His daughter married leading right-wing commentator, Andrew Breitbart. Meanwhile, his politics turned more conservative. Quinn, Medicine Woman.” He remained active on the screen in recent years with guest shots in such shows as “Desperate Housewives,” “How I Met Your Mother” and “Modern Family.” In the 1990s, he played the shopkeeper Loren Bray on the long-running drama “Dr. “I got sick of contemplating my navel and staring up at the sky and telling myself how wonderful it was not to be doing anything,” he explained in a 1983 interview with The New York Times. and - after a period as a self-described “house-husband” - resumed his career. He also starred on Broadway with Maureen O’Sullivan in “Never Too Late” and with Melina Mercouri in “Illya Darling,” based on her hit film “Never on Sunday.”īean took a break from his career for a time in the 1970s when he dropped out and moved to Australia, where he lived a hippie lifestyle. Bean starred on Broadway as a timid fan magazine writer in George Axelrod’s 1955 Hollywood spoof “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” alongside Jayne Mansfield and Walter Matthau. The blacklist didn’t stop him in the theater. “Basically I was blacklisted because I had a cute communist girlfriend,” he explained in a 2001 interview. The dramatic outcome inspired a national catchphrase as the host turned to the three and said: “Will the real (notable’s name) please stand up?”īean’s style appealed to both Jack Paar and Johnny Carson, and he appeared on “The Tonight Show” more than 200 times.īut his early career was hobbled for a time when he found himself on the Hollywood blacklist in the early years of the Cold War. In a 1983 New York Times interview, he recalled his early career in small clubs where the show consisted of “me - master of ceremonies, comedian and magician - maybe a dog act, and a stripper.” It was a piano player in one such club, he said, who suggested replacing Dallas Burrows with some funny name like “Roger Duck” - or Orson Bean.īean’s quick wit and warm personality made him a favorite panelist for six years on “To Tell the Truth.” The game required the panelists to quiz three contestants to figure out which one was a real notable and which two were impostors. His father, George, was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and Bean recalled later that his “house was filled with causes.” But he left home at 16 after his mother died by suicide. He had picked the stage name Orson Bean “because it sounded funny.” Born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1928 as Dallas Frederick Burrows, he never lost the Yankee accent that proved a perfect complement to the dry, laconic storytelling that established him as popular humorist.
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