Abe Vigoda’s Dead: The song! (They saw it coming)

“Beloved character actor Abe Vigoda dies at 94” is categorized as “life and leisure”.

The actor was nominated for an Emmy for three straight years for his role as detective Phil Fish on the 1970s sitcom “Barney Miller”. The actor famous for his character role in the cult movie – The Godfather as Sal Tessio and played a host of other movies and television serials in the 197os.

His daughter, Carol Vigoda Fuchs, told the Associated Press Vigoda died in his sleep at her home. The New York Times says Vigoda responded by “placing an ad in Variety with a photo showing him sitting up in a coffin and holding a copy of the offending issue of the magazine”.

His fellow Barney Miller star, Hal Linden, 84, isn’t on Twitter so he spoke out in more traditional fashion, in an interview with the New York Daily News about his old friend. In 1982, rumors of his death began to circulate due to an erroneous People Magazine article, and later a website was even created to track whether or not he was alive.

One of Olmeda’s favorite posts: “Let the joyous news be spread: Abe Vigoda is still not dead!”

Abe Vigoda and Al Pacino in The Godfather. He appeared on Barney Miller for 61 episodes.

David Letterman and Conan O’Brien invited him onto their late-night shows to prove he was still alive.

But it was the 1982 report of his premature death that caused him some consternation and was the basis of many jokes during his later years.

His breakthrough role on the big screen came when he played mobster Salvatore Tessio in Francis Ford Coppola’s classic, The Godfather. He got the part and remained a regular on Barney Miller until 1977, when he took the character to a spin-off series called Fish. His resemblance to Boris Karloff led to his casting in the 1986 NY revival of “Arsenic and Old Lace“, playing the role Karloff originated on the stage in the 1940s.

Later, he appeared on Broadway in The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade, in Robert Shaw’s The Man in the Glass Booth and, as Abe Lincoln, in the comedy Tough to Get Help. His other work included the films Good Burger, Joe Versus the Volcano, Look Who’s Talking and Cannonball Run.

Vigoda’s wife Beatrice died in 1992.

He often told the story of his agent getting a call from a producer seeking “an Abe Vigoda type”, unaware that the original was still around and available.