Actor, screenwriter and songwriter Gerrit Graham has passed away at age 77.
As Variety reports, Graham passed in Rhinebeck, New York, having suffered from health ailments including lung disease.
A TV Staple
As an actor, Graham was certainly familiar to television viewers of the 1970s and ’80s, amassing nearly 130 screen credits.
His guest-starring appearances on television ran the gamut, in series including “Laverne & Shirley,” “Dynasty,” “The A-Team” “The Dukes of Hazzard,” “Miami Vice,” “Law & Order,” “Seinfeld” and dozens more.
Graham also made his mark on the big screen, appearing in numerous movies. These included Brooke Shields‘ controversial “Pretty Baby,” memorably playing a sleazy car salesman in the Kurt Russell-starring comedy “Used Cars,” “Childs Play 2” and “Stuart Saves His Family,” among others.
‘Phantom of the Paradise’
Of all those many screen roles, however, Graham remained best known for playing glam-rock star Beef in 1974 cult hit horror flick “Phantom of the Paradise.”
As Graham recalled in a 2014 interview with Media Mikes, he’d previously worked with the film’s director, Brian DePalma, who cast him in the role of Swan, villainous head of Death Records — who was ultimately played by songwriter/actor Paul Williams.
“I was originally hired to play Swan. Then Paul Williams, who would become an Oscar winner and at the time was a very popular songwriter in LA had a agreed to play the Phantom in exchange for doing the music score. Paul then decided that he didn’t want to play the Phantom and instead wanted to play the villain. This meant that William Finley, a good friend of Brian De Palma’s, could play the Phantom, which was written by Brian for Finley,” Graham said.
“This meant I couldn’t play Swan anymore and Brian said he had another role; a character called “Capt. Beef.” I asked Brian what this character was like, and he said ‘a rock and roll star.’ So that sounded like a lot of fun to me,” he continued. “A Sha-Na-Na type character was something that sounded like fun to me. It turned out that was not what he wanted. He flew me out from New York to meet with Paul Williams and the two of them kept making this Beef character seem more like Little Richard. ‘What do you want?’ I said. They said ‘flamboyant,’ which at the time in Hollywood meant ‘gay.’ So I did a few lines in the Beef accent and lisp, and they loved it, burst into laughter and said, that’s it! That’s how the character was born.”
A Collaboration with the Dead
As Variety points out, Graham was also an accomplished screenwriter who worked extensively with Disney.
Among the projects he wrote for Disney include “The Little Mermaid,” “Oliver & Company” and “Prince and The Pauper.”
He also wrote episodes of TV series “The Young Riders” and “The Twiglight Zone.”
Also a songwriter and lyricist, Graham collaborated with Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead on “Victim or the Crime,” which the band recorded on its 1989 “Built to Last” album.
“I had originally written it for the Grateful Dead in 1983 or 1984,” Weir recalled in an interview, explaining how he came to work with Graham.
“I write a snatch of a chorus and then I showed that to my friend Gerrit Graham and we talked about it a little bit, and then he fleshed it out lyrically, and I fleshed out the music as well,” Weir added. “When I originally brought it around to the band, the way I wrote it and the way it came together, it’s a very complicated piece and it didn’t get a whole lot of attention because there was a lot of other material we were working on at the time. So I did it a little bit with [his band] the Midnites, then did it solo, and then brought it around again a few months ago to a warmer response. So at that point we started putting it together as a Grateful Dead song.”
