LOS ANGELES -- Buck Henry, The Graduate co-writer who as screenwriter, character actor, Saturday Night Live host and cherished talk-show and party guest became an all-around cultural superstar of the 1960s and 70s, has died. He was 89.
Henry's wife, Irene Ramp, told The Washington Post that his death Wednesday in Los Angeles was due to a heart attack.
Henry, who also co-created the TV spy spoof Get Smart with Mel Brooks and others, managed to pull off the rare Hollywood coup of screenwriter-as-celebrity, partly through inserting himself in his films in small but memorable roles.
In The Graduate, Mike Nichols' classic 1967 film that made a star of Dustin Hoffman, Henry and Calder Willingham adapted the script from the Charles Webb novel about a young man who has an affair with one of his parents' friends. Henry created a role for himself as the room clerk at the hotel who spooks a young Hoffman with the unintended double entendre, "Are you here for an affair, sir?" "What?" Hoffman's character says, nervously. "The Singleman party, sir?" Henry responds.
His script would get Henry the first of his two Academy Award nominations.
Henry also wrote the screenplays for Nichols' follow-up film Catch-22, the Barbara Streisand comedies The Owl and the Pussycat and What's Up, Doc and director Gus Van Sant's 1995 film To Die For, starring Nicole Kidman and Joaquin Phoenix.
Short and deceptively mild, wearing black-rimmed glasses, Henry was already an established film and television writer who became widely recognizable during the early years of Saturday Night Live. He hosted numerous times and played such memorable characters as the creepy baby-sitter Uncle Roy and the father of "Nerd" Bill Murray.
With Warren Beatty, Henry co-directed and appeared in 1978's Heaven Can Wait, the hit remake of the Hollywood classic about a man who dies by mistake and is sent back to earth in someone else's body.
The film got nine Oscar nominations, including one for Henry and Beatty as best directors.
Information for this article was contributed by Hillel Italie and Bob Thomas of The Associated Press.
A Section on 01/10/2020