LOS ANGELES, July 24 -- Memorial services are planned in Beverly Hills and New York for popular character actor Herbert Edelman, who died Sunday in Los Angeles of emphysema at age 62. The lanky, bald Edelman was known most recently for his Emmy- nominated recurring role on the NBC sitcom 'The Golden Girls,' in which he played Bea Arthur's ex-husband. His longtime companion, actress Christina Pickles, said he died at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital in Woodland Hills. Edelman, who lost his hair at an early age, began acting as a student at Brooklyn College, but he was eking out a living as a New York cab driver when director Mike Nichols tapped him to play a small but significant role in the Broadway production of 'Barefoot in the Park,' that of the telephone installer. The role gave him national notice, but it apparently he was not yet sure enough of his success to quit the day job. 'I'd done a lot of acting before, mostly at Brooklyn College,' he told the Los Angeles Times in 1970. 'I went on hacking for a while. I'd put the cab in the garage while I was onstage and pull it out after the play, sometimes picking up people who were in my audience.' That show ran from 1963 to 1968, and he played the same character in the 1967 movie version starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda as newlyweds. Edelman also played one of the poker game buddies in Simon's hit 'The Odd Couple' in New York and in the Jack Lemmon-Walter Matthau movie.
In addition to Pickles, his survivors include his father, two daughters, a sister and a brother. The Los Angeles service will be held Friday at the Beverly Hills Playhouse, and Edelman will be memorialized Aug. 11 at Union Temple in Brooklyn. His family asked that memorial contributions go to the American Lung Association's Emphysema Foundation.
