This is a long post, I know but some very interesting facts are included
and it is worth the read... if you are interested!


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Peter Boyle, Father on ‘Raymond,’ Dies at 71.

Peter Boyle, who left the life of a monk to study acting and went on to
become one of the most successful character actors of his time in films
like “The Candidate,” “Young Frankenstein” and “Monster’s Ball,” then
capped his career with a long stint as the meddlesome father on the hit
sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond,” died Tuesday evening in Manhattan. He
was 71.

His death, at New York Presbyterian Hospital, was announced by his
publicist, Jennifer Plante. She said Mr. Boyle had suffered from
multiple myeloma and heart disease. With his bulky frame and balding
pate, Mr. Boyle was a formidable presence on screen, whether playing a
drunken redneck (“Joe”), a corrupt union leader (“F.I.S.T.”) or a savvy
private eye (“Hammett”). He could be convincingly chilling, so much so
that he often ran the risk of being typecast. When he appeared with
Peter Falk and Paul Sorvino in William Friedkin’s 1978 film “The Brink’s
Job,” as a member of the gang that robs an armored car company of nearly
$3 million, the New York Times critic Vincent Canby wrote that “Mr.
Boyle’s role is one that he could telephone in by this time.”

But it wasn’t all thugs and gangsters. In 1974, Mr. Boyle made a
memorable impression in Mel Brooks’s “Young Frankenstein,” in which he
played the bumbling monster brought to life by the addled grandson (Gene
Wilder) of the original Dr. Frankenstein. In one high point, Mr. Boyle’s
monster, decked out in white tie and tails à la Fred Astaire, performed
a nifty soft-shoe routine with Mr. Wilder while bellowing out the lyrics
of “Puttin’ On the Ritz.”

Mr. Boyle, who once admitted to being “a little nutty,” enjoyed his
infrequent ventures into film comedy. In “Where the Buffalo Roam”
(1980), a screen portrait of the freewheeling writer Hunter S. Thompson
(Bill Murray), he went happily wild as the writer’s carousing companion.
Along with members of the Monty Python troupe, he was part of a zany
pirate crew in “Yellowbeard” (1983). And in “The Dream Team” (1989), he
tried to wring laughs from his role as a mental patient with a fixation
on Jesus.

His breakthrough, however, was no laughing matter. He won the title role
in the 1970 film “Joe,” about a hard-drinking, hate-filled factory
worker who improbably joins forces with a murderous executive in a
bloody war on “hippies” and the rest of the counterculture. Mr. Boyle
said that he was paid only $3,000 for his work in “Joe” but that he
realized he had taken a giant step forward. The role, he said at the
time, seemed to have been made for him because he’d grown up surrounded
by people like Joe.

“I knew the character so well that when it came to the actual shooting
of the movie, I was worried that I would do a caricature,” “ he said.
Writing in The Times, Mr. Canby called “Joe” one of the 10 worst films
of the year but hailed Mr. Boyle’s performance as “extraordinary.”

Peter Boyle was born on Oct. 18, 1935, in Northtown, Pa. After
graduating from La Salle College, he became a member of the Christian
Brothers order and entered a monastery as Brother Francis. He later
recalled praying “so hard, I had calluses on my knees.” After three
effortful years, he left the monastery — he later called it “an
unnatural way to live” — and, after a brief period in the Navy that
ended in a nervous breakdown, came to New York City to try the life of
an actor.

There, he studied with Uta Hagen, worked at whatever jobs he could find,
toured with a road company of Neil Simon’s “Odd Couple” and wound up in
Chicago, where he joined the Second City troupe and immersed himself in
improvisational theater. He was living in Chicago at the time of the
Democratic National Convention in 1968 and never forgot the ensuing
explosion of violence and the reek of tear gas in the streets. Early on,
he described himself as a “conservative radical.”

Politics was an element in some of his work in the years ahead, although
more often on television than in film. An exception was “The Candidate”
(1972), the film in which he played a cool-headed campaign manager for a
liberal Democrat (Robert Redford) running for the Senate. In the 1977
NBC movie “Tail Gunner Joe,” he portrayed Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,
with Burgess Meredith as the Boston lawyer Joseph Welch in the notorious
Army-McCarthy hearings.

Mr. Boyle relived his 1968 experience in Chicago on HBO’s “Conspiracy:
The Trial of the Chicago Eight” (1987), appearing as one of the jailed
political protesters, David Dellinger. And in the 1989 CBS docudrama
“Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North,” he played Vice
Admiral John M. Poindexter, a national security adviser.

Despite his early theatrical training, Mr. Boyle clearly preferred film
and television over stage work. He was seen on Broadway in 1980 in “The
Roast,” directed by Carl Reiner, in which he played a comedian who is
the guest of honor, with lots to hide, at a no-holds-barred “roast,” or
stag dinner, given by his fellow comics. Off Broadway later that year,
he co-starred with Tommy Lee Jones in a Public Theater production of Sam
Shepard’s “True West,” about the warring relationship of two brothers.
He also appeared at the Circle Repertory in 1982 in the ill-conceived
“Snow Orchid,” a play by Joe Pintauro in which he played the mentally
unstable head of a dysfunctional family in the Williamsburg section of
Brooklyn.

In his private life, Mr. Boyle was a functional and devoted family man.
He had met Loraine Alterman, his wife-to-be, when he was filming “Young
Frankenstein” and she was interviewing Mel Brooks for Rolling Stone
magazine. They were married in 1977, with John Lennon as best man at
their wedding. She survives him, along with their daughters Lucy and
Amy.

Mr. Boyle’s film credits in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s included
“Walker” (1987), in which Ed Harris played the American adventurer
William Walker, who briefly seized control of Nicaragua in the mid-19th
century; Mr. Boyle played his supporter Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt.
In “Bulletproof Heart” (1995), Mr. Boyle was cast as a professional
hitman. In “Monster’s Ball” (2001), he gave an acclaimed performance as
the bigoted father of a prison death-house guard (Billy Bob Thornton).

Mr. Boyle was also becoming a familiar face on television, appearing in
several episodes of ABC’s “NYPD Blue” and winning an Emmy Award in 1996
for a guest appearance on the long-running Fox series “The X-Files.”
That was also the year Mr. Boyle became a member of the Barone family on
the durable CBS sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond.”

The series starred the comedian Ray Romano as Ray Barone, a sportswriter
whose parents (played by Mr. Boyle and Doris Roberts) are all too
willing to complicate daily life in Ray’s suburban household. As the
grouchy, wisecracking Frank Barone, Mr. Boyle could be counted on to win
laughs, as he did for nine seasons. The role brought him five Emmy
nominations.

Mr. Boyle suffered a stroke in 1990 and had a heart attack while taping
an episode of “Raymond” in 1999, but he quickly recovered and continued
his career, pursuing what he called his challenge on “Raymond” —
“finding where the funny is.”

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Hope you enjoyed the above article. It is from the NYTimes.

Verb

I for one really enjoied his work,and will miss his kind of humor...

sir...may you rest in PEACE!

YEAH He was Mr. Moon on Yellowbeard!!! Thats one of my favorite movies
EVER!!!!!!!! I will definitely pray for him and his family, cuz that
man has made me LAUGH my ass off during my short period alive.


How's that for a squabble Pew????

what HUMP???

ARRRG!!!
you won't fool me with those trick questions!!!

you'll have to kill me before I die!!!

Man, he will be missed.

yes he will but we all gotta go sometime and I can only hope I make it
to 71 men die too young all too often

I damn sure hear ya there.

"Instead, you may bang your head on the floor until forgiven." ROFLMAO

I'll tell you what, in "Young Frankenstein" when he did the tap dance
and sang "Puttin on the Ritz" I laughed till I peed myself. It really
tickled my funnybone...

He was amazing...

Verb

He always put a smile on my face, and some days thats hard to do. and
YES the song and dance was freakin great!!!!!