Jack Betts, an actor whose six-decade career included a memorable part in 2002’s Spider-Man, has died.
Betts died in his sleep at home in Los Osos, California, on Thursday, June 19, his nephew told The Hollywood Reporter. He was 96.
In Spider-Man, Betts played Henry Balkan, the Oscorp board chair who fired Norman Osborn (Willem Defoe). Norman then suited up as the villainous Green Goblin, hopped on his hijacked Oscorp glider, and vaporized Henry and the rest of the board.
Betts said in a 2020 interview on The Dev Show that it took hours to film the Oscorp boardroom scene and that he asked director Sam Raimi if he could add humor to the scene.
“I really looked [Defoe] right in the eye, and I had kind of a smile in my eye — you know, like, ‘You’re fired, you motherf*****,’” he recalled. “After, I finished it, [Raimi] said, ‘That’s it. Terrific. Print that one.’ My point being is that I wanted to add something just a little different to it instead of doing it the same way over and over and over and over. [Raimi] he was willing to do that. He really was. Wonderful man to work with.”
Betts, who was born on April 11, 1929, in Jersey City, New Jersey, became interested in acting after seeing Laurence Olivier in 1939’s Wuthering Heights, per THR.
After moving to New York City, Betts caught the attention of acting coach Lee Strasberg and studied at The Actors Studio for three years.
Then came parts for Betts in films (1959’s The Broody Bunch) and TV (The Detectives, Checkmate, Bonanza, Perry Mason), sometimes under the stage name Hunt Powers. Betts got a starring role in 1966’s Sugar Colt, one of his many spaghetti Western films, after lying to director Franco Giraldi about knowing how to ride a horse and shoot a gun.
As his screen career continued, Betts played Dr. Ivan Kipling in a recurring One Life to Live role in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, Betts took small roles in 1995’s Batman Forever and 1997’s Batman & Robin and portrayed Boris Karloff in 1998’s Gods and Monsters. And in the 2000s, Betts guest-starred on TV shows like The Unit, The Mentalist, and Monk. His last screen credit came in 2019, when he made an appearance on Good Trouble.
Betts met future Everybody Loves Raymond star Doris Roberts at The Actors Studio in 1954, and in 1988, he accepted her invitation to move into her Hollywood Hills home. From then until Roberts’ 2016 death, he often accompanied her to Hollywood events. “We were best friends to the very end, we had wonderful times together,” he once said.
Betts’ survivors include his nieces, Lynne and Gail, and his sister, Joan, who turns 100 this year, THR reports.
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