Jack Wrangler
Dennis Lewis
of respiratory failure. The 62-year-old actor had been in a nursing
facility for several months. He is survived by his wife, Margaret
Whiting, and his sister Pamela.
Wrangler's mother had been a line dancer in several Busby Berkeley
musicals. His father was respected film and television producer Robert
Stillman, whose credits include the long-time NBC Sunday night staple
"Bonanza."
Wrangler entered show business at age 9 with a role in the
Emmy-winning TV series "The Faith of Our Children." In the 1970s he
accepted an offer to appear in a gay porn film and went on to make
over 80 adult films, both gay and straight. He later became active in
the Manhattan cabaret scene and in the early 1990s was a master
teacher at the Eugene O'Neill Cabaret Symposium in Connecticut.
Wrangler and Whiting also taught young students about the Great
American Songbook at the Sundance Festival in association with the
Johnny Mercer Foundation.
<http://broadwayworld.com/article/Actor_Writer_and_Producer_Jack_Wrangler_Dead_At_62_20010101>
Playwright Robert Patrick, who appeared with Wrangler in his 1980 play
"T-shirts," shares interesting insights about Jack. Patrick notes that
Wrangler asked his father's advice while considering whether to accept
the initial offer to do gay porn and his father told him "just be the
best." After later branching out into straight porn, Wrangler confided
he'd lost his heterosexual virginity on camera.
Patrick recalls a scene in "T-shirts" in which Wrangler was supposed
to be off stage in a rainstorm while Patrick and the third "T-shirts"
star Dale Merchant were in front of the audience:
"Just before [Wrangler] re-entered, a stagehand would toss a pan of
water on him. Jack, I repeat, was a professional. Dale and I were more
freewheeling. At each performance, our scene would expand as we
improvised new jokes.
"A page before Jack's re-entrance cue, the stagehand splashed him. But
But Dale and I continued, Jack dried up, and the stagehand wetted him
again. Finally, at a matinee where he had to be doused a third time,
he slammed the door open before his cue and acted the ensuing scene
with clenched teeth. When I got too close to him as I hurried to catch
up with the staging, I got a professional elbow in a kidney with a
force that would have knocked a lighter clown down. The scene returned
to normal length."
JTEM
d...@sprynet.com (Dennis Lewis) wrote:
> Jack Wrangler (real name: John Robert Stillman) died Tuesday,
> April 7, of respiratory failure.
....brought on by.... ????
Lars Eighner
<1201ef86-0cef-414b...@e2g2000vbe.googlegroups.com>, the
lovely and talented JTEM broadcast on soc.motss:
> d...@sprynet.com (Dennis Lewis) wrote:
> ....brought on by.... ????
emphysema
--
Lars Eighner <http://larseighner.com/> use...@larseighner.com
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