Gene Barry
Live Performance Category Star
- Ceremony was on May 5, 1988
Gene Barry
Debonair actor Gene Barry dies at 90
He starred in Burke's Law
By Dennis McLellan The Los Angeles Times
LOS ANGELES - Gene Barry, the ruggedly handsome actor who made a career of playing dapper and debonair lead characters on television beginning with the Western series "Bat Masterson" in the late 1950s and later as the star of "Burke's Law" and "The Name of the Game," has died. He was 90.
Barry, a versatile performer who delivered a Tony-nominated performance in the hit 1980s Broadway musical "La Cage aux Folles," died Wednesday of congestive heart failure at Sunrise Assisted Living in Woodland Hills, said his son, Michael Barry.
The actor, who had Alzheimer's disease for about five years, entered Sunrise in early summer 2009. The increased socialization improved his father's mental capacity, his son said.
"He was a very loving and generous father," he said, "and he was handsome, charming and funny until the end."
A New York veteran of plays and musicals who became a Paramount contract player in 1951, Barry had made more than a dozen movies and numerous TV appearances, including starring in the science-fiction classic "The War of the Worlds," when he was offered the title role in "Bat Masterson."
Barry, however, wasn't interested in joining the era's crowded ranks of TV cowboys. Then someone told him that Masterson wore a derby hat and carried a gold-headed cane.
"That appealed to the actor in me," Barry recalled in a 1989 Associated Press interview. "If it hadn't been for that, I would have turned it down. I didn't want to be tied down doing a Western. I went to wardrobe and found that hat and cane and an elegant swallowtail coat and shiny black boots.
"I looked at myself in the mirror, and I knew exactly how to play this man. The costume dictated my performance. It changed my life. Every role I've done since has been a guy who looked good in clothes."
After playing the charming Old West dandy on NBC from 1958 to 1961, Barry returned to series television in 1963 as Capt. Amos Burke, the millionaire Los Angeles chief of detectives on ABC's "Burke's Law."
A suave and sophisticated magnet for beautiful women, the impeccably dressed Burke lived in a palatial mansion and rode around town in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce.
Barry was perfectly suited for the role. As producer Aaron Spelling told TV Guide at the time: "He has the remarkable knack of wearing a tuxedo well. He is at home in it, secure in it."
But by the early 1980s, Barry was primarily doing commercial voice-over work for Miller beer, Ford, Haggar and other companies, and his acting career was in decline.
Then in 1983, Barry auditioned for the role in "La Cage aux Folles" of Georges, the gay impresario of a drag nightclub and father of a son who is about to marry the daughter of a bigoted politician. He won a Tony Award nomination for best actor in a musical the following year.
His final screen role was in Steven Spielberg's 2005 "War of the Worlds," in which Barry and Ann Robinson, his co-star in the 1953 movie, played grandparents.
Besides his son Michael, Barry is survived by his other children, Fred and Elizabeth; three grandchildren; and two great-grand-children.
