Henry Gibson

Published on Sunday 20 September 2009 19:56

Actor

Born: 21 September, 1935, in Germantown, Pennsylvania.

Died: 14 September, 2009, in Malibu, California, aged 73

Henry Gibson came to fame as the cherub-faced actor who recited nonsense poems in a Southern drawl on the TV series Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In and later stood out as a smarmy country star in the 1975 film Nashville.

Gibson made his living working the margins in dozens of films and TV shows. However, Laugh-In made him a star. Wearing clerical garb and sipping tea, he would calmly circulate in the show's frenetic cocktail-party scene, deliver a one-liner and then melt into the crowd.

As a simpering poet, he would hold a flower and announce, with deadpan formality: "A Poem, by Henry Gibson."

However, as egomaniacal Haven Hamilton in Robert Altman's 1975 Nashville," Gibson showed he could do more than sketch comedy.

His performance as an evil-tempered superpatriot earned him the National Society of Film Critics' award for best supporting actor.

Gibson, whose real name was James Bateman, was born in 1935 in Philadelphia and at the age of eight he began acting. After earning a bachelor's degree at Catholic University of America in 1957, he served in France as an intelligence officer in the US air force.

In the early 1960s he and Jon Voight, a college friend, hit on a scheme to get their acting careers off the ground.

"We decided that we would be two brothers from the Ozarks who represented the United States on cultural tours and caused riots wherever they went," Voight recalled. "I gave him the name Henry Gibson, which I got from Henrik Ibsen."

Gibson wangled a booking for the act, at which point Voight bowed out. Gibson recited his poetry, tickled the audience and was invited back. The character evolved, and in 1961 Gibson recorded a poetry album, The Alligator and Other Poems. Soon afterward, Jerry Lewis cast him in The Nutty Professor" (1963). Small and offbeat comic roles followed.

Gibson's appearances on Laugh-In from 1968 to 1971 opened up a wide variety of film and TV roles, usually small, but often choice. They ranged from the leader of the Illinois Nazi Party in The Blues Brothers (1980) to a priest in Wedding Crashers (2005). He also recorded a second comedy album, The Grass Menagerie (1968), and wrote a book, A Flower Child's Garden of Verses.

He worked steadily on TV shows both comic and dramatic, including Boston Legal as Judge Clark Brown as recently as 2008.

In 1966, he married Lois Geiger, who died in 2007. He died of cancer just days before his birthday and is survived by three sons.