Kenneth Mars, a Mel Brooks collaborator who played a Hitler-worshipping playwright in “The Producers” and an earnest police inspector with a malfunctioning artificial arm in “Young Frankenstein”, has died at 75.
Mars had been on Broadway and appeared in several hit TV shows (“Get Smart”, “Gunsmoke”) when he was cast as the Hitler-worshiping playwright in Brooks’ 1968 comedy, “The Producers”. Six years later, he was Transylvania’s one-armed, eye-patch-wearing police inspector who leads the rioting townspeople against the monster in “Young Frankenstein”.
Mars also appeared in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, “The Parallax View”, and two Woody Allen films “Radio Days” and “Shadows And Fog”. He was also notable in Peter Bogdanovich’s “What’s Up, Doc?”. In recent years, he’d voiced many animated characters (such as King Triton in “The Little Mermaid”) and had a recurring role on the TV series, “Malcolm in the Middle” as well as hundreds of other appearances on TV shows.
Graham Spicer is a writer, director and photographer in Milan, blogging (under the name ‘Gramilano’) about dance, opera, music and photography for people “who are a bit like me and like some of the things I like”. He was a regular columnist for Opera Now magazine and wrote for the BBC until transferring to Italy.
His scribblings have appeared in various publications from Woman’s Weekly to Gay Times, and he wrote the ‘Danza in Italia’ column for Dancing Times magazine.
