NEW YORK – Michael McGrath, a Tony Award-winning Broadway character actor who starred in hilarious, feel-good musicals and earned a Tony for “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” has died. He was 65.
According to his publicist, Lisa Goldberg, McGrath died Thursday at his Bloomfield, New Jersey, home. No other information was provided.
“Michael McGrath was as wonderful offstage as he was on,” Michael Urie said in a tribute. “Awesome, mischievous, and brilliant. His passing is heartbreaking, but I will carry what dad taught me with me wherever I go.”
McGrath appeared in over a dozen Broadway productions, including “Plaza Suite,” “She Loves Me,” “Tootsie,” and “Spamalot,” as well as on television as Martin Short’s sidekick on “The Martin Short Show.”
“Very saddened to hear that Michael McGrath, our first and most beloved Patsy in ‘Spamalot,’ has passed away,” Monty Python member Eric Idle tweeted. “Warm hugs to all the ‘Spamalot’ family and very happy memories of a lovely man.”
Michael McGrath, a Tony Award-winning Broadway character actor who starred in hilarious, feel-good musicals, has died. He was 65.
Michael earned the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Featured Musical Role 2012 for his performance as wise guy Cookie McGee in “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” starring Matthew Broderick and Kelli O’Hara.
In “Memphis,” he played a hard-boiled radio station owner, and in “On the Twentieth Century,” he sang “Five Zeros,” a hymn to the joys of money.
The Associated Press stated of Michael’s performance in “Follies” at City Centre in 2007, “he exudes a pugnacious, good-time Charlie conviviality that also hides insecurities.” The actor also moves with the assurance of a natural hoofer, especially in “The God-Why-Don’t-You-Love-Me Blues.”
His wife of 30 years, actress Toni Di Buono, and daughter, actress Katie Claire McGrath, survive him.
SOURCE – (AP)
