Actor Fritz Weaver Dies At 90

Actor Fritz Weaver has died at the age of 90. He passed away on Saturday at his home in [...]

Actor Fritz Weaver has died at the age of 90. He passed away on Saturday at his home in Manhattan.

Weaver received an Emmy nomination for NBC's acclaimed 1978 drama series Holocaust. He portrayed a Jewish doctor named Dr. Josef Weiss who was sent first to the Warsaw ghetto and then to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex where he was then murdered by the Nazis.

Rosemary Harris, who played Weaver's wife in the series recently said to Deadline, "Somebody sent us photographs of Fritz and I the other day. Oh, it all came flapping back. There's a picture of me saying goodbye to him when he was getting on the train, and oh, it's still painful. It filmed in Vienna and also in Berlin. And we spent a day at Mauthausen [the concentration camp in northern Austria]. George Rose and Meryl and I and Fritz, we'd all huddle together when we came back from filming and meet in the bar and just sort of sit there."

After earning a Tony Award nomination for his role as an English butler in Enid Bagnold's 1955 Broadway comedy The Chalk Garden, Weaver made regular appearances on Broadway and off. In 1970, he won a Tony Award for his performance in Child's Play.

Most recently, Weaver was dedicated to developing an all-new play with True Detective's Jay O. Sanders about the Rwandan genocide of 1994 titled Unexplored Interior.

"Fritz was an extraordinary man and actor of great passion, elegance, broad literary reach, and impeccable craft," Sanders said. "Over the ten years of developing my play, in which he played Mark Twain, he would regularly call me out of the blue to check in on my progress. 'It's important!' he would say…which kept me going."

Weaver portrayed key characters in films such as 1964's Fail-Safe, Marathon Man (1976), Day of the Dolphin (1973), and The Thomas Crown Affair (1999). He also had a countless number of roles on notable prime-time television series including The Twilight Zone, Playhouse 90, and Omnibus.

Actress Maryann Plunket, Weaver's co-star in The Crucible said: "Fritz Weaver was an elegant, generous, supremely talented actor I was privileged to share the stage with and learn from. He was a dear friend who loved his family with passion. A good, good man."

Fritz Weaver is survived by his wife, Rochelle Oliver; his daughter, Lydia Weaver; and his son, Anthony.

Our thoughts and prayers go out to Fritz Weaver's family and friends.

[H/T Deadline]

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