More than just Felix

Tony Randall, who passed away Monday night at the age of 84, had a career of such length and breadth that one may be excused for underestimating it. (It takes a death to see these things whole.) Though his five years on “The Odd Couple” tend to occupy the foreground, for six decades he was active in every medium available to him -- stage, radio, television and film, even recordings. (He liked to sing novelty songs from the 1920s.) Randall was the very definition of a working actor, for whom the work and the acting took precedence over questions of fame and image.

Though in personal appearances he could seem a bit of a snob, he was professionally open to anything: thus a body of work that encompasses Shakespeare and Shaw, “The Gong Show Movie” and “Battle of the Network Stars.” Even as his presence on screens small and large diminished through the ‘80s and ‘90s, he continued to work onstage, both with his own National Actors Theater (as actor, director and producer) and in productions across the country.

Despite a lifelong love of serious drama, Randall’s gifts were essentially comic, his presence light, which is not to say lightweight. Lean and lithe, he possessed a feline grace -- he studied with Martha Graham -- that made him seem always younger than he was. (A quality that he obtained in his personal as well as professional life -- in his 70s, he married a woman 51 years his junior and became a father for the first, and then second, time.)

He was already 50 when he became a TV star, playing the obsessive-compulsive Felix to Jack Klugman’s lackadaisical slob Oscar on “The Odd Couple,” for which he won an Emmy in 1975. “The Tony Randall Show” and “Love, Sidney” followed, with less cultural effect. Situation comedy, filmed before a live audience, brought out the stage actor in him -- the vocal and bodily control, the largeness of effect, of someone who knew how to project to the back row of the balcony.

He had spent his 20s as a stage and then a radio actor in New York, moving early into television, and was 37 when he scored his first film success, “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?,” an advertising-age comedy in which he first played the character that would define his film work through the ‘60s -- the midcentury New York junior executive, a little neurotic, fairly hapless, always undone by the desires of the postwar, three-martini-lunch, gray-flannel world.

Always more a character actor than a movie star, he played supporting roles in A pictures and lead roles in B. Among the former films were a Rock Hudson-Doris Day trifecta of “Pillow Talk” (1959), “Lover Come Back” (1961) and “Send Me No Flowers” (1964) -- his final film appearance was in last year’s Hudson-Day homage “Down With Love.” Among the latter pictures were “The Brass Bottle,” “Fluffy” and “Rock Hunter,” in which his straight-arrow existence was upset by forces larger than life: a genie, a lion and Jayne Mansfield, respectively.

It wasn’t a long stretch from there to Felix Unger. Though Randall frequently asserted that the neuroses of Felix were not his own, the sophisticated tastes of the character -- a lover of opera, dance and art -- were all his. (He hosted “Live From the Metropolitan Opera” on PBS.) In his roles and his life, Randall was especially identified with New York, the city the Tulsa, Okla., native made his home since the 1940s.

In later years, bolstered by his frequent appearances on late-night talk shows -- he appeared more than 100 times each on “The Tonight Show” and with David Letterman -- the lingering image of callow late-maturing youth was replaced by that of a somewhat fearsome, headmasterish polymath. “There’s only one thing worse than a man who doesn’t have strong likes and dislikes,” he once said, “and that’s a man who has strong likes and dislikes without the courage to voice them.”