Sad but not surprised to hear of the passing of our pal Warren Berlinger, who went away yesterday morning at the age of 83 after a long and awful fight with cancer. Before he hit a certain stage of life, Warren was a very talented, oft-hired leading man type on TV, in films and on the stage. After he hit that stage, he was a very talented, oft-hired character actor in all the same places. I'm going to steal the career overview from something that our mutual friend Steve Stoliar posted on Facebook…
Warren had an endless string of stories, which was no surprise, because of his lengthy, prolific career. His Broadway work goes back to the original 1946 production of Annie, Get Your Gun and he scored a big hit in Blue Denim, both on Broadway and in the film version. Other films in which he appeared include The Wackiest Ship in the Army, Spinout, The Long Goodbye, Harry and Walter Go To New York, The Shaggy D.A., Cannonball Run, The World According to Garp and That Thing You Do, amongst many others.
He was also a frequent presence on TV in such series as That Girl, Love American Style, Operation Petticoat, Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, just to name a very few.
I'll add a few more: Warren was in the original Broadway cast of Neil Simon's first play, Come Blow Your Horn, and he starred in the London production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and later toured occasionally in this country. On TV, he had a recurring role on Joey Bishop's sitcom and was later in the cast of a short-lived TV series on NBC in 1971 called The Funny Side. I met him on the set of that show in a visit I wrote about here.
IMDB, Wikipedia and other online sources will tell you he was the nephew of Milton Berle, whose real last name was, yes, Berlinger. Other sites will tell Uncle Miltie was not Uncle Miltie to Warren. The truth, if you asked Warren, was that he was much more distantly related to Berle. He would sometimes however suggest jokingly that the legendary Berle phallus ran in the family. I don't know about that but having a long, successful career sure did. We're gonna miss that guy.