Actor Peter Boyle Dies at 71

Actor Peter Boyle, best known for his roles in the films Young Frankenstein and Joe and the TV sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, died on Tuesday, December 12 at New York Presbyterian Hospital. He had been suffering from multiple myeloma and heart disease. Boyle was 71.

Born in Philadelphia on October 18, 1935, Boyle attended Roman Catholic schools and spent three years in a monastery before abandoning his religious studies. He served in the U.S. army, but his military career was cut short by a nervous breakdown. After graduating from La Salle University in Philadelphia in 1957, he came to New York to study acting with Uta Hagen and was eventually cast in a touring production of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. When the tour reached Chicago, he quit to join that city’s famed improvisational troupe Second City, but he remained with them for only a brief time.

Boyle returned to New York and began to land roles in Off-Broadway shows, TV commercials, and, eventually, films. He was seen on Broadway as a replacement in Paul Sills Story Theatre (1970-71) and in The Roast, a play by Jerry Belson and Garry Marshall that ran only 14 performances in May 1980. His most recent stage appearance was in the Off-Broadway show The Exonerated at 45 Bleecker.

He made his film debut with an uncredited appearance in The Group (1966), then went on to The Virgin President, Medium Cool, and The Monitors before achieving fame with his role of a bigoted, murderous hard-hat in Joe (1970). In a complete change of pace, he played the monster in Mel Brooks’ comedy Young Frankenstein (1974), achieving screen immortality with his performance of the Irving Berlin classic “Puttin on the Ritz” as a song-and-dance duet with Gene Wilder. He also appeared in such films as The Candidate, Taxi Driver, Where the Buffalo Roam, Outland, The Dream Team, The Shadow, Malcolm X, The Santa Clause (and its two sequels), and Monster’s Ball.

Boyle earned acclaim for his performance as Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1977 television film Tail Gunner Joe. Among his many other TV credits are the miniseries Master Spy: The Robert Hanssen Story and Echoes in the Darkness, and the films Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North, The Tragedy of Flight 103: The Inside Story, and In the Lake of the Woods. In 1996, he won an Emmy Award for a guest appearance on The X-Files, in which he played an insurance salesman who can see into the future. But he is best known to today’s audiences for his role of the irascible Frank Barone in the hit CBS sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond, which aired from 1996 to 2005.

In 1977, Boyle married Loraine Alterman, a reporter for Rolling Stone whom he had met when she visited the set of Young Frankenstein. The couple has two daughters, Lucy and Amy.