Oliver Burgess Meredith

Oliver Burgess Meredith died at his home in Malibu, California, on September 9, 1997. He was eighty-nine. Born in Cleveland on November 16, 1907, he became one of those American actors who seem to have been in everything: stage, radio, film noir, war pictures, television villains, and, late, a boxing trainer who would not stay down. He played George to Lon Chaney's Lennie in Of Mice and Men, took roles that required a quick mind behind a battered face, and spent the blacklist years navigating a industry that had turned suspicious of its own talent. Television later gave him the Penguin — a gleeful, umbrella-wielding chaos agent — and then Mickey Goldmill in the Rocky films, a part that made him newly beloved to people who had never seen the earlier work. Directing and writing interested him; so did the craft of disappearing into a scene without sanding off the odd edges. Colleagues remembered a professional who could be mischievous and exacting in the same rehearsal. Alzheimer's and cancer marked the end; the credits do not. Malibu was the last house. The voice — dry, urgent, capable of a growl or a chuckle — is still in the reels.