Jack Betts has handed away at 96 years outdated.
The actor starred on the cleaning soap opera “One Life to Live” from 1979 to 1985, showing in 20 episodes as Llanview Hospital’s Dr. Ivan Kipling.
Betts’ nephew, Dean Sullivan, instructed The Hollywood Reporter that the star died in his sleep at his home in Los Osos, California, on Thursday.
Betts lived with “Everybody Loves Raymond” actress Doris Roberts earlier than her dying at age 90 in 2016. The 2 would attend occasions collectively through the years and Roberts even directed a play written by Betts, a couple of cleaning soap opera, titled “Screen Test: Take One.”
The shut friends first met in 1954 at The Actors Studio in New York Metropolis in 1954. A long time later, in 1988, Betts accepted Roberts’ provide to maneuver from the Large Apple into the downstairs house at her Hollywood Hills residence.
“We were best friends to the very end, we had wonderful times together,” he gushed following her dying.
Betts was additionally identified for starring as Henry Balkan – the Oscorp board chair who fired Norman Osborn (Willem Defoe) – in Sam Raimi’s 2002 “Spider-Man.”
Norman then grew to become the villainous Inexperienced Goblin and vaporized Henry and the board.
Whereas on “The Dev Show” in 2020, Betts spoke about filming the Oscorp boardroom shot and the way he requested Raimi, 65, if he may add a few of his personal spin onto the scene.
“I really looked [Defoe] right in the eye, and I had kind of a smile in my eye — you know, like, ‘You’re fired, you motherf–ker,’” the actor defined. “After, I finished it, [Raimi] said, ‘That’s it. Terrific. Print that one.’”
“My point being is that I wanted to add something just a little different to it instead of doing it the same way over and over and over and over. [Raimi] he was willing to do that. He really was. Wonderful man to work with.”
The Hollywood vet was raised in Jersey Metropolis, New Jersey, earlier than shifting to Miami along with his household at age 10. The actor obtained his diploma in theater from the College of Miami, and shortly after commencement, relocated to New York to start appearing.
Betts landed his first position as a supporting actor within the 1953 Broadway adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Richard III.”
For 2 seasons, from 1960 to 1962, Betts performed detective Chris Devlin within the CBS thriller sequence “Checkmate” reverse Anthony George, Sebastian Cabot and Doug McClure. The present, created by Eric Ambler, adopted non-public detectives fixing instances in San Francisco with the assistance of a British criminologist.
Betts appeared 4 instances on CBS’ Perry Mason from 1961-66 earlier than he met Giraldi about starring in Sugar Colt. He instructed the director that he may trip a horse and had simply gained a taking pictures contest — after all, he had by no means been on a horse or dealt with a gun — however he spent the following three weeks studying these abilities at John Wayne’s ranch earlier than reporting for obligation at Cinecittà in Rome.
Shortly after, he entered the cleaning soap opera world, touchdown a task on “General Hospital” from 1963 to 1965.
From there, Betts made his mark on the franchises, and together with “One Life to Live,” he had components on “The Edge of Night,” “The Doctors,” “Another World,” “All My Children,” “Search for Tomorrow,” “Guiding Light,” “Loving,” “The Young and the Restless,” and “Generations.”
A few of Betts most memorable tv roles included “Seinfeld,” “Frasier,” “Everybody Loves Raymond,” “Monk,” and “Friends.”
His final credited sequence was on the Freeform drama “Good Trouble” in 2019.
When Betts stepped onto the spaghetti Western scene in 1966 because the title character Hunt Powers in Franco Giraldi’s “Sugar Colt,” he was capable of flip that movie into 15 others till 1973.
However Betts didn’t get the identical credit score as a sure fellow western star did.
“In the hotel next to mine was Clint Eastwood,” he recounted in a 2021 interview. “He’d go up to his mountain and do his Western and I’d go up to my mountain and do my Western. But while his films had distribution all over the world, my films were distributed [everywhere] except Canada and America.”
Betts is survived by his sister, Joan – who is about to show 100 this 12 months – nephew Dean, and nieces, Lynee and Gail.
