A familiar face for years in movies, on television and especially on Broadway, he had a particular affinity for the work of George Bernard Shaw.
Philip Bosco, a character actor who was a familiar face for years in movies, on television and especially on the Broadway stage, where he won a Tony Award and was nominated for five more, died on Monday night at his home in Haworth, N. J. He was 88.
His daughter Celia Bosco said the cause was complications of dementia.
A tall man with a hearty manner and a voice that could shift easily from stentorian boom to silken purr, Mr. Bosco received his first Tony Award nomination for his Broadway debut, in 1960, and his last for his role as the angriest member of the jury in a murder trial in the 2004 production of Reginald Rose’s intense drama “Twelve Angry Men.”
Known for his versatility, Mr. Bosco won his one Tony, in 1989, for portraying a buffoonish opera impresario in Ken Ludwig’s farce “Lend Me a Tenor.”
As late as 1979, when he had already appeared in more than 30 Broadway productions, he told The New York Times, with more resignation than rancor, “There are a lot of actors like me who have been working a long time, yet no one knows you outside the theater world.” He added, “You could say all of us are waiting in the wings for that great role.”
If he never did have that one great role, he had more than a few memorable ones in a career that lasted more than 50 years. Many of those roles were written by George Bernard Shaw.
Although he told one interviewer that he had not “followed any particular course in pursuing Shaw” (while acknowledging that it was “heavenly for an actor to wrap his tongue around those delicious words”), it became his specialty; Mr. Bosco played more than a dozen Shavian roles.
When he played the voluble munitions maker Andrew Undershaft in Shaw’s “Major Barbara” at the Circle in the Square in 1980, Walter Kerr wrote admiringly in The Times that Mr. Bosco could “maintain a machine-gun pace without losing a gleeful syllable or an ounce of Shaw’s art.” Frank Rich, reviewing Mr. Bosco’s performance as the British general John Burgoyne in “The Devil’s Disciple,” Shaw’s Revolutionary War drama, at the same theater in 1988, wrote, “While there are no sure things in the New York theater, the partnership of George Bernard Shaw and Philip Bosco comes close.
