Jerry Stiller, who played Frank Costanza on Seinfeld, has died at 92

The New York Times reports:

Jerry Stiller, a classically trained actor who became a comedy star twice — in the 1960s in partnership with his wife, Anne Meara, and in the 1990s with a memorable recurring role on “Seinfeld” — has died. He was 92.

His death was announced on Monday on Twitter by his son, the actor Ben Stiller, who did not specify the cause.…

He appeared on Broadway in Terrence McNally’s frantic farce “The Ritz” in 1975 and David Rabe’s dark drama “Hurlyburly” in 1984. Off Broadway, he was in “The Threepenny Opera”; in Central Park, he played Shakespearean clowns for Joseph Papp; onscreen, he was seen as, among other things, a police detective in “The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three” (1974) and Divine’s husband in John Waters’s “Hairspray” (1988). But he was best known as a comedian.

The team of Stiller and Meara was for many years a familiar presence in nightclubs, on television variety and talk shows, and in radio and television commercials, most memorably for Blue Nun wine and Amalgamated Bank.

Years after the act broke up, Mr. Stiller captured a new generation of fans as Frank Costanza, the short-tempered and not entirely sane father of Jason Alexander’s George, on the NBC series “Seinfeld,” one of the most successful television comedies of all time.

Mr. Stiller was in fewer than 30 of the 180 episodes of “Seinfeld,” whose nine seasons began in 1989, and he did not make his first appearance until the fifth season. (Another actor appeared as Frank in one episode of Season 4, although his scenes were later reshot with Mr. Stiller for the syndicated reruns.) But he was an essential part of the show’s enduring appeal. He was nominated for an Emmy in 1997.

Frank Costanza was a classic sitcom eccentric whose many dubious accomplishments included marketing a brassiere for men and creating Festivus, a winter holiday “for the rest of us” celebrated with tests of strength and other bizarre rituals.

His most noteworthy characteristic was his explosive, often irrational anger, and most of the episodes on which he was featured found him, sooner or later, yelling, usually at either his son; his wife, Estelle, played by Estelle Harris; or both.

When I ranked my 20 favorite Seinfeld episodes, my #3 choice was an episode with Jerry Stiller: "The Opposite."

Jerry Stiller tells the amazing story of how he invented his character of Frank Costanza by showing up on his first day and doing the opposite of what he had been told to do:




More from the obit:

Gerald Isaac Stiller was born in Brooklyn on June 8, 1927, the first of four children born to William Stiller, the son of immigrants from Galicia, and Bella (Citron) Stiller, who was born in Poland. His father drove a taxi and later a bus. His mother was a homemaker.

After serving in the Army during and immediately after World War II, he studied theater at Syracuse University under the G.I. Bill, learning about Greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama from the celebrated teacher Sawyer Falk. He began working in summer stock almost immediately after graduating in 1950, and was appearing Off Broadway a few years later.

Mr. Stiller remained active throughout his 80s. He was typically manic in a series of commercials for Capital One Bank, seen on television and heard on radio in 2012.…

In 2016, he reprised the role of the agent Maury Ballstein in “Zoolander 2,” the sequel to the hit 2001 comedy about a male model, starring and directed by his son.

“I’ve never thought of stopping,” Mr. Stiller told The Daily News of New York in 2012. “The only time you ever stop working is when they don’t call you.”

Some of his most dramatic acting on Seinfeld was in the episode where he was asked to cook for a Jewish social function:




The end of his New York Times obituary is very meta:

Mr. Stiller and Ms. Meara’s swan song as a team was a series of web-only video clips produced by their son and posted from November 2010 until March 2011. Each clip lasts about two minutes and consists of the two of them discussing a single topic. One topic is obituaries.

In that clip, Mr. Stiller says he is “shocked” that The New York Times might have already prepared their obituaries and wonders whether the newspaper is “up to date” on his having worked with Veronica Lake in a production of “Peter Pan” (about six decades earlier). And Ms. Meara reveals that years ago Mr. Stiller had persuaded The Times to publish her father’s obituary by falsely claiming that he had written material for their comedy act.

Mr. Stiller’s agitated response: “What you just said is going to get us in trouble with The New York Times! I may never get an obit!”