Tony winning-actor Fritz Weaver dies at 90

Fritz Weaver, a Tony Award-winning character actor who played a German Jewish doctor slain by the Nazis in the 1978 mini-series “Holocaust” and an Air Force colonel who becomes increasingly unstable as the nation faces a nuclear crisis in the 1964 movie “Fail Safe,” died at his home in Manhattan. He was 90.

  • Mr. Weaver won a Tony in 1970 for his role in Robert Marasco’s drama “Child’s Play,” about the malevolent environment at an exclusive Roman Catholic school for boys.
  • Fritz William Weaver was born on Jan. 19, 1926, in Pittsburgh, the son of John Carson Weaver and the former Elsa Stringaro.
  • Mr. Weaver and Pat Hingle played teachers of wildly different temperaments who inevitably became adversaries. Mr. Weaver was the fierce disciplinarian, Mr. Hingle his easygoing rival.
  • From the 1950s on, Mr. Weaver was a familiar presence on television shows like “Studio One,” “Playhouse 90,” “Mission: Impossible” and “Murder, She Wrote.”
  • He appeared in two episodes of “The Twilight Zone” — “The Obsolete Man” and “Third From the Sun,” in which he played a scientist who plots to take his family aboard a rocket to escape their planet before a nuclear war.
  • He was nominated for an Emmy for his performance in the NBC mini-series “Holocaust,” playing Dr. Josef Weiss, the patriarch of a Jewish family who is denied his livelihood, is sent to the Warsaw ghetto and then to Auschwitz to die.

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