All-round actor with great sense of comedy

LOS ANGELES • Charles Grodin - the versatile actor familiar to audiences from Same Time, Next Year (1975) on Broadway, popular movies like The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Midnight Run (1988) and Beethoven (1992) and numerous television appearances - died on Tuesday at home in Wilton, Connecticut. He was 86.

His son, Nicholas, said the cause was bone marrow cancer.

With a great sense of deadpan comedy and the kind of everyman good looks that lend themselves to playing businessmen or curmudgeonly fathers, Grodin found plenty of work as a supporting player and the occasional lead.

He was a writer as well, with several plays and books to his credit.

Grodin, who dropped out of the University of Miami to pursue acting, had landed a smattering of stage and TV roles by the time he received his first big break in 1962 - a part in a Broadway comedy called Tchin-Tchin, starring Anthony Quinn and Margaret Leighton.

Then, in 1975, he nabbed a breakthrough Broadway role opposite actress Ellen Burstyn in Bernard Slade's Same Time, Next Year, a two-hander about a man and woman - each married to someone else - who meet once a year in the same inn room.

Another of his roles was in the action-comedy Midnight Run, in which he played an accountant who embezzles a fortune from the mob and is pursued by a bounty hunter played by Robert De Niro.

However, what may have been Grodin's best-known role had him working with a dog.

The film was Beethoven, a family-friendly 1992 hit, and the dog was a St Bernard. Grodin played a cranky father who did not exactly warm to the new pet. The next year, he reprised the role in Beethoven's 2nd.

In the mid-1990s, he began hosting The Charles Grodin Show on the cable channel CNBC.

After his talk show ended in 1998, he largely stepped away from show business for a dozen years. Then he began to take roles again, including a recurring one on comedian Louis C.K.'s series, Louie (2010 to 2015).

Grodin's first marriage, to Julie Ferguson, ended in divorce. In 1983, he married writer Elissa Durwood. She survives him, along with Nicholas, who is from his second marriage; comedienne Marion Grodin, a daughter from his first marriage; and a granddaughter.

NYTIMES