Jack Betts, an actor whose six-decade profession included a memorable half in 2002’s Spider-Man, has died.
Betts died in his sleep at residence in Los Osos, California, on Thursday, June 19, his nephew advised The Hollywood Reporter. He was 96.
In Spider-Man, Betts performed Henry Balkan, the Oscorp board chair who fired Norman Osborn (Willem Defoe). Norman then suited up because the villainous Inexperienced Goblin, hopped on his hijacked Oscorp glider, and vaporized Henry and the remainder of the board.
Betts stated in a 2020 interview on The Dev Present that it took hours to movie the Oscorp boardroom scene and that he requested director Sam Raimi if he might add humor to the scene.
“I actually seemed [Defoe] proper within the eye, and I had type of a smile in my eye — you realize, like, ‘You’re fired, you motherf*****,’” he recalled. “After, I completed it, [Raimi] stated, ‘That’s it. Terrific. Print that one.’ My level being is that I needed so as to add one thing just a bit totally different to it as a substitute of doing it the identical method time and again and time and again. [Raimi] he was keen to do this. He actually was. Great man to work with.”
Betts, who was born on April 11, 1929, in Jersey Metropolis, New Jersey, grew to become taken with appearing after seeing Laurence Olivier in 1939’s Wuthering Heights, per THR.
After shifting to New York Metropolis, Betts caught the eye of appearing coach Lee Strasberg and studied at The Actors Studio for 3 years.
Then got here elements for Betts in movies (1959’s The Broody Bunch) and TV (The Detectives, Checkmate, Bonanza, Perry Mason), typically below the stage identify Hunt Powers. Betts received a starring function in 1966’s Sugar Colt, one among his many spaghetti Western movies, after mendacity to director Franco Giraldi about understanding journey a horse and shoot a gun.
As his display profession continued, Betts performed Dr. Ivan Kipling in a recurring One Life to Stay function within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties. Within the Nineties, Betts took small roles in 1995’s Batman Endlessly and 1997’s Batman & Robin and portrayed Boris Karloff in 1998’s Gods and Monsters. And within the 2000s, Betts guest-starred on TV exhibits like The Unit, The Mentalist, and Monk. His final display credit score got here in 2019, when he made an look on Good Bother.
Betts met future All people Loves Raymond star Doris Roberts at The Actors Studio in 1954, and in 1988, he accepted her invitation to maneuver into her Hollywood Hills residence. From then till Roberts’ 2016 dying, he typically accompanied her to Hollywood occasions. “We had been greatest pals to the very finish, we had fantastic instances collectively,” he as soon as stated.
Betts’ survivors embrace his nieces, Lynne and Gail, and his sister, Joan, who turns 100 this 12 months, THR experiences.