Related Stories

Dennis McDougal, Author of Books About Lew Wasserman, Jack Nicholson and Bob Dylan, Dies at 77

Weaver was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame in 2010.

In his movie debut, Weaver portrayed a rattled Air Force colonel facing a nuclear crisis in Sidney Lumet’s classic Fail-Safe (1964), and he was an evil mastermind bent on using trained dolphins to attack the president in Mike Nichols’ The Day of the Dolphin (1973).

His film résumé also included The Maltese Bippy (1969), Marathon Man (1976), Demon Seed (1977), Black Sunday (1977), The Big Fix (1978), a segment of Creepshow (1982), Lumet’s Power (1986) and the 1999 remake of The Thomas Crown Affair.

He starred in two episodes of the original The Twilight Zone, including 1960’s “Third From the Sun,” in which he played a scientist who tries to hijack a rocket to get him and his family off Earth as nuclear war beckons.

Weaver also appeared on the small screen on Playhouse 90, The Defenders, Gunsmoke , Dan August, Hunter, Mannix , Falcon Crest, Law & Order and dozens of other shows. Recently, he narrated specials for the History channel.

Fritz Weaver, Tony-Winning Veteran of Stage and Screen, Dies at 90

Fritz Weaver, the courtly veteran of Broadway and the big screen who won a Tony Award and stood out in such films as Fail-Safe and The Day of the Dolphin, has died. He was 90.

Weaver died Saturday at home in Manhattan, The New York Times reported.

His sister was Mary Weaver Dodson, a four-time Emmy-nominated art director known for her work on Murder, She Wrote. She died in February.

Weaver received his Tony in 1970 for his performance as strict Catholic boarding school teacher Jerome Malley in Robert Marasco’s long-running thriller Child’s Play.

The 6-foot-3 Pittsburgh native made his Broadway debut in 1955’s The Chalk Garden, for which he landed his first Tony nom. He also played Sherlock Holmes in the 1965 musical Baker Street and appeared in such productions as the 1962 musical All-American, Alan Ayckbourn’s 1974 comedy Absurd Person Singular and Lanford Wilson’s Angels Fall in 1982.

Trending on Billboard

01/11/2016

His many other TV credits include guest parts on Murder, She Wrote, The Twilight Zone, Magnum, P.I., Matlock, Gunsmoke, Falcon Crest and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

His film work included playing a college professor in Marathon Man opposite Dustin Hoffman, an FBI agent in Black Sunday, the 2015 Adam Sandler film The Cobbler and the 2016 film The Congressman, starring Treat Williams. In 2013, he played Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black in HBO’s Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight.

But his first love was the stage. He earned a Tony nomination for his Broadway debut in The Chalk Garden and he went on to play King Henry IV, Peer Gynt, a singing Holmes in the musical Baker Street and a town official in a 1991 Broadway revival of The Crucible, among others.

Born in Pittsburgh, he attended the University of Chicago intending to major in physics when he was cast in the part of Archbishop Thomas Becket in T.S. Eliot’s tragedy Murder in the Cathedral.

He later told the Christian Science Monitor that playing that role changed his life: “When you play the great roles, you get spoiled and think you’ll have a whole career playing nothing but great roles, and of course you can’t.”

Weaver’s first marriage to Sylvia Short ended in divorce. He married the actress Rochelle Oliver in 1997. She survives him, as do his daughter, Lydia, and his son, Anthony.

Get weekly rundowns straight to your inbox