traveling around the globe to find plays for their next blowout. Here’s how Mr. Sahlins described his breakneck pace to the Tribune’s Sid Smith:

“Just last month, I got on the tube in London. I got out of the tube and walked onto an airplane, I flew to Dusseldorf, and go into another tube. I took that to my hotel, took a taxi from the hotel to the theater, where I saw ‘The Three Sisters’ in Hungarian. I took a taxi back to the hotel, slept, got up and got back on the tube, onto another airplane, flew back to the London airport and back on the London tube home. I was hardly outside the entire trip. It was as if I had never breathed German air.”

That was the way Mr. Sahlins operated best: in near-constant motion. He maintained a strong presence in Chicago’s theatrical community until the end of his life.

“The worst thing was to be bored,” says Mr. Patinkin. “He never allowed himself to be bored.”

Mr. Sahlins is survived by his wife, Jane, and a brother, Marshall. Funeral services will be private.

[JackFavell]

This man was maybe the most influential one in the world of modern comedy. Most of my favorite comedians and actors (Alan Arkin, David Steinberg, Robert Klein) came out of Chicago's Second City. Sad news but his work will live on through that influence.