LOS ANGELES - Actor Charles Grodin, who charmed audiences with his droll, understated and awkward humor in such films as The Heartbreak Kid, Midnight Run and the Beethoven movies, has died. He was 86.

Grodin died Tuesday of bone marrow cancer at his home in Wilton, Connecticut, his son, Nicholas, told The New York Times.

Grodin invigorated Neil Simon’s Seems Like Old Times (1980) when he portrayed an ambitious D.A. whose wife (Goldie Hawn) and life are distracted and disrupted when her ex-husband (Chevy Chase) plops into their straight-laced marriage.

On the flip side, the Pittsburgh native brought a duplicitous guile to a positive character in Sunburn (1979), playing an insurance investigator who poses as a tourist while investigating a murder.

Grodin won an Emmy in 1978 for co-writing NBC’s The Paul Simon Special, which championed the anti-establishment ethos of the era, and wrote and starred in the 1985 Hollywood-set feature Movers and Shakers.

His body of work also includes such movies as Taking Care of Business (1990), Clifford (1994), The Humbling (2014) and Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young (2014), More recently, he appeared in ABC’s Madoff miniseries and on Louie.

Grodin penned a column for the New York Daily News for nearly 10 years and wrote several books, including 1989’s It Would Be So Nice If You Weren’t Here, 1992’s How I Get Through Life, 1993’s Freddie the Fly and 2009’s How I Got to Be Whoever It Is I Am. (The Hollywood Reporter contributed to this story)

Story Date: May 24, 2021