Pat Harrington, Jr., has died at 86, according to friends of the family.

:( Schneider :rip:

I remember hearing the news he didn't have long to live and just last night at work, I was thinking about him and how he's still hanging in there. Then I come home and read this.

Rest in Peace, Pat Harrington, Jr. :(

Pat Harrington, Jr., has died at 86, according to friends of the family.
What was the cause of death?

Very sad. RIP Schneider.

What was the cause of death?

The report I read said that he had recently been diagnosed with Alzheimer's, and that his health was deteriorating.

RIP Pat Harrington.

I know he was in other things, but besides some Love Boat, etc. guest stars, I don't think I ever saw him in another TV series or film. Weird. He was great on ODAAT, though.

May he RIP. He was great on ODAAT.

Two movies I remember him in is The President's Analyst (1967), and the Disney Kurt Russell film The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. Though I will admit, I almost forget it's him because he's not wearing his iconic Schneider outfit.
He did a lot of voice over work, including the voice of Moe Howard in the New Scooby Doo Movies.

RIP Pat!! Sad, I read on another thread that he died on Bonnie Franklin's birthday too!

I loved his character Schneider! His C B handle was "Super Stud"!:lol: :lol:

May he rest in peace. :(

CNN is my homepage, so I knew it wasn't good when One Day at a Time was right up front:( May he always have a passkey to heavens door. The lodge brothers raise a toast in his memory.

I remember him on an episode of The Partridge Family in which he played a Las Vegas gangster who mistakenly thought Danny was trying to steal his girl. He was so good in the episode. :rip: Pat Harrington Jr.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2016/01/07/emmy-winner-pat-harrington-jr-super-one-day-time-dies/78409300/

Pat Harrington Jr., Emmy-winning super on 'One Day at a Time,' dies

Pat Harrington Jr, who won acclaim as the buttinsky building superintendent who rarely fixed anything on the long-running 1970s sitcom, One Day at a Time, has died, according to his family. He was 86.

His daughters Tresa and Terry posted a message on Facebook Thursday announcing his death on Wednesday evening. It included a picture of him as the swaggering, cluttered keychain-wielding Dwayne Schneider from One Day.

"Dear Friends, it is with the most unimaginable pain and sadness, that I tell you my father, Pat Harrington, Jr. passed away at 11:09 PM this evening," Tresa Harrington wrote. "We were all with him today and tonight: crying, laughing and loving him.

"My heart is broken to pieces and I will cry and cry until I just won't," she concluded. "Love to you all! And as we head into this year, never be afraid to tell the people you love, that you love them."

The sitcom, which ran from 1975-1984 on CBS, was a Norman Lear production about a newly single mom, Ann Romano (Bonnie Franklin), who moves back to her hometown of Indianapolis with two teen daughters, Barbara (Valerie Bertinelli), and Julie (MacKenzie Phillips) after her divorce. It was one of the first portrayals of a divorced mom on American TV.

Harrington played Dwayne Schneider, their building super who thinks he's a ladies man, who swaggers into their lives and becomes part of the family. “The ladies in this building don’t call me ‘super’ for nothing," was one of his lines.

(Franklin died in 2013. Bertinelli and Phillips are still close and still working in Hollywood. Bertinelli paid tribute.

Harrington, in his costume of white T-shirt, blue vest, cigarette pack rolled up in his sleeve, and tool belt that he never seemed to use, regularly stole scenes, Lear once said. "He turned out to be the comic strength of the show,” Lear said.

The role won Harrington an Emmy and a Golden Globe, plus multiple nominations of each.




Although the show ended in the mid-1980s, there was a reunion special in February 2005, and Harrington took part.

In 2012, Harrington made his final onscreen appearance, appearing as the manager of an apartment building on Bertinelli’s Hot in Cleveland sitcom on TV Land until June 2015.

But his list of TV credits was huge, dating back to 1949 and the Ford Theatre Hour. Make Room for Daddy, The Munsters and The Beverly Hillbillies are only some of the famous series he appeared in. More recently, he appeared in shows such as Curb Your Enthusiasm and The King of Queens.

Pat Harrington Jr. was born on August 13, 1929 in New York City, as Daniel Patrick Harrington Jr.

R.I.P. Pat. You'll never be forgotten. :(

Another from my generation of memorable television actors/actresses that are leaving us.

He was so handsome on Make Room for Daddy as Terry's love interest and husband to be.

Link (https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/pat-harrington-jr-schneider-of-tvs-one-day-at-a-time-dies-at-86/2016/01/07/fb8cf232-b54c-11e5-9388-466021d971de_story.html)


Pat Harrington Jr., an actor and comedian who portrayed the farcically macho building superintendent Dwayne Schneider in “One Day at a Time,” a sitcom that explored sexism, harassment and other tribulations through the lens of a divorced working woman and her two teenage daughters, died Jan. 6 at 86.

His daughter Tresa Harrington announced the death on her Facebook page but did not provide other details. In November, she wrote that he had Alzheimer’s disease and was in rapidly declining health.

Although billed as a supporting actor on “One Day at a Time,” Mr. Harrington provided such welcome comic relief that the program’s popularity and longevity — it aired on CBS from 1975 to 1984 — was owed as much to him as to anyone. Years afterward, producer Norman Lear, who also created “All in the Family,” said Mr. Harrington “turned out to be the comic strength of the show.”

Seemingly coming from nowhere — he was a total unknown to Lear when the show was being cast — Mr. Harrington was in fact a seasoned comic performer. His father had been a song-and-dance man in vaudeville and on Broadway, a late-night carousing companion of fellow Irish American entertainers such as Bing Crosby, Pat O’Brien and James Dunn.

“They’d sit down for eggs as I’d be going off to parochial school,” Mr. Harrington once recalled.

”One Day at a Time,” which ran on CBS from 1975-1984, followed Ann Romano (Bonnie Franklin, lower right) who moved with her two teenage daughters, Julie (Valerie Bertinelli, center) and Barbara Cooper (MacKenzie Phillips, upper right) back to her hometown of Indianapolis to start fresh after her divorce. Dwayne Schneider (Pat Harrington Jr., left) is the super of the building who becomes close friends with the women. (HO/CBS)
In the late 1950s, his talent for wisecracking and mimicry brought him influential admirers such as Jonathan Winters, Jack Paar, Steve Allen and Danny Thomas. He subsequently worked in nightclubs, released comedy albums, and won small roles in films such as “Easy Come, Easy Go” (1967) with Elvis Presley and “The Candidate” (1972) with Robert Redford.

But it was “One Day at a Time” that made Mr. Harrington a household name during its protracted prime-time run.

The star was Bonnie Franklin, playing an independent-minded divorced woman in Indianapolis who struggles to raise two willful daughters (played by Mackenzie Phillips and Valerie Bertinelli). Set against the second wave of feminism, the show explored previously taboo sitcom subjects such as divorce, rape, teenage pregnancy and menopause.

Franklin’s Ann Romano is both sensible and exasperated as she juggles a career, her home life and come-ons from men such as Mr. Harrington’s Schneider, a seedy building custodian who tells her, “The ladies in this building don’t call me ‘super’ for nothing.”

Rendered by Mr. Harrington, Schneider was less a threatening wolf than a clueless chauvinist. Fancying himself a ladies’ man, he sports a Clark Gable-inspired pencil mustache and swaggers about with his tool belt around his waist and a cigarette pack tucked in the sleeve of his white T-shirt.

As the character was conceived, Schneider was a married man and an unrepentant adulterer who used fake maintenance problems to enter women’s apartments. Mr. Harrington, however, doubted that such an unpleasant type would fit in a show filled with far more likeable people.


On Mr. Harrington’s insistence, Schneider was recast as a bachelor with a comically grandiose sense of his appeal to the opposite sex. “At first, Schneider was pretty much a lecher,” he told People magazine. “I made sure that got changed to ‘amorous.’ It bespeaks a certain respect for women.”


Over the years, Schneider surrenders his pursuit of Romano and becomes a surrogate father figure to her daughters. In the show’s final year, Mr. Harrington won an Emmy Award for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series.

Daniel Patrick Harrington Jr. was born in Manhattan on Aug. 13, 1929. He grew up watching his father’s career wax and wane.

“Until I was schoolage, we drove around the country in a Hupmobile and Dad worked week to week, hand to mouth by singing, playing drums and entertaining,” he told Robert Pegg, author of the book “Comical Co-Stars of Television.” “He didn’t want that for his kids because he knew it was a very hard life.”

Mr. Harrington went to a Catholic military school and graduated from Fordham University, where he also later received a master’s degree in political philosophy. After Air Force service, he began working in the NBC mailroom, a job he parlayed into a junior advertising salesman position for the network.

He told Pegg that he drew notice for his elaborate office pranks. He once paid an actor $20 to impersonate David Sarnoff — who was chairman of the parent company of NBC and was universally known as “the General” — to approach him one morning before a weekly sales-staff meeting.

“How are sales?” the imposter Sarnoff asked.

In a move that might have been career suicide, Mr. Harrington shot back with annoyance, “Why don’t you just get back upstairs and tend to your electrons and I’ll take care of sales.”

“Good for you, young man,” Sarnoff replied, patting his shoulder. “That’s the spirit!”

Mr. Harrington then strutted past aghast colleagues, quipping, “Look, I’ll be out for the rest of the day.”


He often entertained clients at Toots Shor’s, the Manhattan watering hole, where, as the evenings wore on, he liked to trot out various voices and characters. He had his greatest success conjuring a fictional Italian immigrant named Guido Panzini, part of a gag he honed over many years and many drinks.

Panzini was at times the self-preserving first mate of the doomed ocean liner Andrea Doria, a charming golf pro who once played the toughest course in the world — up the side of Mount Kilimanjaro — and a veteran of the Italian submarine service in World War II who learned English by sneaking up on American warships at night to watch movies.

Winters, who was scheduled to substitute host on Paar’s variety show, caught the routine one night and booked him in 1958. That appearance sparked widespread demand for Panzini to appear on other shows.

Mr. Harrington so completely inhabited the Panzini character — and his style was so deadpan — that an official with the U.S. immigration service reportedly expressed concern to the network that the agency could find no record of his entry into the country.

Over the next few years, Mr. Harrington became part of the ensemble on “The Steve Allen Show” and won a recurring role as Thomas’s son-in-law on the sitcom “The Danny Thomas Show.”

In addition to many theater parts, he did voice-over work for cartoons, made a spate of game-show appearances and had a frequent role in the early 1970s as a prosecutor on “Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law,” an ABC legal drama starring Arthur Hill.

His first marriage, to Marjorie Gortner, with whom he had four children, ended in divorce. In 2001, he wed Sally Cleaver, an insurance executive. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

In recent years, Mr. Harrington popped up as a guest on TV shows such as “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Hot in Cleveland.” But in a varied career, he made his peace with being associated with a single sitcom, “One Day at a Time,” emphasizing that it had brought him steady work in a notoriously unsteady profession.


He told Pegg, “I got 10 years of work out of this series, and if I was penalized by typecasting, then that’s the price you have to pay.”

I am not sure what the cause of death was, but when he fell in early November,2015,he suffered a small brain hemorrhage and spent
three weeks in hospital and nursing home. This is bad news.
RIP Pat.

Pat Harrington, Jr., has died at 86, according to friends of the family.

Tried to post this a few hours earlier but it was kinda hard to do with the nurse trying to check my vital signs. Posting from a smart phone isn't my cup of tea either. :lol:

Tried to post this a few hours earlier but it was kinda hard to do with the nurse trying to check my vital signs. Posting from a smart phone isn't my cup of tea either. :lol:

Still better then me. I would post the tribute from Valerie Bertinelli's Twitter feed if I knew how to do such things.

(Nothing up from Mackenzie yet).

Still better then me. I would post the tribute from Valerie Bertinelli's Twitter feed if I knew how to do such things.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BAPxErRnxyb/

https://www.instagram.com/p/BAPxErRnxyb/

Thanks.

Thanks.
You're welcome. :)

https://www.facebook.com/TheNormanLear/

There was never a dearer man, who filled out a more hilarious character, than Pat Harrington Jr. Coincidentally, he passed away yesterday on Bonnie Franklin's birthday. I'm sure they 're together now, and laughing.

Sad to hear of his passing, may he rest in peace.

https://www.facebook.com/TheNormanLear/

There was never a dearer man, who filled out a more hilarious character, than Pat Harrington Jr. Coincidentally, he passed away yesterday on Bonnie Franklin's birthday. I'm sure they 're together now, and laughing.

Thanks for posting the Norman Lear link.

Here's a link to a nice tribute that Glenn Scarpelli posted:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1257190890963409&set=a.161370930545416.42238.100000175296334&type=1&theater

R.I.P., Pat.

From the article posted above:

As the character was conceived, Schneider was a married man and an unrepentant adulterer who used fake maintenance problems to enter women’s apartments. Mr. Harrington, however, doubted that such an unpleasant type would fit in a show filled with far more likeable people.

On Mr. Harrington’s insistence, Schneider was recast as a bachelor with a comically grandiose sense of his appeal to the opposite sex. “At first, Schneider was pretty much a lecher,” he told People magazine. “I made sure that got changed to ‘amorous.’ It bespeaks a certain respect for women.”


Until reading this article, I had no idea that Pat was responsible for this change to the character. That's one time when a retcon was beneficial to a character. Even in a sitcom world, it would be hard to justify Ann regularly letting a married creep barge into the apartment and hit on her. Switching the character from married perv to nosy-but-harmless bachelor not only made Schneider more likable but showed Ann to be very tolerant (as opposed to very stupid, if the change hadn't been made).

I think Pat made the right decision pushing for the alteration to his character.

From the article posted above:

As the character was conceived, Schneider was a married man and an unrepentant adulterer who used fake maintenance problems to enter women’s apartments. Mr. Harrington, however, doubted that such an unpleasant type would fit in a show filled with far more likeable people.

On Mr. Harrington’s insistence, Schneider was recast as a bachelor with a comically grandiose sense of his appeal to the opposite sex. “At first, Schneider was pretty much a lecher,” he told People magazine. “I made sure that got changed to ‘amorous.’ It bespeaks a certain respect for women.”


Until reading this article, I had no idea that Pat was responsible for this change to the character. That's one time when a retcon was beneficial to a character. Even in a sitcom world, it would be hard to justify Ann regularly letting a married creep barge into the apartment and hit on her. Switching the character from married perv to nosy-but-harmless bachelor not only made Schneider more likable but showed Ann to be very tolerant (as opposed to very stupid, if the change hadn't been made).

I think Pat made the right decision pushing for the alteration to his character.

Great thoughts and totally agree with his sentiments regarding the character.

I read a similar story regarding the characters in "The Odd Couple". IIRC, Jack Klugman told the producers that despite the characters arguing, it was essential that the audience understand that they really loved each other. And I totally agree. One thing I don't like about a lot of modern sitcoms is that there is no undercurrent of real affection. The nasty characters REALLY are just nasty, and so we don't connect to them on any real level; they end up being just cartoons. Characters like Schneider, Felix, Oscar, Archie Bunker, Lou Grant, etc., are great because of their dimension and underlying goodness.

Great post!

From the article posted above:

As the character was conceived, Schneider was a married man and an unrepentant adulterer who used fake maintenance problems to enter women’s apartments. Mr. Harrington, however, doubted that such an unpleasant type would fit in a show filled with far more likeable people.

On Mr. Harrington’s insistence, Schneider was recast as a bachelor with a comically grandiose sense of his appeal to the opposite sex. “At first, Schneider was pretty much a lecher,” he told People magazine. “I made sure that got changed to ‘amorous.’ It bespeaks a certain respect for women.”


Until reading this article, I had no idea that Pat was responsible for this change to the character. That's one time when a retcon was beneficial to a character. Even in a sitcom world, it would be hard to justify Ann regularly letting a married creep barge into the apartment and hit on her. Switching the character from married perv to nosy-but-harmless bachelor not only made Schneider more likable but showed Ann to be very tolerant (as opposed to very stupid, if the change hadn't been made).

I think Pat made the right decision pushing for the alteration to his character.


That is really cool!!!! I'm glad Pat pushed to change up Schneider and make him a much more respectable character! ;)

:rip:

RIP.
"Please all remember and never forget"