Actor Bruno Kirby has died. I’m seeing a number of films cited, but it’s never the two that come most quickly to mind for him, admittedly smaller roles. There was the brief bit as a limo driver in Spinal Tap, and a juicier role in The Freshman. It was working with Marlon Brando in that latter film that gave him a number of the anecdotes that he spun when I saw him on The J. Keith Van Straaten Show (a never-broadcast live talk show done in a 99-seat theater in L.A.) a couple years back. In person, he was just as witty, charming, and disarming as you would’ve thought from those films.
He wasn’t young-young, but 57… as I move through my 40s, somehow that doesn’t sound that old any more.
