CNN
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Richard Belzer, the comic and actor greatest identified for enjoying the acerbic Detective John Munch throughout a variety of NBC crime dramas, together with “Legislation & Order: Particular Victims Unit,” over greater than twenty years, has died, in keeping with his longtime supervisor. He was 78.
Belzer “handed away peacefully” early Sunday morning native time at his dwelling in France, in keeping with Eric Gardner, his supervisor.
Author Invoice Scheft, a longtime good friend of the actor, informed The Hollywood Reporter that Belzer had “a number of well being points.”
Belzer was famed for his position as Detective Munch, first showing on NBC’s “Murder: Life on the Avenue” from 1993 to 1999. He reprised that position within the TV film “Murder: The Film” in 2000 and additionally appeared because the famed detective in 4 episodes of “Legislation & Order.”
Belzer appeared as Munch once more in “Legislation & Order: SVU,” the place he turned a sequence common, showing in 326 episodes between 1999 and 2016. Although his character retired in 2013, he returned in two further episodes after his departure.
Like Belzer himself, detective Munch had a conspiratorial mindset, a Jewish background and a dry humorousness. His scrawny, wisecracking, glasses-wearing investigator turned over time one of the vital recognizable cops in TV crime present historical past.
“I might by no means be a detective, but when I have been, that’s how I’d be,” he mentioned in a current interview with The Boomer Tube. “The character may be very near how I might be. They write to all my paranoia and anti-establishment dissidence and conspiracy theories, so it’s been quite a lot of enjoyable for me. It’s been a dream truly.”
The 9 lives of Detective Munch
Over the course of his profession, Belzer portrayed a detective in 11 tv sequence, together with “The Wire” and “The X-Recordsdata.” He made crossover appearances in-character within the comedies “30 Rock,” “Arrested Improvement” and “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” and his detective Munch was even was a muppet within the “Sesame Avenue” skit “Particular Letters Unit.”
In an announcement posted to the Twitter account for Wolf Leisure, “Legislation & Order” producer Dick Wolf mentioned Belzer’s Munch character was “one in all tv’s iconic characters.”
“I first labored with Richard on the ‘Legislation & Order’ / ‘Murder’ crossover and liked the character a lot. I informed Tom (Fontana) that I wished to make him one of many unique characters on ‘SVU.’ The remaining is historical past,” Wolf mentioned. “Richard introduced humor and pleasure into all our lives, was the consummate skilled, and we are going to all miss him very a lot.”
His colleagues, amongst them Chris Meloni and Mariska Hargitay, supplied reward of their co-star.
“Goodbye my expensive, expensive good friend,” Hargitay wrote on Instagram. “I’ll miss you, your distinctive gentle, and your singular tackle this unusual world. I really feel blessed to have identified you and adored you and labored with you, aspect by aspect, for therefore a few years.”
Different fond recollections got here from comedians Billy Crystal, Richard Lewis and Laraine Newman, who singled out his comedic crowd work.
“I don’t suppose there’s a comic book of our era who wouldn’t cite Richard Belzer, as not solely a significant affect, however as completely the funniest man,” mentioned Paul Shaffer, the comic and musician on David Letterman’s late night time reveals. “Now, all people strikes up one.”
Regardless of his crime-solving profession, the Connecticut-born actor’s early focus was on comedy and rooted in New York Metropolis. He appeared within the metropolis’s comedy golf equipment, together with Catch a Rising Star and The Improv, and was identified for his unsympathetic feedback on political and social occasions of the time.
His breakout position got here in 1974, when he starred alongside Chevy Chase within the counter-culture movie “The Groove Tube,” which featured a compilation of skits that included social commentary on televisions reveals of the ’70s. He later labored because the warm-up act for “Saturday Night time Reside” and appeared in a number of sketches in its early seasons.
Belzer appeared within the hit 1980 movie “Fame” as M.C. Later movie roles got here in 1982’s “Night time Shift” adopted by the Al Pacino-starring “Scarface” one yr later. And within the Nineties, he appeared on the superhero reveals “The Flash” and “Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.”
Then got here the chance on “Murder.” The community wished a “hunk” to play the position, however the filmmaker Barry Levinson forged Belzer as detective Munch after listening to him on the radio, he informed the AV Membership in 2010.
A longtime creator, Belzer was a identified conspiracy buff and wrote the ebook, “UFOs, JFK and Elvis: Conspiracies You Don’t Should Be Loopy to Consider.” He additionally wrote a number of comedy books and novels, together with “I Am Not A Cop!,” a fictionalized story a few TV actor who performs a detective and has to unravel his good friend’s disappearance.
Belzer’s final credited position was within the 2016 movie “The Comic” starring Robert de Niro, through which Belzer portrayed himself.