GILBERT GOTTFRIED
(28 February 1955 – 12 April 2022)
The American actor and comedian Gilbert Gottfried, who has died aged 67 from ventricular tachycardia, complicated by type II myotonic dystrophy, may have been recognisable more for his voice than his looks. He had a signature rasping vocal delivery that lent itself to all kinds of voice-over work including the dubbing of Iago, the parrot in Disney's Aladdin (1992), Tonko the parrot in Home Movies, Mr Beetle in Thumbelina, and such TV shows as Sesame Street, Family Man, Superman, Crank Yankers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, among others, in which he assumed the voices of a penguin, a platypus, a stomach, a genie, a cop, a horse, a dog whistle, a coal miner, Santa Claus and, in his last television series, Smiling Friends (2022), he played the voice of God. What a repertoire for a man who was basically a stand-up comedian. He also contributed to many video games and TV commercials and continued doing live stand-up work throughout his career. In 2017 he played himself in the British-American sitcom Episodes with Matt LeBlanc, Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig.
He was born Gilbert Jeremy Gottfried in Brooklyn to Max, a hardware store owner, and his wife Lillian. He started doing comedy from the age of fifteen in open mic nights in New York and became very well-known and very successful. His first gig was at The Bitter End in Greenwich Village after which his family encouraged him to do his impressions of movie stars such as Bela Lugosi, Groucho Marx, Humphrey Bogart, Patrick Swayze and his favourite actor Lon Chaney Jr. Never one to pull his punches, his material was often fairly colourful. However, in 1980 he was asked to join the NBC comedy show Saturday Night Live and later on did promotional work for the new MTV channel which led to appearances on The Cosby Show and other programmes such as Seinfeld. From 1989 he was the host of USA Up All Night, presenting terrible old B-movies. He was also a great success doing the TV roasts of celebrity lives, the most memorable being those for Donald Trump, Roseanne Barr and Hugh Hefner in which their reputations were crucified but all done in good dirty fun.
Inevitably the film industry also beckoned and he appeared in The House of God (1984) with Tim Matheson, Bad Medicine with Steve Guttenberg and Alan Arkin and then made a great impression as Sidney Bernstein in Beverly Hills Cop II, a role he improvised. Later films included Problem Child on TV and in three films, Look Who's Talking Too with John Travolta and Kirstie Alley, and Highway to Hell, in which he played Hitler.
Always inclined towards comic roles, Gottfried generally got to play weirdo characters or the voices of unusual species - see above. He first voiced the parrot in Disney's Aladdin in 1992 and was on hand to repeat the performance, his favourite role, in various sequels on TV and video. Much of his work would have been seen only in the US but he made hundreds of appearances in comedy series and chat shows such as Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, on the last of which he appeared as assorted characters such as Kim Jong-Il, Benjamin Franklin and David Gest.
Many of the films he made were not always prime productions, such as Target Witness, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and A Million Ways to Die in the West (in which he played Abraham Lincoln), but then you need to see or hear Gottfried at his best (or worst) in The Aristocrats movie, a kind of documentary in which umpteen comics tell their own versions of the same and most filthy joke in the world. That is Gilbert Gottfried's true legacy.
Gilbert Gottfried was married at age 51 to Dara Kravitz whom he had met at a Grammy Awards ceremony in the late 1990s. They married in 2007 and have a daughter, Lily, and a son, Max. Gilbert wrote a memoir called Rubber Balls and Liquor in 2011 which he also narrated for a download. His was one of the funniest and oddest comedy careers in entertainment history.
MICHAEL DARVELL