When the news hit that comedian actor Dom DeLuise died today at age 75 of cancer, in one sense it wasn’t a huge surprise: he had reportedly had cancer, and for months now the supermarket tabloids have talked about how sick he was and how if anything he was eating more than ever because the end was near.
True or not, the fact is that when I was a reporter on the San Diego Union newspaper reporters there at the beginning of each year would take bets on which celebrity wouldn’t live out the rest of the year (Raymond Burr was accurately predicted one year after people saw the oversized actor walk slowly down the hall). Dom DeLuise would have been an easy — and tragic — bet.
People liked DeLuise because he was highly talented…and they liked him. On and off the screen.
News reports about his death were typical of the kind of impersonal, formula obits editors keep on file. CNN has this:
Dom DeLuise, who spiced up such movies as “Blazing Saddles,” “Silent Movie” and “The Cannonball Run” with his manic delivery and roly-poly persona, has died, his son’s publicist said.
Publicist Jay Schwartz did not disclose the cause of death, but DeLuise, 75, had been battling cancer for more than a year.
DeLuise was surrounded by family when he died in a Santa Monica, California, hospital Monday night, son Michael DeLuise told CNN affiliate KTLA.
DeLuise was most famous for his supporting roles in a number of Mel Brooks films, including 1974’s “Saddles” — in which he played a flamboyant musical director who led dancers in a number called “The French Mistake” — and 1976’s “Silent Movie,” in which he played the assistant to Brooks’ director Mel Funn. He was also in the Brooks-directed “The Twelve Chairs” (1970), “Spaceballs” (1987) and “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” (1993).
But he could also assay more serious roles, most notably in the 1980 dark comedy “Fatso,” in which he played an overweight man trying to wean himself from comfort food. The film was directed by Brooks’ wife, Anne Bancroft.
DeLuise, who struggled with his own weight, was also an author of cookbooks.
There are more obits…more news stories that were “boilerplate” ready for months or years. But one fact about DeLuise is forgotten by many people who saw him in recent years and not known by young people who had seen him in now-vintage movies:
He was truly a multifaceted performer, who hit the “big time” in the mid-60s via his act Dominic the Great — the world’s worst magician, sometimes assisted by a most unattractive female assistant (the great Ruth Buzzi, who would later use the same character and gain Laugh-In fame). He even had his own CBS summer show in 1968 — which I can remember to this DAY.
Why? Because I’m in comedy (not the posts on this site, even though you may think so) and have studied comedians since I was a tiny kid — and still do. And DeLuise I could tell even in high school HAD “IT.” He had “IT” to go the comedic distance.
Yet, Hollywood put him mainly to use in memorable and not so memorable second fiddle roles. In that sense, his artistic fate was similar to another star of the 60s and early 70s, the late Paul Lynde. Hollywood could never figure out how to properly package and use DeLuise or Lynde — who would have been major comedy stars if they had been at their peak in Hollywood’s Golden Age of Comedy in the 30s and even 40s.
But mid-century TV and mid-century Hollywood simply couldn’t quite fit them into a cookie cutter. (FOOTNOTE: These two comic actors were not similar in their styles, lifestyles or in what has been written about them. DeLuise was almost universally liked. Lynde, at the end of his life, lost a key TV job and some accounts say his drinking was out of control and he was not beloved at the end.).
Here are some quick You Tube glimpses of DeLuise that go beyond the cold prepared-in-advance obits that you’ll read over the next day or two.
He does his (in)famous magic act on the Dean Martin Show:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znsZYcEdlGc
Dom has a new role — and wardrobe — as he does this number with the late Gilda Radner in the movie Haunted Honeymoon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpNMYntemw4
He was considered a really nice guy — and would even appear on L.A.’s Chabad Telethon for the Jewish community:
But his passion was cooking — and he even gave a cooking lesson his own twist (note that there are some patches of silence, where it looks liked they basically bleeped out what he said before it was aired):
Talent and a nice guy? Show biz needs more of those.
And today there’s one less.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.