Now That They've Gone

Things learned, from the passing of another two of a generation.

At 90, Jack Klugman. Bitten by the bug at around 14

... when his sister took him to a play, "One Third of a Nation," a "living newspaper" production of the Federal Theater Project about life in an American slum; the play made the case for government housing projects.

"I just couldn't believe the power of it," he said of the production in an interview in 1998 for the Archive of American Television, crediting the experience for instilling in him his social-crusading impulse. "I wanted to be a muckraker."

He landed in Pittsburgh, where he auditioned for the drama department at Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University).

"They said: 'You're not suited to be an actor. You're more suited to be a truck driver,'" he recalled. But this was 1945, the war was just ending and there was a dearth of male students, so he was accepted. "There were no men," he said. "Otherwise they wouldn't have taken me in."

More on career and roles of an always credible "everyman," who had an old-fashioned social consciousness—

In "Quincy, M.E.," which ran from 1976 to 1983, Klugman played an idealistic, tough-minded medical examiner who tussled with his boss by uncovering evidence of murder in cases where others saw natural causes.

"We had some wonderful writers," he said in a 1987 Associated Press interview. "Quincy was a muckraker, like Upton Sinclair, who wrote about injustices. He was my ideal as a youngster, my author, my hero.

"Everybody said, 'Quincy'll never be a hit.' I said, 'You guys are wrong. He's two heroes in one, a cop and a doctor.' A coroner has power. He can tell the police commissioner to investigate a murder. I saw the opportunity to do what I'd gotten into the theater to do -- give a message.

At 89, Charles Durning.

It sounds even more remote than the 1920s, the kind of poverty, disease, and loss his family endured during his childhood. But: another reminder of why we once had a New Deal.

The World War II experiences he survived are jaw-dropping. And then,

After the war, still mentally troubled, Mr. Durning "dropped into a void for almost a decade" before deciding to study acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, he told Parade magazine in 1993. The school dismissed him within a year. "They basically said you have no talent and you couldn't even buy a dime's worth of it if it was for sale," he told The Times in 1997.

He went from job to job, from doorman to dishwasher to cabdriver. He boxed professionally for a time, delivered telegrams and taught ballroom dancing, meeting his first wife, Carole, at an Arthur Murray studio. Every so often he landed a bit part in a play.

His big break came in 1962, when Joseph Papp, founder of the Public Theater and the New York Shakespeare Festival, invited him to audition. It was the start of a long association with Papp, who cast him, often as a clown, in 35 plays, many by Shakespeare.

It was decades before he spoke publicly of his war experience and how it marked him.

In the [1993] Parade interview, he recalled the hand-to-hand combat. "I was crossing a field somewhere in Belgium," he said. "A German soldier ran toward me carrying a bayonet. He couldn't have been more than 14 or 15. I didn’t see a soldier. I saw a boy. Even though he was coming at me, I couldn't shoot."

They grappled, he recounted later — he was stabbed seven or eight times — until finally he grasped a rock and made it a weapon. After killing the youth, he said, he held him in his arms and wept.

Mr. Durning said the memories never left him, even when performing, even when he became, however briefly, someone else.

"There are many secrets in us, in the depths of our souls, that we don't want anyone to know about," he told Parade. "There's terror and repulsion in us, the terrible spot that we don’t talk about. That place that no one knows about — horrifying things we keep secret. A lot of that is released through acting."

"RIP, "king of the character actors."