George Gaynes: Character actor who found fame after 30 years’ work thanks to Police Academy

Fame came to him late, which allowed him to take it all in his stride

George Gaynes in Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow in 1994 (Rex Features)

There is an old adage in show business: it takes 20 years to become an overnight success. For the delightful character actor George Gaynes, who has died at the age of 98, it took a good deal longer. After three decades of solid work on stage and screen he finally became a household name in America after starring alongside Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie (1982), in which he played lusty actor John van Horn, tirelessly pursuing his leading lady, unaware that the object of his affections is in fact a fellow male, for whom dragging up seems to be the only way of getting cast in anything.

Although its profile has dropped a little in the years since its release, Tootsie was a huge success at the time, the biggest grossing movie of the year after ET and nominated for 10 Oscars. Its old-fashioned blend of gentle satire and charm was a pleasant diversion in the hard-nosed 1980s, and Gaynes’ performance was eye-catching.

Then two years later, he starred as the hapless Commandant Eric Lassard in Police Academy (1984). Despite a critical mauling, the film spawned six sequels, with Gaynes always an essential part of the silliness. The Police Academy films were some way from the deft comedy of the film they took their lead from, Airplane (1980), but they were also a much jollier and less offensive effort than cinema’s previous comedy cop caper, the awful The Choirboys (1978).

Russian by birth, George Gaynes was born George Jongejans in Helsinki in 1917, a few months before Finland gained independence from the Russian Empire. His mother, Iya Grigorievna De Gay, was an artist, his father a Dutch businessman. He was also the nephew of Gregory Gaye, a character actor who was equally prolific, although despite appearing in Casablanca (1942), he never gained the same recognition Gaynes ultimately did.

He was introduced to opera by his mother and by her close friend, the Russian basso Feodor Chaliapin, and after a childhood spent in France, England and Switzerland, studied acting and music in Milan. He started performing as an opera singer in Italy and France but was interrupted by the Second World War, spending three months as a prisoner of war in Spain before travelling to Britain and joining the Royal Navy. Then he joined the New York City Opera, where his credits were plentiful, from Gilbert and Sullivan (which allowed him to develop his considerable comic talents) to playing Figaro.

By the 1950s he was appearing regularly on Broadway in musical comedies; he debuted playing Jupiter in the original production of Cole Porter’s Out of This World (1950), and followed this with Bob Baker in the Leonard Bernstein musical version of My Sister Eileen, entitled Wonderful Town (1953), and Henry Higgins in the 1964 tour of My Fair Lady. For much of his Broadway career he was still juggling his opera commitments and appearing in musicals on alternate nights.

He made his television debut in 1955, starring alongside Robert Culp in a production of Molière’s The Would-Be Gentleman. By the mid-’60s he was chalking up plentiful credits on the small screen, in time appearing in everything from Cheers! to The Six Million Dollar Man, though he never had a regular role until, off the back of his film successes, he starred as the grumpy but loveable widower and foster dad Henry Warnimont, in the sitcom Punky Brewster (1985). Here, Gaynes was the straight man, playing second fiddle to cute kids and a dog, and playing it commendably straight.

The premise was that Gaynes’ character, the ageing janitor of an apartment block, discovers an abandoned child and offers her shelter, ultimately becoming her adoptive father. So many American sitcoms of the era were guilty of being consciously “performed”, everything thrown out to the audience, the actors only ever half in character; the warmth of the relationship between the two leads in Punky Brewster however was down to the sheer sincerity of the performances more than it was the writing.

Gaynes was always a generous performer, even when not sharing a stage with such obvious scene-stealers as children and dogs. His characterisation of Commandant Lassard in Police Academy was an example of him lampooning his own presence and command. The films are a mixture of the slapdash and the slapstick, but Gaynes is at the top of his game regardless of the quality of the material: the unforgettable sequence when he tries to deliver a speech to his motley crew of cadets while suffering the attentions of a particularly amorous fan is a masterclass in comic expression.

A later recurring role on television was in the undervalued comedy-drama series The Days and Night of Molly Dodd (1991), as friend and flatmate Blair Brown’s thirtysomething New York singleton. He also appeared in many television miniseries during their heyday, namely Rich Man, Poor Man (1976), Washington: Behind Closed Doors (1977) and Scruples (1980).

He married the actress Allyn Ann McLerie in 1953. Their son Matthew died in a car accident in 1989; their daughter, Iya Gaynes Falcone, a lawyer, also had a brief political career. Fame came to him late, which allowed him to take it all in his stride, and after a career spanning more than 50 years he retired in 2003, saying with characteristic modesty that he was delighted to have in some small way made people feel good now and then.

George Jongejans (George Gaynes), actor and singer: born Helsinki 16 May 1917; married 1953 Allyn Ann McLerie (one son deceased, one daughter); died North Bend, Washington 15 February 2016.