Keenan Wynn

Francis Xavier Aloysius James Jeremiah Keenan Wynn, the gravel-voiced character actor who could turn a supporting part into the center of a scene, died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Brentwood, California, on October 14, 1986. He was seventy. He was born in New York City on July 27, 1916, into show business on both sides. His father was the comedian Ed Wynn; his maternal grandfather was the actor Frank Keenan. He grew up around theaters and radio studios, served in the Army Air Forces during World War II, and by the late 1940s was under contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, where casting directors learned they could hand him anything from a gangster to a colonel and he would find the dry comic edge. He appeared in more than 200 films and television shows. Audiences remember him as the frantic gambling-house owner in Annie Get Your Gun, as one of the comic villains opposite Frank Sinatra in Anchors Aweigh's orbit, and especially as Colonel "Bat" Guano in Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964), the deadpan officer who shoots a Coca-Cola machine for change to call the President. He worked steadily in television Westerns and dramas, including The Twilight Zone and Dallas, and played opposite his father in the television adaptation of Requiem for a Heavyweight. Off camera he was an early motorcycle and motorboat racer and a familiar figure at Southern California tracks. He married the actress Eve Abbott; their son Ned Wynn became a writer, and another son, Tracy Keenan Wynn, a screenwriter. He kept working almost until the end, refusing to let illness erase the professional habit of showing up prepared. He is buried at Forest Lawn in Hollywood Hills. The laugh that comes a half-beat late in Dr. Strangelove is still his.