Jack Betts, the debonair character actor who starred in spaghetti Westerns, performed Dracula for a fleeting second on Broadway and appeared in such notable movies as Spider-Man and Gods and Monsters, has died. He was 96.
Betts died Thursday in his sleep at dwelling in Los Osos, California, his nephew, Dean Sullivan, advised The Hollywood Reporter.
Betts was nice mates with Everyone Loves Raymond actress Doris Roberts, with whom he shared a house and escorted her to occasions all through Hollywood from the late Nineteen Eighties till her demise in April 2016.
A member of The Actors Studio, Betts portrayed Llanview Hospital physician Ivan Kipling on ABC’s One Life to Reside from 1979-85, and his cleaning soap opera résumé additionally included stints on Basic Hospital, The Fringe of Night time, The Medical doctors, One other World, All My Kids, Seek for Tomorrow, Guiding Gentle, Loving and Generations.
Betts bluffed his method into starring because the avenging title character in Franco Giraldi’s Sugar Colt (1966), the place he was billed as Hunt Powers for the primary time. The movie kicked off a run of about 15 spaghetti Westerns for him via 1973 however left him with out the celebrity loved by one other American star of comparable Italian fare.
“Within the resort subsequent to mine was Clint Eastwood,” he recalled in a 2021 interview. “He’d go as much as his mountain and do his Western and I’d go as much as my mountain and do my Western. However whereas his movies had distribution everywhere in the world, my movies have been distributed [everywhere] besides Canada and America.”
In Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002), Betts’ character, Henry Balkan, tells Willem Dafoe’s Norman Osborn that he’s via at Oscorp Applied sciences — “You’re out, Norman” — however the Inexperienced Goblin will quickly flip him and his fellow board members into skeletons during an attack on Times Square.
Jack Betts with Doris Roberts on the Hollywood Movie Awards in Beverly Hills in 2015.
Mark Davis/Getty Photos
Jack Fillmore Betts — he mentioned he was associated to the 13th U.S. president, Millard Fillmore — was born on April 11, 1929, in Jersey Metropolis, New Jersey. When he was 10, he moved along with his household to Miami and was impressed to develop into an actor after seeing Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights (1939).
After graduating from Miami Senior Excessive Faculty, he studied on the College of Miami, the place he studied theater and acted within the Moss Hart play Gentle Up the Sky in Cuba. He then moved to New York and made it to Broadway in 1953 in Richard III, starring José Ferrer.
Betts had a job in a lamp manufacturing facility when a buddy requested him to do a scene together with her for her audition for The Actors Studio, and that led to Lee Strasberg giving him a three-year scholarship to review there. He later earned a spot on the famed studio, with Elia Kazan placing him in a manufacturing of Cat on a Scorching Tin Roof.
He made his big-screen debut in The Bloody Brood (1959), starring Peter Falk, then joined Anthony George, Sebastian Cabot and Doug McClure in 1961 to play detective Chris Devlin on the second and final season of CBS’ Checkmate, created by Eric Ambler.
Betts appeared 4 occasions on CBS’ Perry Mason from 1961-66 earlier than he met Giraldi about starring in Sugar Colt. He advised the director that he might trip a horse and had simply gained a capturing contest — in fact, he had by no means been on a horse or dealt with a gun — however he spent the subsequent three weeks studying these abilities at John Wayne’s ranch earlier than reporting for obligation at Cinecittà in Rome.
Betts additionally was working for actress-turned-publicist Helen Ferguson on the time, and she or he gave him the stage identify Hunt Powers.
Betts returned to Broadway for Kazan in a 1959-60 manufacturing of Tennessee Williams’ Candy Hen of Youth earlier than touchdown on the 1977-80 revival of Dracula. He portrayed Dr. Seward, and as Raul Julia’s standby, he acquired to step in because the rely — however solely as soon as — a spotlight of his profession.
Holding with that theme, he performed Boris Karloff in Invoice Condon’s Gods and Monsters (1998), starring Ian McKellen.
Betts additionally confirmed up in such movies as The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), Falling Down (1993), Batman Endlessly (1995), Batman & Robin (1997), 8MM (1999) and Workplace House (1999) and on TV sequence together with Gunsmoke, The F.B.I., It Takes a Thief, Kojak, Remington Steele, Frasier, Everyone Loves Raymond, Associates, My Identify Is Earl, The Mentalist and Monk.
Betts first met Roberts at The Actors Studio in 1954, and he accepted her supply to maneuver from New York right into a downstairs house in her Hollywood Hills dwelling in 1988. “We have been greatest mates to the very finish, we had fantastic occasions collectively,” he mentioned.
Roberts additionally directed a play Betts wrote, Display Take a look at: Take One, a few cleaning soap opera that originated on a movie set.
Along with his nephew, survivors embrace his nieces, Lynne and Gail, and his sister, Joan, who turns 100 in November.