Jonathan Harris (born Jonathan Charasuchin; November 6, 1914 – November 3, 2002) was an American character actor. Two of his best-known roles were as the timid accountant Bradford Webster in the TV version of The Third Man and the prissy villain Dr. Zachary Smith of the 1960s science fiction television series Lost in Space. Near the end of his career, he provided the voice of Manny, a praying mantis in the animated feature A Bugs Life. Jonathan Harris worked as a box boy in a pharmacy at age 12 and later earned his pharmacy degree at Fordham University. However, the desire to act proved overwhelming and he forsook this promising trade for the theater, shaking off his thick Bronx accent and changing his surname to one easier to pronounce. After performing in over 100 plays in stock companies nationwide, he made his Broadway bow in 1942 with Heart of a City and entertained World War II troops in the South Pacific. Following his introduction to live television drama (Before entering the show business, he watched lots of English movies to adopt the ways of a classical British actor) in 1948, he ventured off to Hollywood and made his film debut, co-starring with Alan Ladd and James Mason in Botany Bay (1953). However, it was television that would make him a household name - first as Bradley Webster in The Third Man (1959) opposite Michael Rennie, and then the role that made him a cult icon, Dr. Zachary Smith, the dastardly, effete stowaway on Lost in Space (1965), with Harris easily stealing the show week after week as he botched and mangled all the good intentions of the Robinson family to get back home to Earth. Unable to top this achievement and seriously typecast as a plummy villain, the remainder of his career was spent with great relish providing voice-over work in commercials and animated cartoons. Although he reprised his most infamous role as Dr. Smith in a one-hour TV special Lost in Space Forever (1998) in 1998, he refused a cameo in the motion picture version of Lost in Space (1998) later that year, unlike June Lockhart, Mark Goddard, Marta Kristen and Angela Cartwright, the other stars of the 1960s series. With typically cryptic Dr. Smith flair, he announced that if he could not play his own role in the movie, he wanted nothing to do with it. Interestingly, Gary Oldman portrayed Dr. Smith in a curiously subdued fashion. He would often sit up at night thinking of ways to insult the robot (Be quiet, you bubble-headed booby!) while on Lost in Space (1965). His colorful put-downs for his mechanical colleague, almost all of them unscripted, are among the best-remembered aspects of the series. Jonathan was married to his childhood sweetheart, Gertrude Bregman (who died of natural causes on August 28, 2007 at age 93), from 1938 until his death in 2002. They had a son, Richard (born 1942), as well as a daughter-in-law and two step-granddaughters. Harris father, Sam Charasuchin, was struck by a car while crossing the street in New York City in 1977. He was 93 years old at the time of his death. In late 2002, Harris and the rest of the surviving cast of the TV series were preparing for an NBC two-hour movie entitled Lost In Space: The Journey Home. However, two months before the movie was set to film, he was taken to the hospital with what he thought was a back problem. But on November 9, 2002, just one day before he was scheduled to return home, Jonathan Harris died of a blood clot to the heart. He is interred at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery. His eulogists included long-time friend and director Arthur Hiller, close friend and former Twentieth Century Fox television executive and producer Kevin Burns and fellow Lost in Space cast-mate and good friend Bill Mumy.
Posted on: Thu, 31 Jul 2014 04:31:07 +0000
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