Sitcoms Online Photo Galleries - Odd Couple: Tony Randall and Jack Klugman

"On November 13, Felix Unger was asked to remove himself from his place of residence. (Unger's unseen wife slams door. She reopens it and angrily hands Felix his saucepan) That request came from his wife. Deep down, he knew she was right, but he also knew that someday, he would return to her. With nowhere else to go, he appeared at the home of his childhood friend, Oscar Madison. Sometime earlier, Madison's wife had thrown him out, requesting that he never return. Can two divorced men share an apartment without driving each other crazy?"

Opening Naration of The Odd Couple

The Odd Couple aired from September 1970 until July 1975 on ABC.

If comedy thrives on contrasts, The Odd Couple offered a perfect situation. Felix ( Tony Randall) was a prim, fastidious photographer, a compulsive cleaner; Oscar ( Jack Klugman) was a gruff, sloppy sportswriter for the fictional New York Herald, to whom a floor was a place to toss things. Both were divorced, and only a mutual need for companionship and a place to stay brought them together to live in the same apartment. Well, coexist in the same apartment. The conflicts were obvious and endless, as each upset the other's way of life and attempted to mix with the other's friends. Frequently seen were Oscar's poker partners , notably Murray the cop ( Al Molinaro), Speed the compulsive gambler ( Garry Walberg), and meek Vinnie ( Larry Gelman). Nancy Cunningham ( Joan Hotchkis) was Oscar's girlfriend during the first season and Myrna ( played by producer Garry Marshall's sister Penny Marshall) his secretary. The Pigeon Sisters , Cecily and Gwendolyn ( Monica Evans, Carol Shelly) were two nutty English girls who lived upstairs and Christopher Shea for a time played the obnoxious kid next door. Oscar's ex-wife, Blanche was played by Jack Klugman's real-life wife Brett Somers, in occasional appearances. Seen infrequently was Felix's daughter, Edna ( played by Pamelyn Ferdin in the first few seasons and Doney Oatman later).

For a couple of seasons Miriam ( Elinor Donahue) served as Felix's girlfriend, but by the final season he had reconciled with his ex-wife Gloria ( Janis Hansen). The situation on which the series had been built was neatly resolved in the final episode when Felix moved out to remarry Gloria. Oscar returned to the apartment alone , looked around , and exploded into noisy, messy celebration at the prospect of uninhibited chaos-at last.

The Odd Couple was based on Neil Simon's hit Broadway play ( 1965), which was made into a movie ( 1968) starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.

Here's a Review of the 1968 Theatrical movie from Time Magazine

The Odd Couple
Friday, May. 03, 1968

Waddling around on feet that by all rights ought to be webbed, Oscar Madison is the slop-happiest hero in history. In midsummer, Christmas stockings still hang over his hearth, and his refrigerator is cleaned so seldom that he has milk standing up in there without the bottle. And yet, as played by Walter Matthau, he is the better half of The Odd Couple.

The Neil Simon comedy that lit up Broadway for more than two years shines again in this flawed but still funny screen adaptation. Heading for divorce, Felix Ungar (Jack Lemmon) is a casualty of the war between the sexes. The same calamity befell his old pal Oscar, an alimony-poor sportswriter with a rambling eight-room flat on Manhattan's Riverside Drive. Out of pity and penury, he invites Felix to share his lair. At this point Simon pulls the switch that brightens the screen: the partnership becomes a parody of a failing marriage. Oscar is the kind of host who offers his card-playing buddies green sandwiches that were "either very new cheese or very old meat." Felix is Mr. Clean, an uptight neurotic ("the only man in the world with clenched hair") who does all the shopping and cooking and charges the cigar-smoky atmosphere with deodorizer until his roommate mumbles: "Leave everything alone. I'm not through dirtying up for the night."

Can this marriage be saved? Felix tries, by allowing his partner to invite a couple of British birds for dinner. While Oscar plays the randy dandy, Felix hilariously glums up the works by showing pictures of his ex-wife and kids to the girls until they dissolve into enough tears to drown the evening. After a series of megatonic comic explosions, the men learn enough about themselves to try a second go with their former lives.

The Odd Couple is not quite the near-perfect comedy it could have been. Except for a handful of outdoor shots, Director Gene Saks has followed the original Mike Nichols staging with slavish and unimaginative fidelity. Time after time, the camera remains static while the dialogue is left to fend for itself. Although he is one of Hollywood's most polished performers, Lemmon too often strains to achieve the lines of tension that characterized Art Carney's high-strung stage interpretation of the role.

The film owes its comic force to two stars—one visible, the other unseen. Walter Matthau, with his loping, sloping style, mangled grin and laugh-perfect timing, may well be America's finest comic actor. And Playwright Neil Simon occasionally takes off his clowns' masks to show the humans beneath. In doing so, he has made his Odd Couple real people, with enough substance to cast shadows alongside the jokes.

An Article from Time Magazine

The Odd Squad
Monday, Oct. 26, 1970 Article

In Televisionland, inspiration seldom soars higher than a flying nun and quality is usually borrowed, not born. Thus it should be no surprise that the season's liveliest new situation comedy is an ABC adaptation of Neil Simon's five-year-old play, The Odd Couple. The success is not simply Simon's; the only writing he does for the weekly program is his name on the back of a weekly royalty check. The real source of the Odd Couple's life is the most empathetic team of situation comedians since Gleason and Carney. They are Tony Randall and Jack Klugman, and they combine total understanding of the play (in which they both performed) with contempt for the accustomed mechanical slickness of most TV comedy.

The stars' prime concern has been to avoid defamation of characters. Both of them are friends of Simon's brother, Danny, a TV writer whose divorce gave Simon the idea for Odd Couple. Danny became Felix, the fussy journalist who, after splitting with his wife, moves in with Oscar, an untidy sportswriter-divor-cee; the two, in turn and in caricature, unconsciously re-enact their failed marriages. Klugman once kidded Danny Simon: "Jesus, actors are ashamed to play the part of Felix." Replied Danny: "I was ashamed to live it."

Randall can play Felix almost by reflex action. The big problem is to keep the series' scriptwriters from turning the neurasthenic homemaker into a Mr. Belvedere, a kind of prissy know-it-all. "I must remain a kind of male Jewish mother, manipulating others as hysterical people do," says Randall. At the same time, he adds, Klugman has had to resist a depiction of Oscar as "excessively crass and vulgar, an unattractive middle-aged girl chaser. In the play, he is really a sensitive man. His sloppiness is merely neurotic."

Randall and Klugman thus spend the first day of work on every episode repairing the writing. When one script, in the latest TV mode, made a cynical and token pass at the nation's racial troubles, the stars gagged and turned the circumstance into parody: the black athlete became a token Eskimo. Randall and Klugman also lose battles. They were embarrassed by the third segment in the series, which lost bits of subtle humor to give more time to a leering portrayal of Oscar hustling an airline stewardess. The actors condemn the use of canned laughter as "an atrocity" and fume at the network's excision of the characters' children from the story. Randall complains that "ABC Standards & Practices says that divorced people don't have children. In the play, the fact that the men had children placed the beam of heartbreak under the structure."

The pair's passionate involvement with characterization suggests, rightly, that each sees himself in his part. About the only discrepancy is that both are long and apparently happily married. Randall, 46, like Felix, is compulsively neat; he is never without a Chap Stick ("a touch of security") and preaches against smoking. "You'll hate me for it," he explained to Klugman after ordering him to douse his cigar. "But you'll be a much better man." Randall's other causes are opera, ballet and peace politics. He was a friend of Jack and Bob Kennedy, campaigned for Eugene McCarthy, and is now working for such antiwar candidates as New York Congressman Allard Lowenstein. Fans should not be misled by his old Doris Day movies, his recordings of "mothball music" just this side of Tiny Tim, and his nutball performances on TV talk shows. Tony Randall is a serious actor whose dream is to wind up in a good repertory company.

Klugman, 48, like Oscar, claims to be a slob. But, says Randall, "he really isn't," although his dressing room does look like a locker room, and his dress is sloppy. After Lyndon Johnson "let me down," Klugman's major commitments have been apolitical —playing the horses and his work. Long a highly regarded character actor (he and Randall first met in the cast of a Philco Playhouse drama 20 years ago), Jack became more widely known in films following his role as Ali McGraw's father in Goodbye, Columbus.

Like so many of their New York-trained colleagues, Randall and Klugman loathe Hollywood and were overjoyed to be back East last week, after wrapping up their 15th show. As has often been proved, the good usually die young on TV, and the shaky ratings so far give no guarantee that Klugman and Randall will be recalled to the Coast to shoot No. 16. But the show is climbing and should continue to move up once the opposing CBS movie series runs out of blockbuster films (Butterfield 8, The Dirty Dozen so far). "Just watch us," says Randall, "when CBS is down to Gidget Buys a Vibrator.'"

Klugman, though admitting that "if I'm ever going to get rich, it's going to be in a series," is philosophical about the ratings sweepstakes. "I wouldn't want a success doing a cockamamie show I couldn't respect," he says. "If Tony and I fail, we have failed first-class."

Here is Tony Randall's Obituary from The New York Times

Tony Randall, 84, Dies; Fussbudget Felix in 'Odd Couple,' He Loved the Stage

By RICHARD SEVERO
Published: May 19, 2004

Tony Randall, the sardonic actor with the commanding voice and precise diction whose career in light-comic parts in Hollywood and on the New York stage seemed the perfect preparation for his signature role as the fussbudget Felix Unger in the classic television series ''The Odd Couple,'' died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 84 and lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Randall died in his sleep at N.Y.U. Medical Center with his wife, Heather, by his side, said Joe Trentacosta of Springer Associates, Mr. Randall's publicity firm. Mr. Trentacosta said Mr. Randall had been hospitalized since December, when he underwent a triple heart bypass and later contracted pneumonia.

Theaters on Broadway dimmed their lights last night at 8 in tribute.

Mr. Randall felt at home in Shakespeare and Shaw as well as in expounding the virtues of Verdi and other operatic composers, which he did on many occasions on public broadcasting and during intermission programs of Saturday broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera.

But he was best known for comedy, for which the public was eager to accept him, even when the material was flimsy.

He had so many frothy parts in the movies and on television that Mr. Randall slipped into sitcoms ''as if into a warm bath, to play with the rubber ducks the writers have provided,'' John Leonard wrote in The New York Times in 1976. ''Dignity is his wash rag. He is so talented that one wouldn't blame him for a hint of disdain, even of contempt, for many of the lines he has had to speak, the predicaments to be endured. There never has been any such hint. He somehow civilizes the material.'' Suave and urbane, his rich baritone the vehicle for the clipped diction of the demanding elocution professor that he easily could have been, Mr. Randall said he had been pleased to play Felix Unger, whose roommate and temperamental opposite was Oscar Madison, the slovenly, unkempt, cigar-smoking sportswriter played by Jack Klugman. These two New Yorkers were thrown together by the vicissitudes of life (mostly rejection by their wives) and made the worst of it, in a series that ran from 1970 to '75, continung in reruns.

Founder of Repertory Theater

But Mr. Randall, who won an Emmy Award for his portrayal, made clear that he did not want to be always or only thought of as Felix Unger, because he could do so many other things.

He had a great love of repertory theater and in 1991 founded, with a million dollars of his own money and much more from the moneyed sources who backed his commercial acting, the National Actors Theater in New York. Its purpose was to keep the works of playwrights like Ibsen, Chekhov and Arthur Miller before the public, and at a reasonable price. The critics were not especially kind to his efforts, and he said more than once that he was especially disappointed in the reviews that his company got from The New York Times. But he stuck with it, saying he refused ''to be brushed aside'' by The Times or any other newspaper.

He made clear, whenever he was asked, that his favorite role in more than 50 years of acting was that of a middle-aged American diplomat in the Broadway stage production of ''M. Butterfly,'' David Henry Hwang's 1988 Tony winner. In it, Mr. Randall's character falls in love with a gorgeous Japanese woman who turns out to be a male spy in disguise.

''It was the closest I ever came to being the kind of actor I believe in,'' he said on more than one occasion.

Tony Randall was born Leonard Rosenberg in Tulsa, Okla., on Feb. 26, 1920, the son of Mogscha Rosenberg, a dealer in artworks and antiques, and the former Julia Finston.

He was drawn to acting as a child. He had a most expressive, elastic face and used it in class when he was not expected to, with the result that one of his grade school teachers sent a note home, asking his parents to order him to stop making funny faces. He appeared in his first production in grade school and liked it so much that he decided acting was what he would do with the rest of his life. But when he went to Central High School in Tulsa, he was unsuccessful when he tried out for parts in school plays, perhaps because he then had a childhood stammer he was in the process of overcoming.

As a teenager he went to see plays whenever he could, and on one occasion Katharine Cornell came to town in a touring production of ''Romeo and Juliet.'' Mr. Randall went backstage to get her autograph, for which he was asked to pay 25 cents; Cornell informed him that such money went to charity. She borrowed the boy's pen to write her name.

''Someday,'' Mr. Randall said, ''I'll give you mine.''

''Autograph or pen?'' Miss Cornell inquired.

After high school Mr. Randall enrolled as a speech and drama major at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., but dropped out after a year and moved to New York, where he began to study acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of the Theater. His teachers there included Sanford Meisner, a stern taskmaster, and Martha Graham, the dancer, who gave him lessons on how to move about the stage gracefully.

He found work in radio in the early 1940's. One of his first parts was on a weekly show called ''I Love a Mystery,'' which revolved around three adventurers named Jack, Doc and Reggie. Mr. Randall was Reggie. His voice was also heard on radio soap operas like ''Portia Faces Life,'' ''When a Girl Marries'' and ''Life's True Story.''

In 1941 he made his New York stage debut in an adaptation of the 13th-century Chinese fantasy ''A Circle of Chalk,'' and later that year appeared in Shaw's ''Candida.'' He was in rehearsal for a part in Thornton Wilder's ''Skin of Our Teeth'' in 1942 when he was drafted into the Army. He quickly rose from private to first lieutenant but saw no combat action overseas. His last job with the Army was delivering classified documents to various offices in Washington.

After his discharge in 1946 he returned to New York and made appearances on a radio show then presided over by the satirist Henry Morgan. Over the next two years he renewed his acquaintance with Cornell, with parts in a touring production of ''The Barretts of Wimpole Street'' and on Broadway in ''Antony and Cleopatra.''

Eva Wolas wrote what was then described as a ''sex comedy'' in 1948, called ''To Tell the Truth,'' and Mr. Randall got a part in it. He was noticed by Brooks Atkinson of The Times, who wrote that Mr. Randall moved about the stage ''with the grace of a dancer.'' That led to his appearance in 1950 in ''Caesar and Cleopatra,'' which starred Lilli Palmer and Cedric Hardwicke.

Sidekick of 'Mr. Peepers'

Two years later he won a role on television that in a sense would presage his Felix Unger portrayal in that people began to feel that Mr. Randall and this character -- a schoolteacher named Harvey Weskit -- were really the same. The show was called ''Mr. Peepers.'' Produced by Fred Coe for NBC, it starred Wally Cox as Peepers, a sweet, shy, somewhat befuddled teacher. As Weskit, Mr. Randall was cast as Peepers's posturing, swaggering sidekick. It earned Mr. Randall an Emmy nomination. The role made both Mr. Cox and Mr. Randall stars.

By the late 1950's Mr. Randall was swamped with work, appearing in some of Max Liebman's television spectaculars and briefly substituting for Steve Allen on the ''Tonight'' show and for Arthur Godfrey, who then had a popular daytime show. There were also a great many television plays.

Throughout all of this he maintained his connection to the legitimate theater. In 1954 he played the part of a boozing movie star in ''Oh, Men! Oh, Women!'' and he also got the role of E. K. Hornbeck, the iconoclastic reporter in ''Inherit the Wind,'' a dramatization of the 1925 Scopes ''monkey trial'' about the teaching of evolution in Tennessee. Walter Kerr, writing in The New York Herald Tribune, said Mr. Randall played the role well, ''uttering juicy sarcasms with great finesse.''

He started to make Hollywood pictures, too. He appeared in the film version of ''Oh, Men! Oh, Women!'' and he was an advertising man in ''Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?'' That same year, 1957, 20th Century Fox asked him to appear as an alcoholic car salesman in Jerry Wald's ''No Down Payment,'' a melodrama about young marrieds.

In the late 50's and early 60's he appeared prominently in three Doris Day-Rock Hudson movies, ''Lover Come Back,'' ''Pillow Talk'' and ''Send Me No Flowers.'' He was cast as the foil to Mr. Hudson's romantic lead. He had roles of a similar vein in movies like ''Let's Make Love'' (with Marilyn Monroe), and ''Boys Night Out'' (with Kim Novak).

Among his other television credits are ''The Tony Randall Show'' (1977-78), in which he played a judge and ''Love, Sidney'' (1981-83), in which he played a middle-aged man who took in an unwed mother and offered to help raise her child. The Sidney character is often said to be the first gay lead character on television. The character was portrayed as gay in a television-movie version that preceded the series; the issue of homosexuality was played down in the series.

Voice of Aluminum

As he gained fame as an actor, Mr. Randall became active in a number of causes, including a futile effort to save the old Metropolitan Opera House. After the new opera house was finally built, Mr. Randall became a frequent visitor, showing up at the stage door for rehearsals and happily sitting through them when he was not working himself.

He had a fine baritone voice but disparaged it, explaining: ''I have a nice, healthy tone, but it's not terribly musical. Musicality is something that can't be taught.'' Mr. Randall, who studied voice for 32 years, added, ''If beautiful voices are golden, mine is aluminum.''

During this same period he became national chairman of the Myasthenia Gravis Foundation, a post he occupied for some 30 years. Myasthenia gravis is an incurable neuromuscular disease. Mr. Randall disliked maudlin pronouncements, and so when he was asked why he became involved with the foundation, he replied, ''My agent told me I needed a disease.''

Mr. Randall married Florence Gibbs in 1939. She died of cancer in 1992. They had no children. In 1995 he married Heather Hanlan, a former intern with the National Actors Theater, in 1995, when he was 75 and she was 24. She survives him, as do their two children -- Julia Laurette Randall, named after Mr. Randall's mother and Laurette Taylor, the Broadway star who died in 1946; and Jefferson Salvini Randall, named after Tommaso Salvini, a 19th-century Italian Shakespearean actor.

Although unfailingly good humored about his television fame, Mr. Randall remained dismayed that most of the television-watching public did not often, if ever, go to stage productions, and many did not recall ''M. Butterfly'' and the role he had enjoyed so much.

But they certainly remembered Felix. Even 20 years after ''The Odd Couple'' went off the air, Mr. Randall was often stopped on the streets of New York (he loved to walk and when he did not, he almost always took public transportation) by people who never forgot Felix and were convinced that Unger and Randall were one and the same.

''It was fun for the first 15 years,'' Mr. Randall said.

Correction: May 20, 2004, Thursday An obituary of the actor Tony Randall yesterday misstated the nationality of a character in the Broadway drama ''M. Butterfly,'' in which he played an American diplomat. The diplomat's love interest -- a spy who turns out to be a man in disguise -- is Chinese, not Japanese.

Correction: May 25, 2004, Tuesday An obituary of the actor Tony Randall on Wednesday included an erroneous reference from his publicity agency to the whereabouts of his wife, Heather, when he died. The agency later said she had been on her way to the hospital, not at his bedside.

An Article from Time Magazine on Tony Randall by Jack Klugman

Eulogy
Sunday, May. 23, 2004 By JACK KLUGMAN

People would go on about the "chemistry" between TONY RANDALL and me on The Odd Couple. But the chemistry really came out of the work. By the time the show began in 1970, we had 65 years of experience on the stage between us. We knew what we were doing. We'd start with a script every Monday, and maybe out of 40 pages only six would remain by week's end. We'd improvise, and the writers would rewrite, and the next day we'd go with what they had written. At the end of every season, we'd hear we were canceled. We'd be in the bottom 10 or in 52nd place. That went on for five years.

The Felix Unger role gave Tony a kind of recognition he liked. But he hated when people asked him if, like Felix, he was really neat. He'd get very sarcastic and say, "Oh, what a wonderful question!" Of course, the answer is no. But Tony was one of those guys who could buy a pair of pants for $2 and they would look like they came from Brooks Brothers. Whereas if I bought pants at Brooks Brothers, they would look like they cost $2. Whatever refinement I have was placed there by Tony.

If Tony resented the Felix Unger label, it was because he had done so many other things. His dream was to bring good, classic theater to America through repertory companies. He was outraged that it was not subsidized by the government. He said he would set up the National Actors Theater in New York, and nobody believed him, including me. And by God, he did it. He was like Don Quixote fighting the windmills, and thank God he did. During his last few years, he was the happiest actor I ever knew.

Tony Randall and Jack Klugman reunited on Larry King Live on March 23, 2001. To read a transcipt of the show go to http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0103/23/lkl.00.html

For 2 great reviews of The Odd Couple go to http://www.televisionheaven.co.uk/odd.htm and http://www.museum.tv/archives/etv/O/htmlO/oddcouplet/oddcouplet.htm