Joseph Bologna, who looked like the quintessential tough guy but couldn’t seem to resist writing and playing sensitive male characters who longed for love and commitment in films like “Lovers and Other Strangers” and “Made for Each Other,” died on Sunday in Duarte, Calif., near Pasadena. He was 82.
His death, at the City of Hope Hospital, was confirmed by his publicist, Dick Guttman. Mr. Bologna learned he had pancreatic cancer three years ago.
Mr. Bologna’s fame, like his onscreen persona, had its roots on the Broadway stage. He was 34 when “Lovers and Other Strangers,” four short plays about couples of various ages and situations that he wrote with his wife, Renée Taylor, opened at the Brooks Atkinson Theater. Clive Barnes of The New York Times praised it as a “sprightly quartet of revue-style playlets,” written with “compassion, insight and irony.”
The production, in which Ms. Taylor starred, ran only two months, but Mr. Bologna and Ms. Taylor sold the film rights. “Lovers and Other Strangers” the movie (1970) was a box-office hit, earning roughly three times its production cost in North America alone and garnering the couple a shared Oscar nomination (with a co-writer, David Zelag Goodman) for best adapted screenplay.
Continue reading the main storyThat bought the Bologna-Taylor team major credibility, which they turned into their next film, “Made for Each Other” (1971), a satire based on their own love story. Mr. Bologna made his screen debut, starring opposite his wife as an Italian-American bachelor who meets a neurotic Jewish actress in an encounter group and does psychological battle with self-esteem issues and a fear of intimacy.
“It’s a deep, loving character study and manages to make us laugh while demonstrating how much the truth can hurt,” Roger Ebert wrote of “Made for Each Other” in The Chicago Sun-Times.
As soon as Hollywood casting directors met Mr. Bologna, they saw him as a gangster. He was cast as the mobster Joe Bonanno in the TV movie “Honor Thy Father” and as a police officer turned thief in “Cops and Robbers” (1973).
He combined comedy and the tough-guy personality, and received the best reviews of his career, in “My Favorite Year” (1982), as King Kaiser, a tyrannical 1950s TV variety-show host modeled on Sid Caesar. Kaiser may have been a law-abiding citizen, but his ego was criminal.
The typecasting took only partial hold, as Mr. Bologna made a film career in varied comedy roles. In “Blame It on Rio” (1984), he starred as a middle-aged adulterer whose teenage daughter had an affair with his best friend, played by Michael Caine. He was a mad scientist in “Transylvania 6-5000” (1985) and Adam Sandler’s father in “Big Daddy” (1999). He and Ms. Taylor continued to make films together, including “Love Is All There Is” (1996), a Romeo and Juliet story about dueling catering families on City Island, in the Bronx.
In 2001, Mr. Bologna and Ms. Taylor — in their 60s — wrote and starred in “If You Ever Leave Me … I’m Going With You!,” a Broadway show that consisted largely of anecdotes about their marriage. It closed after eight weeks, but they publicized it beforehand by interviewing each other for The Times. Asked how he felt about working with his wife so often, Mr. Bologna declared the arrangement “very practical.”
“I can have an affair with my director, writer and co-star at the same time,” he said. “That saves a lot of wear and tear at my age.”
Mr. Bologna was born on Dec. 30, 1934, in Brooklyn, the son of Anthony and Josephine Bologna.
Joe Bologna was the son, grandson and nephew of bootblacks. His grandfather Giuseppe Bologna was the author of “At the Feet of the Mighty: A Bootblack’s Biography,” and Joe’s uncle Pat Bologna recalled giving investment advice to Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. that helped Kennedy avoid the financial devastation of the 1929 crash. Kennedy remembered it with a slightly different point of view. “When the shoeshine boys have tips,” he said, “the stock market is too popular for its own good.”
Joe graduated from Brown University with a degree in art history. When he was cast in a student stage production of “Stalag 17” there, he was surprised to discover that he had dramatic abilities. “I found out that I could do things that other people couldn’t do,” he told the actor Robert Wuhl in a 2016 podcast.
But he did not immediately consider an acting career. Instead he joined the Marine Corps. He later found an entry-level job at a New York advertising agency and worked his way up to directing television commercials. He had also considered a career as an architect, he said, but believed his freehand sketching wasn’t good enough.
He met Ms. Taylor while moonlighting as a joke writer for comedians. “We spent most of our courting in Sardi’s,” the theater-district restaurant, he told The Daily News in 1996. They married in 1965, and the reception was broadcast on “The Merv Griffin Show,” on which Ms. Taylor had been a frequent guest. They had a son, Gabriel Bologna, an actor and director. In addition to his wife and son, Mr. Bologna is survived by a daughter, Zizi Bologna; a sister, Barbara Carson; and a grandson.
Gabriel Bologna directed his father’s final film performance, as a priest in “Tango Shalom,” an indie comedy. The elder Mr. Bologna was also a screenwriter. His last television appearance was as a serial killer’s father, a gruff but gracious Italian-American restaurateur, in a 2010 episode of “C.S.I.”
Mr. Bologna, who always thought of himself more as a writer than an actor, liked to talk about comedy. “You have to have surprise and inevitability at the same time,” he said in a 2003 interview with The San Francisco Chronicle. “That’s what makes you laugh. Subliminally, you know where the scene is going and that even the most outrageous insults are somehow going to end well.”
But over the decades, the subject that reporters tended to ask Mr. Bologna and Ms. Taylor about most frequently was the secret of their enduring marriage and professional collaboration. Mr. Bologna often pointed out the ways in which they were opposites, far beyond their religious upbringings. (She was Jewish. He was Roman Catholic.)
“I was a hedonist, and she was a sufferer,” he told The Boston Globe good-naturedly in 1984. “I taught her pleasure, and she taught me to suffer.”
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the given names of Mr. Bologna’s parents. They were Anthony and Josephine, not Peter and Antonett. The earlier version also misidentified the author of the book “At the Feet of the Mighty.” It was Mr. Bologna’s grandfather Giuseppe Bologna, not his uncle Pat Bologna.