Sardi’s Caricaturist Donald Bevan Has Died
During the Second World War, Bevan flew missions as a waist gunner before getting shot down over Bremen, Germany in 1943. He spent two years in prisoner-of-war camps where he and fellow prisoner Edmund Trzcinski built a theater, wrote, and performed plays for the fellow detainees. The experience would serve as the basis of their 1951 play Stalag 17, which ran for over a year on Broadway before being adapted for the screen in 1953.
Following the war, Bevan, then an artist and illustrator, married the actress Patricia Kirkland and was introduced by her father, the playwright Jack Kirkland, to Vincent Sardi, Jr., proprietor of the theater district watering hole that bore his last name. Sardi was in need of a caricaturist, and Bevan fit the bill. In his two decades creating caricatures for Sardi’s, Bevan drew the likes of Hermione Gingold, Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, Lauren Bacall, Zero Mostel, and Laurence Olivier.
They still adorn the walls of the restaurant today.