Mere days after America lost its TV mom, Happy Days dad Tom Bosley has died. He was 83. (The story first emerged via unsubstantiated Twitter reports, but TMZ has now confirmed through family members that Bosley died after battling a staph infection.)
Bosley got his start on the stage, most notably playing the Tony Award-winning role of New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia in 1959’s Fiorello!, then broke into movies in the early ‘60s. He courted Natalie Wood in 1963’s Love With The Proper Stranger and had a supporting role in Peter Sellers’ The World Of Henry Orient, but his true home was television, where he consistently turned up on classic shows like Car 54, Where Are You?, Marcus Welby, M.D., Get Smart, The Defenders, The Mod Squad, Bewitched, Mission: Impossible, and Bonanza. In 1969, he landed his first major recurring role on The Debbie Reynolds Show, playing the boss to Reynolds’ sportswriter husband—a part similar to the one he played on The Sandy Duncan Show, where he played the boss at Duncan’s advertising agency.
From 1970 to 1973, Bosley starred in three episodes of the anthology series Love, American Style—most notably in the segment “Love And The Old-Fashioned Father,” which gave rise to the primetime animated sitcom Wait Till Your Father Gets Home: On the show Bosley voiced a working-class everyman who’s forced to contend with his hippie kids, a precursor to what would be his most famous role.
Bosley did not, however, star in the Love, American Style episode that would eventually spawn the series’ most successful spin-off: In the episode “Love And The Happy Days,” fellow longtime character actor Harold Gould (who also died recently) played the part of the loving patriarch to the Cunningham family. But when Gould chose to travel with a stage production rather than star in the series, producers moved on to Bosley. For 10 years, Bosley played the hardware store-owning, bowling-loving, frequently easy-chair-bound Howard “Mr. C” Cunningham, a man who represented a stodgily middle-class opposite to the teenage rebellion happening all around him. Bosley’s gently cantankerous relationship with his wife and the kids, particularly his frequent sparring partner The Fonz, would serve as a model for generations of TV dads to come, while Bosley himself remained one of the series’ few steadfast characters, his familiar “Happy Days is filmed before a live audience” intro sticking with the show until its very end.