Howard Hesseman, who made a career out of portraying off-the-wall characters, none more popular than the disc jockey Johnny Fever on the sitcom WKRP in Cincinnati, has died. He was 81.
Hesseman died Saturday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Los Angeles of complications from colon surgery he first had last summer, his wife, actress and acting teacher Caroline Ducrocq, told The Hollywood Reporter.
A member of the San Francisco improv group The Committee and a real-life DJ back in the 1960s, Hesseman also was known for his stint as out-of-work actor turned history teacher Charlie Moore on the ABC comedy Head of the Class. (He quit that show after four seasons to aim for a movie career.)
And on the ninth and final season of One Day at a Time, his character, architect Sam Royer, married longtime divorcee Ann Romano (Bonnie Franklin).
In other eccentric turns, Hesseman played hippies in Richard Lester’s Petulia (1968) and on NBC’s Dragnet (he was billed as Don Sturdy back then); a patient suffering from writer’s block on The Bob Newhart Show; a psychiatrist on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; a pimp opposite Dan Aykroyd in Doctor Detroit (1983); and the manager of rocker Duke Fame in This Is Spinal Tap (1984).
Hesseman received Emmy nominations in 1980 and ’81 for his work on CBS’ WKRP in Cincinnati, which ran for four seasons (1978-82). With his shades, moustache and slouch, he became a countercultural icon.
Veteran TV director Jay Sandrich, who was hired to helm the WKRP pilot for MTM Enterprises, suggested Hesseman would be great for Fever after Richard Libertini said he couldn’t do it at the last minute. The two had just worked together on the ABC comedy Soap, with Hesseman playing a prosecutor out to convict Katherine Helmond‘s Jessica Tate of murder.
“Howard had at one time been a DJ,” Sandrich said in a 2001 interview for the website The Interviews: An Oral History of Television. “He just stepped in and killed it. He knew exactly what he was doing.”
Hugh Wilson, a former sales executive at a Top 40 radio station who created WKRP (the fictional station’s call letters were a pun on “W-crap”), based the rock DJ on “a guy I knew in Atlanta called Skinny Bobby Harper,” he once said. “That was funny, because he was the morning guy, so Skinny had to get up at 4 in the morning to get in there. But he also loved being in the bars at night. He was like Fever.
