R.I.P. Ron Masak

[Mikezilla3k]

Ron Masak, the familiar character actor who as Cabot Cove Sheriff Mort Metzger was the beneficiary of Jessica Fletcher’s crime-solving prowess on the last eight seasons of Murder, She Wrote, has died. He was 86.

Masak died Thursday of natural causes at a hospital in Thousand Oaks, his granddaughter Kaylie Defilippis told The Hollywood Reporter.

The Chicago native appeared six times on Police Story, five times on Bewitched and four times on Webster and also showed up on everything from The Flying Nun, Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie, Ironside and The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Magnum, P.I., The Rockford Files, Columbo, Falcon Crest and Cold Case during his six-decade career.

In February 1960, the everyman actor portrayed a harmonica-playing soldier on “The Purple Testament,” the 19th episode of The Twilight Zone, and had a turn as a nutty Dracula-like count on The Monkees in 1968.

On the summer 1973 ABC sitcom Love Thy Neighbor, based on a hit British TV show, Masak and Joyce Bulifant portrayed a husband and wife who discover they’re not as open-minded as they thought when a Black couple (Harrison Page, Janet MacLachlan) move in next door.

Masak made his big-screen debut in the John Sturges espionage thriller Ice Station Zebra (1968), starring Rock Hudson and Ernest Borgnine, then appeared opposite George Hamilton in Evel Knievel (1971) and as a bartender and friend of Barbara Eden’s character in Harper Valley P.T.A. (1978).

A Hollywood columnist once dubbed Masak “the King of Commercials,” and he served for 15 years as a pitchman for Vlasic pickles, voicing the animated, bow-tied stork that sounds a lot like Groucho Marx.

After playing a couple of other characters on the series, Masak joined the Angela Lansbury-starring Murder, She Wrote in 1988 for its fifth season after the previous inept Cabot Cove sheriff, Amos Tupper (Tom Bosley), left Maine to live with his sister in Kentucky. (In reality, Bosley had departed to star on NBC’s Father Dowling Mysteries.)

He appeared as Metzger on 41 episodes of the CBS show through 1996, with his character — who had quit the New York Police Department in search of a quieter work life up north — driving around town in a red 1976 Cadillac Eldorado.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv...te-1235246004/