“Godfather” star Abe Vigoda dies at 94

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.

On TV, the actor played Detective Phil Fish in the sitcom Barney Miller which resulted in a spin-off show Fish, which looked into the detective’s personal life.

“Tom, can you get me off the hook?”

“We lost a great character today”. But you can’t be Abe Vigoda because he’s dead.”. As Fish, Vigoda further stretched his physical and dramatic range, playing a slumped, world-weary detective haunted by persistent hemorrhoids.

Reflecting on his delayed success, Vigoda once remarked: “When I was a young man, I was told success had to come in my youth”. “This man was never sick”, she said.

“I’m really not a Mafia person”, he said. “Like Fish, we all meet with rejection, and things are seldom easy, no matter what we do”, he said. Check out the first two seasons of Barney Miller for free on Crackle. For more than a decade the website isabevigodadead.com existed purely to report on the actor’s mortality. He was mentioned as being dead in a story by People magazine in 1980. Like Triumph The Insult Comic Dog and The Masturbating Bear, Abe Vigoda fit right into the cast of randomly assembled characters on NBC’s proudly post-modern, irony-drenched Late Night With Conan O’Brien. And thus, a joke was born, a joke that Vigoda eventually told as well. Vigoda was a popular fixture with the Friars Club whose merciless jibes against him usually focused on his less-than-stellar looks and the fact that Vigoda has mistakenly been pronounced as having died in a 1982 article in People magazine. He even placed ads in Hollywood trade papers with him in a coffin to remind casting agents he was alive. The show typically opens with a monologue from Conan O’Brien relating to recent headlines and frequently features exchanges with his sidekick, Andy Richter, and members of the audience. “A doctor or a producer”, and immediately got hired for the part. After that, his uncertain attendance among the quick or the dead became a running joke with comedians.

“Abe Vigoda – Roast in peace”, Ross concluded.

Vigoda was married twice in his life, though his most recent wife, Beatrice Schy passed away in 1992.

The New York Times reports the lab brought about the notion that digital information should be shared freely and was part of the original ARPAnet, the precursor to the Internet. In honor of Ruth Robinson Duccini, the last female Munchkin.

Vigoda had a long and impressive acting career, including notable roles in the films The Godfather, Look Who’s Talking, Cannonball Run II, and Joe Versus the Volcano, among others. He had established a successful NY stage career in the 1960s when “Godfather” director Coppola noticed his work. He said he wanted to be an actor after appearing in a school play at age 6, portraying an old man.

He appeared in 63 episodes of Barney Miller before ultimately getting his own spinoff a few years later. He is survived by a daughter.