Charactor actor Glenn Shadix has died. He’s one of those “that guy” actors, specifically (as in the title) “that fat gay guy”, though in recent years he lost a LOT of weight through gastric bypass. (Fat pic/thin pic.)
His best known roles were in Tim Burton movies: Beetlejuice (the fat gay interior decorator) onscreen and as a voice in Nightmare Before Christmas and an orangutan senator in Planet of the Apes but he did a zillion TV and movie and stage appearances including Carnivale in recent (thin) years.
He was semi-retired for the past few years and living in his native Birmingham, AL (where his parents sent him for electroshock treatment when he was a college student to cure teh gay). He owned a beautiful Queen Anne home there for a while but it burned to the ground at Christmas a few years back. He died from a head injuries he suffered in an accident at his downtown B’ham condo. Apparently he had health problems as the obit says he was in a wheelchair.
I believe he also appeared on a couple of Seinfeld episodes as the super of Jerry’s building, or maybe he was more of a resident helper to the landlord. Either way, he was always funny.
On his blog he mentioned a recent trip to NYC to audition for a Christopher Woltz project for which they had tracked him down in Alabama (he was essentially retired). Nice to know he did not lack for quality work.
The early reports say “blunt head trauma” or something to that effect. If he was wheelchair bound (which me might not have been 100% of the time), it seems hard–but certainly not impossible–to imagine him falling out of it an getting so banged up that he died from the injury. So. . .
If he was having mobility problems, maybe he was trying walk without it? Or possibly he had a heart attack (or something) in his chair and bumped his head as he fell out of it. I had not seen a lot of detail in the reports, and since there’s no indication of foul play, there probably wasn’t an autopsy.