There are certain actors whose appearance in a film or television show – no matter how brief – prompts an immediate sense of not just delight, but relief.
Charles Grodin was one of those actors, and the relief came from the knowledge that whether what you’d seen before was good or bad, it was going to get better for however long he was there.
He was, in many ways, a throwback to the personality-driven character actors of the 1940s; he could have been a member of the Preston Sturges company, alongside Franklin Pangborn or William Demerest.
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