David Birney, star of ‘St. Elsewhere’ and ‘Bridget Loves Bernie,’ dead at 83
nypost.comNew York Times reported.Birney first gained mainstream fame in 1972 opposite his future wife Meredith Baxter in the CBS sitcom “Bridget Loves Bernie.” The show was popular — slotted between ratings juggernauts “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “All in the Family — but short-lived thanks to controversial protests by Jewish groups who disagreed with the “intermarriage” of Birney’s Jewish cabbie character, Bernie Steinberg, and Baxter’s Bridget Fitzgerald, a Catholic grade school teacher from a wealthy family.Both divorced at the time, Birney and the futxure “Family Ties” matriarch, who had two children from her first marriage, got hitched for real in 1974.
The pair had three kids of their own before getting divorced in 1989.Baxter later claimed that Birney was emotionally and physically abusive in her bombshell 2011 book “Untied: A Memoir of Family, Fame, and Floundering.” He vehemently denied her claims, deeming them an “appalling abuse of the truth.”The son of an FBI agent, Birney was born on April 23, 1939, and raised in Cleveland, Ohio.
He graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in English literature in 1961, then earned his master’s in theater from UCLA, Variety reported.
After a tour in the US Army and a year with the Barter Theatre in Virginia, Birney made his New York theater debut in 1967’s “The Comedy of Errors,” “King John” and “Titus Andronicus” at the Shakespeare Festival for Joseph Papp.“I only took the TV series because the options for actors get fewer and fewer,” he told the Times at the height of his new TV fame in 1972.
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