Articledesk
March 9, 2022
Conrad Janis, an actor familiar to television viewers as Mindy’s father on the hit sitcom “Mork & Mindy” who was also a skilled jazz musician and a gallerist well known in the New York art world, died on March 1 in Los Angeles. He was 94.
Dean A. Avedon was his business manager and confirmed his death.
Born to the famed art collectors and gallerists Sidney Janis and Harriet Grossman Janis as children, Mr. Janis seamlessly moved between the worlds high art, jazz and acting. Sometimes, he even switched between them in the same night.
“Conrad Janis Is Glad to Live Three Lives,” the headline on a 1962 Newsday article read. At the time he was starring in the romantic comedy “Sunday in New York” on Broadway and, after the Friday and Saturday night performances, playing trombone with his group, the Tailgate 5, at Central Plaza in Manhattan. (On Sundays he’d trek to Brooklyn to play at the club Caton Corner.) When not onstage or on the bandstand, he could often be found at his father’s art gallery.
Sixteen years later he found himself on one of the most popular shows on television when he was cast on “Mork & Mindy,” which premiered in September 1978, as the father of Mindy (Pam Dawber), a Colorado woman who befriends an eccentric alien (Robin Williams). On Sundays during this period, he played in the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band at the Ginger Man, a club in Beverly Hills, Calif., whose owners included Carroll O’Connor of “All in the Family.”
Newsday was told by Mr. Janis that the key to juggling three areas is keeping his personas separate.
“It just wouldn’t do to tell a knowledgeable art patron that ‘man, I dig Picasso the wildest,’” he said.
Janis was a talented trombonist and actor who performed regularly with the Beverly Hills Unlisted Jazz Band. George Segal, a fellow actor, played banjo and sang in the 1980 performance. Credit… Ralph Dominguez/MediaPunch, via Alamy
Conrad Janis was a Manhattan native, born February 11, 1928. His parents owned a successful shirt-making company that was a success early in their married lives. This gave them the financial resources to start collecting art and open the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1948. New York Times put it in Sidney Janis’s obituary in 1989, “a major pacesetter for the art world in the 1950s and ’60s.”
Harriet Janis also wrote books with the jazz historian Rudi Blesh, including “They All Played Ragtime” (1950). That connection led to Conrad’s musical expertise. Mr. Blesh’s daughter played trombone in her school’s marching band but lost interest; the spare trombone ended up in Conrad’s hands. He was particularly interested in the music of Kid Ory, a New Orleans trombonist who was also a bandleader.
“I memorized a lot of what he did,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988.
His acting skills were developed along with his musicianship. When he was 13, a classmate at the Little Red School House in Manhattan told him that “Junior Miss,” a popular Broadway comedy about a teenage girl, was holding auditions for a road company. He auditioned and was accepted. He spent two years on the tour and rose to the top in his juvenile role. He also began radio voice work.
“I played kids of 14 and old men of 40” on the radio, he told The New York TimesInterview from 1945
He landed a role in the pre-Broadway run of “The Dark of the Moon,” which got him noticed by a Hollywood talent scout. He remained with the play when it went to New York, making his Broadway debut in March 1945, but within a few months he was on the West Coast to make his first film, the comedy “Snafu,” in which he played a teenager who lies about his age to enlist.
It was his first of over 100 television and film credits. In the movies, he played alongside some famous names: Ronald Reagan and Shirley Temple in the notoriously bad “That Hagan Girl” (1947), Charlton Heston and other prominent stars in “Airport 1975” (1974), Lynn Redgrave in “The Happy Hooker” (1975), George Burns in “Oh God! Book II” (1980).
He was on television from the medium’s earliest days, playing numerous roles in the late 1940s and ’50s, many of them on shows like “Suspense,” “Actor’s Studio” and “The Philco Television Playhouse” that were broadcast live. Some of those roles were made possible by his knowledge of musical instruments.
JANIS, Conrad (Conrad Janowitz)
Born: 2/11/1928, New York City, New York, U.S.A.
Died: 3/1/2022, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.
Conrad Janis’ westerns – actor:
Zane Grey theater (TV) – 1956 (Ben Gracia)
Stoney Burke (TV) – 1960 (Penn Hudson)
The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox – 1976 (Gladstone)
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