Jack Weston, Character Actor, Dies

Jack Weston, the chubby, bejowled actor who elevated anguish to a comic art in a 40-year career on television, in the movies and on Broadway, died on Friday at Lenox Hill Hospital.

He was 71 and had had lymphoma for six years, his wife said.

Weston appeared in hundreds of television productions, two dozen movies and another two dozen Broadway plays.

His most acclaimed film role was in “The Four Seasons,” the 1981 movie with Alan Alda, Carol Burnett and Rita Moreno that led to a spinoff television series starring Weston in 1984.

Like many of the characters he played, Weston was the quintessential New Yorker, which is to say he was born in Cleveland and lived in Los Angeles for 18 years.

He spent two years as an Army machine-gunner in Italy in World War II.

After his Army service, Weston moved to New York to study at the American Theater Wing along with such future stars as Lee Marvin, Rod Steiger and Jack Klugman.

Although he did his share of menial work, including a job as an elevator operator that he got because he was the first applicant who fit the suit, Weston found ready work in the theater, including a part in “South Pacific,” and even more on television, where he became a regular during the 1950s.

His Hollywood years began on a whim in the spring of 1958 when he and his first wife, Marjorie Redmond, abruptly quit their parts in the Broadway hit “Bells Are Ringing,” and struck out for Los Angeles in a vintage Volkswagen, fully expecting to return to New York in the fall.

Then the car broke down and the couple were stranded for what turned out to be an 18-year stay as Weston appeared almost constantly on television and often in films.

In much of his early work, Weston was the villain, most memorably as a man who terrorizes Audrey Hepburn in the 1967 cult classic “Wait Until Dark,” but movies like “Cactus Flower” and “Please Don’t Eat the Daisies” led him to comedy.