LOS ANGELES — Eddie Albert, the versatile stage, screen and television actor who co-starred as the Park Avenue lawyer who sought happiness down on the farm in the popular 1960s' sitcom "Green Acres," has died. He was 99.
Albert, an outspoken environmentalist and humanitarian activist, died Thursday night at his Pacific Palisades home of pneumonia, said his son Edward Laurence Albert. According to his son, Albert was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease about 10 years ago but still lived an active, full and happy life and remained at his home throughout.
In an acting career that spanned more than six decades, the blond, blue-eyed Albert was initially typecast as what has been described as an amiable fellow with a "corn-fed grin."
As Gregory Peck's news photographer pal in "Roman Holiday" (1953), Albert earned the first of his two Academy Award nominations for best supporting actor.
His second Oscar nomination came two decades later playing Cybill Shepherd's wealthy, exasperated father in "The Heartbreak Kid," the 1972 Neil Simon-Elaine May comedy.
Among Albert's nearly 100 film credits are "Oklahoma!" "I'll Cry Tomorrow," "Teahouse of the August Moon," "The Sun Also Rises," "The Joker Is Wild," "Beloved Infidel," "The Young Doctors," "The Longest Day," "Captain Newman, M.D." and "Escape to Witch Mountain."
Albert, who scored critically acclaimed dramatic performances on live television in the 1950s, was particularly memorable when he turned his good-guy screen image on its head — as he did playing the sadistic warden in director Robert Aldrich's 1974 comedy-drama "The Longest Yard," starring Burt Reynolds.
"There's no actor working today who can be as truly malignant as Eddie Albert," Aldrich told TV Guide in 1975. "He plays heavies exactly the way they are in real life. Slick and sophisticated."
At the time, Albert was co-starring as a retired bunco cop opposite Robert Wagner as his former con-man son in "Switch," a private-eye drama that ran for three seasons on CBS.
But he is best remembered for "Green Acres," which aired on CBS from 1965 to 1971 and continues to have an afterlife on cable TV. In it, Albert played Oliver Wendell Douglas, the successful Manhattan lawyer who satisfies his longing to get closer to nature by giving up his law practice and buying — sight-unseen — a rundown 160-acre farm near the fictional town of Hooterville. Eva Gabor co-starred as his malaprop-dropping socialite wife, Lisa.
The son of a real estate agent, Albert was born Edward Albert Heimberger on April 22, 1906, in Rock Island, Ill.
Seven months after World War II began, Albert joined the Navy. After graduating from officers training school, he was assigned to an amphibious transport ship and saw action in the South Pacific.
He was credited with saving scores of Marines from a deadly triple cross-fire during the bloody battle for Tarawa in the South Pacific.
Margo, Albert's wife of 39 years, died in 1985, also at the couple's home in Pacific Palisades.
In addition to his son, Albert is survived by a daughter Maria Zucht; and two granddaughters.