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Dick Van Patten

Recognizable for his perennially cherubic countenance and myriad roles of mild-mannered and beleaguered fathers or authority figures on the big and small screen, Dick Van Patten boasted one of the lengthiest and most varied résumés in the acting business. As a child, Van Patten performed alongside giants of Broadway during its Golden Age in some of the theater's greatest works, became a familiar face nationally in the early days of television, and deftly avoided the "child actor curse" that some of his later co-stars could not, working consistently for six decades. Becoming a patriarch of a prolific show business family of his own, he briefly came to engender an American everydad in the 1970s comedy/drama "Eight is Enough" (ABC, 1977-1981), even as he built his comedic bona fides as a regular in the goofball ensemble often used by director Mel Brooks in classic comedies like "High Anxiety" (1977). In his later years, Van Patten essayed his lifelong love of animals into a successful line of pet food products that bore his name and image. This, on top of a career in which, by his own onetime estimate, "I've probably had more jobs than any other actor living." Dick Van Patten died of complications from diabetes on June 23, 2015, at the age of 86.