George S. Irving has taken his final bow at the age of 94. I never met Mr. Irving but I admired him from afar. As this obit reminds us, he had a long and glorious career as an actor. It was mostly on the stage but he was also on TV and he seemed to be in the cast of about two-thirds of all the cartoons that recorded voices in New York from the sixties on. If you ever watched Underdog, you'd know his voice.
He basically worked as a professional actor from 1942 until 2015. It's stunning when you can do anything professionally for 73 years. Acting for all that time might not be as difficult as being a goaltender in the National Hockey League for 73 years but it's not all that much easier.
Okay, I'm going to embed one of my favorite videos of the thousands I've posted here. I reposted it last year around this time but it's worth more than an annual viewing. This is Mr. Irving re-creating a number he performed in a 1976 Broadway show that, alas, closed rapidly. It was called So Long, 174th Street but in hindsight, people took to calling it Enter Laughing, which was the name of the novel by Carl Reiner upon which it was based.
All you need to know is the show (and novel and movie) concerned David Kolowitz, a young man in 1938 who dreams of becoming a huge star in Hollywood. Robert Morse played the role on the stage. Mr. Irving played his butler in a fantasy sequence, imagining what that stardom might be like. Here is the late, great George S. Irving being great at 88…