Del Close, 64, A comedian with a Flair for improvisation.
Del Close, 64, A comedian with a Flair for improvisation.
Del Close, an actor, improvisational comic and mentor to such comedians as John Belushi, John Candy and Bill Murray, died on March 4, [1999] at Illinois Masonic Hospital in Chicago. He was 64 and lived in Chicago.
The cause was emphysema, said Charna Halpern, his partner for the last 15 years at Improv Olympic, a theater school and performance space.
A lifelong devotee of improvisational comedy, Mr. Close was one of those show business legends whose influence was felt far beyond his limited fame. As one of the founders of the Committee, the San Francisco comedy troupe of the 1960's; as a longtime performer with the director of the Second City troupe in Chicago, and a resident coach of the "Saturday Night Live" troupe during its early years, Mr. Close played guru to many of the most prominent comedians of the last quarter century.
Mercurial and hard-living, he has a dark - some said morbid - sense of humor, which was evident on the night before he died. Some 50 of his friends, including Mr. Murray and the director Harold Ramis, gathered in his hospital room for a raucous farewell, during which, among other things, Mr. Close bequeathed his skull to the Goodman Theater and telephoned his final instructions to the group he had been coaching, the Upright Citizens Brigade.
Mr. Close never married and leaves no immediate survivors.
The son of a jeweler, Del Close was born 1934, in Manhattan, KS. HE was the second cousin of Dwight D. Eisenhower. As a teenager, he left home to join a traveling carnival leaning to swallow fire and survive as the target of a knife thrower. In the mid-1950's, he joined the St. Louis company of the Compass player, an improvisational troupe created by Mike Nichols and Elaine May. The troupe was the direct ancestor of Second City, which was founded in 1959 and which Mr. Close joined in 1962. By then he had performed on Broadway in a comedy about beatniks called "The Nervous Set."
For the next two decades, he had an on-again off-again relationship with Second City, which grew ever rockier as his predilection for improvisation clashed with the troupe's scripted sketches. HE finally left in 1983, joining Ms. Halpern at Improv Olympics, where they developed a method, which they called Harold, for creating extended comic improvisations.
Over the years, Mr. Close created two comedy albums, "How to Speak Hip" and :the Do-it- Yourself Psychoanalysis Kit." He acted in many films, including :Ferris Bueller's Day off," "The Untouchables," "Fat Man and Little Boy" [and the sixties film "Gold"].