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Michael Constantine, an Emmy Award-winning actor known as the brilliantly dyspeptic school principal of the popular TV series “Room 222” and, 30 years later, as the brilliantly dyspeptic patriarch in the hit movie “My Big Fat Greek Wedding “, died on August 31 at his home in Reading, Pa., He was 94 years old.
His agent, Julia Buchwald, confirmed the death.
Mr. Constantine, who began his career on the Broadway stage, was blessed with fierce eyebrows, a personal warmth that belied his air of an eternal watchdog, and the mastery of a Babel with foreign overtones. Of Greco-American origin, he was regularly chosen by Hollywood to represent a multitude of ethnicities.
He played several Jewish characters, winning an Emmy in 1970 for the role of Seymour Kaufman, who grumpily presided over Walt Whitman High School in “Room 222,” which aired on ABC from 1969 to 1974.
He has also played Italians, in shows such as “The Untouchables” and “Kojak”; Russians, as in the 1980s series “Airwolf”; a Gypsy, in the 1996 horror film “Thinner”, adapted from a Stephen King novel; and, on occasion, even one or two Greeks.
Mr. Constantine possessed a gravity which often led him to be regarded as lawyers or heavyweights. He played the title role, Night Court Judge Matthew Sirota, in “Sirota’s Court,” a short-lived sitcom that aired on NBC in the 1976-77 season.
He had guest roles on many other shows, including “Naked City”, “Perry Mason”, “Ironside”, “Gunsmoke” and “Hey, Landlord” in the 1960s, and “Remington Steele”, ” Murder, She Wrote “and” Law & Order “in the 80s and 90s.
In the cinema, he appears in “The Last Mile” (1959), a prison film with Mickey Rooney; “The Hustler” (1961), with Paul Newman; the 1969 comedies “If it’s Tuesday, it must be Belgium” and “Don’t drink water”; and “Voyage of the Damned” (1976).
Mr. Constantine became known to an even larger and younger audience as Gus Portokalos, the fuel and tradition-bound father whose daughter is betrothed to a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant patrician, in the hit comedy of 2002 “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”.
A successful immigrant as a Chicago restaurant owner, Gus is an ardent amateur etymologist who can trace any word to its putative Greek origin. (“Kimono”, he concludes after considering the question, surely comes from “cheimónas” – Greek for winter, since, he explains in his strongly accentuated English: “What do you wear in winter to stay warm? ? Dress ! “)
Gus is also a strong believer in the restorative power of Windex, applied directly to the skin, to heal a variety of ailments, including rashes and boils.
“He’s a man of a certain type of background,” Mr. Constantine said of his character in a 2003 interview with The Indianapolis Star. “His saving grace is that he truly loves his daughter and wants the best for her. He may not go about it very tactfully. So many people tell me, “My dad was like that. And I thought, ‘And you don’t hate him?’ “
“My Big Fat Greek Wedding”, written by its star, Nia Vardalos, and also starring Lainie Kazan as Gus’ wife and John Corbett as the man he marries, was an international hit. surprise. It grossed over $ 360 million worldwide, becoming one of the highest grossing romantic comedies of all time.
Mr. Constantine reprized the role on television in “My Big Fat Greek Life,” a sitcom that appeared briefly on CBS in 2003, and on the big screen in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2” in 2016.
Son of Theoharis Ioannides, metallurgist, and Andromache Foteadou, Mr. Constantine was born Constantine Ioannides in Reading on May 22, 1927. (The family name is sometimes Romanized Joanides.)
He embarked on an acting career very early on, an idea reinforced after a childhood visit to a friend who was studying theater in New York.
“I just knew I was there,” Mr. Constantine told Odyssey, an English-language magazine about Greek life, in 2011. “They might be laughing at that prick from Pennsylvania, but I just belong. here – it’s me. “
The young Mr. Constantine studied theater with Howard da Silva while providing odd jobs including night watchman and shooting barker. He became Paul Muni’s understudy as the inspired character of famous defense lawyer Clarence Darrow in “Inherit the Wind”, which opened on Broadway in 1955.
In “Compulsion” – a 1957 Broadway dramatization of Meyer Levin’s novel about the Leopold and Loeb murder case – Mr. Constantine took over the role of another defense attorney for Frank Conroy just before the evening of ‘opening. (Mr. Conroy withdrew after suffering a heart attack during the previews.)
“Michael Constantine gives a great performance,” Brooks Atkinson wrote in The New York Times. “He avoids sentimentality that situations could easily evoke and plays with taste, deliberation, color and intelligence.”
Mr. Constantine’s other Broadway credits include Anagnos, director of the Perkins Institute for the Blind, in the original cast of “The Miracle Worker” (1959), and Dogsborough in Bertolt Brecht’s anti-fascist satire “Arturo Ui” (1963 ).
Mr. Constantine’s first marriage, to actress Julianna McCarthy, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Kathleen Christopher. Her survivors include two sisters, Patricia Gordon and Chris Dobbs. A full list of survivors was not immediately available.
For all of Mr. Constantine’s credits, for all of his rave reviews, it is for a single role – and for a single prop exercised during that role – that he seems destined to be remembered.
“I can’t tell you,” he said in a 2014 interview with his hometown newspaper The Reading Eagle, “how many times I have autographed a bottle of Windex.”
Alyssa Lukpat contributed reports.
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