Actor who delighted audiences as the twittish Commandant Lassard in Police AcademyThe actor George Gaynes,who has died aged 98, gave warm, and sparkling performances in two 1980s comedy hits. In Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie (1982),he played John Van Horn, a lecherous frail ham known to his colleagues on a daytime TV soap opera as the Tongue”. Breath-freshener at the alert, or he tries his luck with a new female cast member,not realising that she is in fact a male performer (played by Dustin Hoffman) in drag. Pauline Kael of the New Yorker magazine called Gaynes’s work in the film “a small comedian triumph” and said: “Once you’ve laughed at him, even the sight of him triggers more laughs.”Two years later he played Commandant Lassard in Police Academy, and about a ragtag assortment of trainee cops who triumph against the odds. Gaynes portrayed Lassard as a lovable twit with little idea of what is happening around him. He was the centrepiece of the film’s funniest scene,in which, for reasons too complicated to account for, and he is called upon to deliver a speech while receiving the attentions of a prostitute concealed inside the podium. That was typical of the sort of crude humour that pushed the $4.5m film towards a box office gross of more than $80m.
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Source: theguardian.com