Orson Bean, Actor and Perennial Guest on Game and Talk Shows, with 989 Credits in TV and Pictures, and Thousands of Stage Performances, Killed at 91 Crossing the Street, When He was Hit by Drivers Coming and Going

 

Orson Bean at circa 90 years of age, with his last wife, Ally Mills, who had played the protagonist's winsome mom on The Wonder Years in the late 1980s and early 1990s
 

By Nicholas Stix

When I was a kid, Orson Bean was ubiquitous on game and talk shows. I didn’t even know he was an actor. They used to say that James Brown was “the hardest-working man in show business,” but after checking out Bean’s credits, I’m not so sure. The man was always working.
 

Orson Bean on Broadway in 1955-56, in Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?; he looks a bit like his contemporary, the young Dick York here
 

And note that in a business, in which I have seen some greats have to retire early, due to dementia (Rita Hayworth, Edmond O’Brien, Curtis Hanson, et al.) the man seems to have never lost his wits, save perhaps for the bitter end. He was wounded by a driver going one way, and then killed by a second driver going in the opposite direction. Neither driver appears to have seen him (it was about 7:35 p.m.), and the second driver reportedly was distracted by witnesses who had seen the first accident, and who were trying to warn him off from hitting Bean a second time.

Talk about a guy's luck running out!

Until more information comes in, I’ll have little to say beyond the foregoing about Orson Bean’s death. However, I do know that there are many intersections in this country, especially in California and New York City, where a pedestrian takes his life in his hands, just crossing the street. You need the reflexes of an assassin. Fifty might be too old to make it across in one piece.
 

Orson Bean on a game show, circa 1960 

There is one negative in the man’s resume: Bean appears to have been one of many fake blacklistees.

“But his early career was hobbled for a time when he found himself on the Hollywood blacklist in the early years of the Cold War.

“‘Basically I was blacklisted because I had a cute communist girlfriend,’ he explained in a 2001 interview. “I stopped working on TV for a year.’

“The blacklist didn’t stop him in the theater.”

Never happened. If you thoroughly study his countless TV and movie credits at IMDB.com, you’ll find that there was no year, in which Bean had fewer than three TV credits (1957 was his low point, and that was not the “early years of the Cold War”). And unless you quickly responded to the blacklist by naming names, you didn’t get back in action in one year.

For generations, there has been a cottage industry of old performers who asserted that they were blacklisted, and writers who covered for them. Some of these people had more work when they were supposedly “blacklisted” than when they supposedly weren’t.

On the other hand, Bean doesn't talk like those guys, who are dyed-in-the-wool Reds.

I’m working on an article on the topic, though it’s on a back burner, and it may be very hard to get clean dope on Orson Bean.

Nonetheless, Bean had some very interesting things to say about the communist and race wars of the past 70-odd years. He was clearly much more intelligent than the average actor.

“TV used to bring people together in the days of Kunta Kinte and Roots (1977). Now it’s separating people. Even in sports, if there is one place where you should forget politics, forget whether you’re liberal or conservative, whether you hate Trump or love him, it should be the ballgame. Instead they have to rear the ugly head of politics by kneeling instead of standing. So it’s changed, and not for the better.

“In the days of ‘Hey, hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?,’ that’s nothing compared to the vitriol of today. So people basically shut up, at least until they get into the ballot box. That’s why you can’t trust the polls.

“In the fifties, there was the blacklist, the Hollywood Ten. There was something that preceded it, that to my knowledge has never been written about, which was a group of communists or actors who they could persuade to become communists in their movies and there was a lot of bitterness on the part of right-wing actors that they were blacked out of a lot of these movies, and this preceded the left-wing blacklist that happened because there were these communist directors who were blacklisting not just right-wingers, but non-communists, and out this came rage on the part of the right, and they began to call anyone who didn’t agree with them a 'communist.'

“All these kids that are getting brainwashed in college are going to become the CEOs and the mayors of cities and governors and, ultimately, Presidents. They are what they are because of all of these Marxist professors. The deplorables in flyover country are not going to run for office or become heads of companies, so they’re having an immediate effect by voting, but I don’t see how in the long range, how we’re going to change this. All of our leaders of industry and politics are of a left-wing bent.”

Variety obit.

His movie and TV credits; and

His Broadway credits.

Breitbart:

Orson Bean was Andrew Breitbart’s father-in-law. In Bean’s honor the news site ran four stories so far on the death of Bean, none of which I found through Google, which is clearly sandbagging the site. I learned of the stories through a helpful reader-commenter at Bean’s Variety obit.
“Actor-Comedian Orson Bean, Father-in-Law of Andrew Breitbart, Hit and Killed by Car in L.A.”
 

Orson Bean, circa 1970s