His first big break came as Tom Hanks’s co-star on the TV comedy “Bosom Buddies” in the early 1980s. He also worked on the stage, occasionally on Broadway.
Peter Scolari, a familiar face on “Bosom Buddies,” “Newhart,” “Girls” and other television shows and in Broadway, Off Broadway and regional theater productions, died on Friday in Manhattan. He was 66. His management company, Wright Entertainment, said the cause was cancer. Mr. Scolari had done some stage work but was easing into television when he was cast alongside Tom Hanks in 1980 as one of the two principal characters on “Bosom Buddies,” an ABC comedy about two men who pretend to be women so they can live in a low-cost all-female apartment complex. The show, Mr. Hanks’s first prominent assignment, lasted only 37 episodes, but it has gained a sort of kitschy cachet over the years thanks to some witty touches in the scripts and the subsequent careers of the two stars. “A lot of television was about bosoms in 1980, when ‘Buddies’ began its two-year run,” Susan Stewart wrote in The New York Times in 2007, assessing a DVD release. “‘Three’s Company’ was three years old; ‘Charlie’s Angels’ was flying high. Compared to those exemplars of ‘jiggle TV,’ ‘Buddies’ was practically the Algonquin Round Table.” Perhaps Mr. Scolari’s best-known role came soon after, when he was cast in “Newhart,” on which Bob Newhart played an innkeeper in Vermont who has a local TV show. Mr. Scolari, who became a regular in the show’s second season, played his producer. Mr. Scolari ultimately appeared in more than 140 of the show’s 184 episodes, earning three Emmy nominations for best supporting actor in a comedy. More than 20 years after “Newhart” went off the air in 1990, Mr. Scolari became familiar to a different generation through a recurring role on the HBO series “Girls,” playing the father of the character portrayed by Lena Dunham, the show’s star and creator. He won an Emmy for the role in 2016. Among the other actors nominated in his category, outstanding guest actor in a comedy series, was Mr.
