[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aadu05wSgA0]
Tom Bosley, a TV fixture as the Cunningham paterfamilias on Happy Days, died today at age 83.
There are two types of TV dads: those who play somebody’s dad, and those who make you feel as if they could be—almost, in some way, as if they are—your dad. Bosley was the latter. His Howard Cunningham, hardware-store owner and ’50s dad, could be gruff and cranky—especially with his boarder Arthur Fonzarelli—but there was also something inherently fatherly and comforting about his rich voice and rumpled dignity. (Look at how he carries himself, even in a ridiculous hat, in the clip above.) A stage and screen veteran (who won a Tony starring in Fiorello!), he was something of a father to the cast as well, as former costars including Henry Winkler remembered him.
Bosley applied his charm, paternal and otherwise, to other TV roles as well. He played the cleric-sleuth lede in The Father Dowling Mysteries, and the first role I ever saw—or heard—him in was one I didn’t know he played until well after the fact: the father in the underappreciated animated sitcom Wait ‘Till Your Father Gets Home. Airing in the early ’70s—it, like Happy Days, launched from Love, American Style—it was a sort of combination of a cartoon All in the Family and a proto-Family Guy. (And I have no idea why my parents let me watch it when I was four years old.) You can hear that familiar paternal growl in the clip below:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHS1q1gQZNw]
RIP.