Dumb Like a Fox

"Antibiotics only bore a cold to death." - Dr. Bombay, "Bewitched"

Attention, believers in Hollywood's rule of threes: In less than week, the business of show lost a trio of celebrities, mostly notable for their appearances on television. On December 13, 2016, Alan Thicke, who starred as work-at-home psychiatrist Dr. Jason Seaver for seven seasons on the sitcom "Growing Pains," succumbed to a heart attack, age 69.

Alan Thicke (second from the left) poses with the seventh season
cast of "Growing Pains," Joanna Kerns, Kirk Cameron, Ashley
Johnson, Tracey Gold, and Jeremy Miller. Leonardo DiCaprio (far
left) joined the family in the final season as a homeless teen.

On December 18, Zsa Zsa Gabor, who had been on life support for five years, died, less than two months before her 100th birthday. She made some movies, including a starring role as famed can-can dancer Jane Avril in director John Huston's "Moulin Rouge" and the title role of "Queen of Outer Space" (a favorite on "Mystery Science Theater 3000"), but not unlike the Kardashians of later generations, she was famous just for being famous, or infamous, like her notorious 1989 arrest for slapping a Beverly Hills police officer after being pulled over for a traffic violation. She appeared on 64 episodes of the game show "The Hollywood Squares" (pictured below).

Speaking of celebrities-with-little-to-celebrate, Paris Hilton is
the great-granddaughter of hotelier Conrad Hilton, who was
married to Zsa Zsa Gabor for a few years in the 1940s, making
Zsa Zsa, we guess, Paris' step-great-grandmother.

Between the passings of Alan Thicke and Zsa Zsa Gabor, on December 14, Bernard Fox died of heart failure, age 89. The Welsh-born actor, who appeared on TV and in films for over four decades, was undoubtedly best known for his roles as the flamboyant, globe-trotting witch doctor Dr. Bombay on "Bewitched" and as the staggeringly incompetent Colonel Crittenden on "Hogan's Heroes."

Regularly called upon to reverse spells or concoct potions for Samantha Stephens (Elizabeth Montgomery) on "Bewitched," Fox's character was summoned by the phrase, "Dr. Bombay, calling Dr. Bombay. Emergency, come right away." The warlock appeared on the series 19 times. Fox later recalled, "If I'd just gone for an ordinary doctor, you wouldn't have heard any more about it. But because I made him such a colorful character, that's why they wanted him back."

Fox insisted the character "was easy to write for. They came up with the idea of him coming from different parts of the world all the time, and in different costumes." The outlandish wardrobe included a Roman toga, a wetsuit, a football uniform, a bath towel, and a matador's outfit.

Samantha: "There goes one of the great quackpots of all time."

Bernard Fox, who ran away from home before he was 18 to join the Royal Navy and served as a mine sweeper during World War II, claimed he met a clueless officer who inspired his characterization of Dr. Bombay. Fox recalled an incident when a half-dozen women from the Royal Navy Service arrived at the all-male camp. "So I went to the officer," Fox remembered, "and said, 'What shall I do?' And he said, 'Oh, I don't know, give 'em a hot bran mash, some clean straw and bed 'em down for the night.' And I thought, 'What a great way to play (Dr. Bombay). And that's the way I played him and (the 'Bewitched' writers) just kept writing him back in...The puns I came up with...they let you do that."

In the late 1970s, Fox reprised the role of Dr. Bombay on the short-lived "Bewitched" spin-off "Tabitha," starring Lisa Hartman, and two decades later, on "Passions," a daytime drama with supernatural elements (although his character was called a "wish doctor" as opposed to a witch doctor). Fox spoofed the character as Dr. Jinga-Janga on an episode of "Pee-wee's Playhouse."

On "Hogan's Heroes," Bernard Fox made eight appearances as the bumbling Colonel Crittenden of the Royal Air Force (although there is no rank of colonel in the RAF). Blindly naive and astonishingly inept, Crittenden proved to be the bane of the wisecracking but unfailingly efficient Colonel Hogan (Bob Crane).

Crittenden, according to Bernard Fox, was "a much bigger
idiot than Dr. Bombay."

Bernard Fox had started acting onstage as a child and continued after the war. One of his earliest film roles was in the acclaimed 1958 British drama "A Night to Remember," about the tragic maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic in 1912. Fox portrayed Lookout Frederic Fleet, who declares, "Iceberg dead ahead, sir!"

The real-life Fleet survived the sinking of the Titanic and later testified at inquiries that if he had been issued binoculars, "We could have seen it a bit sooner." When asked how much sooner, he blithely replied, "Enough to get out of the way." In his later years, Fleet battled severe depression and hanged himself.

Nearly 40 years after "A Night to Remember," Bernard Fox played Colonel Archibald Gracie IV in director James Cameron's 1997 epic, "Titanic." Gracie was, in fact, a direct descendant of Sir Archibald Gracie, a Scottish-born shipping magnate in New York and Virginia. Historically, the colonel was the last survivor to leave the ship and the first adult survivor to die, less than eight months after the sinking. He had been working on a book, which was published posthumously as The Truth about the Titanic. Gracie's last words were, "We must get them into the boats, we must get them all into the boats."

Bernard Fox, as Archibald Gracie IV, exchanges words with "Titanic"
sleazeball Billy Zane, as fictional steel heir Caledon Nathan Hockley.

Fox portrayed Gracie with his British accent intact, while the real-life Gracie was American. After Fox's death, family spokesperson Harlan Boll mentioned that the actor delighted in telling people, "I'm the only person to have survived the Titanic twice."

Another of Bernard Fox's early screen appearances was in 1962's sprawling, multinational saga of the D-Day invasion in World War II, "The Longest Day" (pictured above). That same year, Fox had a small part in the WWII TV series "Combat!" after which he tirelessly toiled in seemingly every U.S. sitcom and numerous drama series through the 1960s and '70s. Most of his roles took advantage of his satiric take on the stiff upper-lipped Englishman, underscored by his clipped, British accent and a bushy, twirled mustache that could have wandered off the pages of a tale by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. As a matter of fact, Fox portrayed Dr. Watson to Stewart Granger's Sherlock Holmes in a 1972 television adaptation of Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, costarring William Shatner.

Bernard Fox guest-starred twice on "Columbo," with Peter Falk,
including an appearance as an appropriately mustachioed
Scotland Yard superintendent.

Fox made three appearances on "The Andy Griffith Show" (sadly 'stache-less) as Malcolm Meriweather, a veddy proper, bicycle-touring Brit (pictured below) who initially works off a traffic fine as Sheriff Taylor's valet, leading to a classic clash of cultures in the fish-out-of-water tale.

Bernard Fox's last appearance in a sitcom, not to mention his final acting assignment before his retirement, was the portrayal of a picky British tourist in San Francisco in a 2001 episode of "Dharma & Greg."

The big screen gave Fox one of his most interesting roles in 1968's "The Bamboo Saucer," a low-budget but modestly sincere hybrid of science fiction and Cold War politics that over the years has developed a cult following. In sort of a poor man's "Ice Station Zebra," rival teams of American and Russian scientists rush to investigate the landing site of a mysterious UFO in communist China.

Promotion for "The Bamboo Saucer" overplayed
the movie's limited, at best, action sequences.

Foreshadowing the relationship between American scientist Roy Scheider and Soviet astronaut Helen Mirren in "2010: The Year We Make Contact," "The Bamboo Saucer" awkwardly suggests a budding romance between Yankee test pilot John Ericson (a B-list leading man of the '60s who starred in "Pretty Boy Floyd" and "7 Faces of Dr. Lao") and Russian scientist Lois Nettleton (pictured below, because where else is one going to find a picture of a topless Soviet scientist taking a birdbath in communist China?).

More importantly, "The Bamboo Saucer" presented veteran character actor Dan Duryea in a rare top-billed role in what was also his last film appearance. Duryea established a familiar presence in Hollywood film noirs and westerns as charismatic hoods and outlaws with an affably belying grin (pictured below).

But we digress. In a supporting cast featuring Bob Hastings (best known as Captain "Leadbottom" Binghamton's suck-up subordinate, Lt. Carpenter, on TV's "McHale's Navy") and James Hong ("Big Trouble in Little China") as a Red Chinese soldier named Sam Archibald, Bernard Fox played a scientist in a stylish bush hat (pictured below, center).

In 1971's "Big Jake," an odd combo of a traditional John Wayne cowboy movie and a contemporary "Butch Cassidy" revisionist western, Bernard Fox enjoyed a colorful cameo as a Scottish sheepman about to be lynched by a pair of cattlemen (pictured below), until the Duke, as saddle-weary gunfighter Jacob McCandles, intervenes: "Jacob McCandles? I thought you were dead." "Not hardly."

Bernard Fox's inimitable command of the Queen's English made him a natural casting choice for animated features. He was the voice of the Chairman (pictured below) in Disney's "The Rescuers" (1977) which featured Bob Newhart and Eva Gabor.

"The Rescuers" became the first Disney animated feature to have a sequel when "The Rescuers Down Under" was released in 1990. Bernard Fox reprised his character of the Chairman, as well as providing the voice for the Doctor (pictured below).

Fox's autograph revealed his sense of panache.

Fox's career of sending up stuffy British stereotypes culminated in a delightful cameo as Captain Winston Havlock, a retired pilot of His Majesty's Royal Air Corps, in the rousing 1999 version of "The Mummy," featuring Brendan Fraser as American ex-foreign legionnaire Rick O'Connell.

O'Connell hopes to employ Winston's aviation skills to "rescue the damsel in distress, kill the bad guy, save the world," in response to which the tea-and-crumpets Englishman inquires, "Is it dangerous?" O'Connell replies, "Well, you probably won't live through it." Obviously having the time of his life in the role, Fox excitedly gushes, "By Jove, do you really think so?" In typical deadpan demeanor, Brendan Fraser says, "Everybody else we've bumped into has died, why not you?"

"Ever since the end of the Great War, there hasn't been a single
challenge worthy of a man like me."

In 2005, Bernard Fox, Erin Murphy (who played the infant and toddler Tabitha Stephens on "Bewitched"), and actress Kasey Rogers (who portrayed the wife of Darrin's boss, Larry Tate) attended the unveiling of a statue of "Bewitched" star Elizabeth Montgomery in Salem, Massachusetts (pictured below).

Kasey Rogers (center), who played Farley Granger's scheming,
adulterous wife in Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train," passed
away a year after the statue's unveiling, in 2006. 

Bernard Fox was a longtime fan of magic and illusion and had long been a member of Los Angeles' The Magic Club, an exclusive Los Angeles nightspot acknowledged as "the most unusual private club in the world."