His was a city actor ideal for “The Odd Couple,” which ran from 1970 to 1975 and was based on Neil Simon's play about mismatched roommates, divorced New Yorkers who end up living together. The show teamed Klugman—the sloppy sports writer Oscar Madison—and Tony Randall—the fussy photographer Felix Unger—in the roles played by Walter Matthau and Art Carney on Broadway and Matthau and Jack Lemmon in the 1968 film.
Klugman had already had a taste of the show when he replaced Matthau on Broadway, and he learned to roll with the quick-thinking Randall.
“There's nobody better to improvise with than Tony,” Klugman said. “A script might say, ‘Oscar teaches Felix football.' There would be four blank pages. He would provoke me into reacting to what he did. Mine was the easy part.”
They were the best of friends in real life. When Randall died in 2004 at age 84, Klugman told CNN: “A world without Tony Randall is a world that I cannot recognize.”
In “Quincy, M.E.,” which ran from 1976 to 1983, Klugman played an idealistic, tough-minded medical examiner who tussled with his boss by uncovering evidence of murder in cases where others saw natural causes.
“Everybody said, ‘Quincy'll never be a hit.' I said, ‘You guys are wrong. He's two heroes in one, a cop and a doctor,”' he said in a 1987 Associated Press interview.
For his 1987 role as 81-year-old Nat in the Broadway production of “I'm Not Rappaport,” Klugman wore leg weights to learn to shuffle like an elderly man. He said he would wear them for an hour before each performance, “to remember to keep that shuffle.”
“The guy is so vital emotionally, but physically he can't be,” Klugman said.
“We treat old people so badly. There is nothing easy about 80.”
