David Schramm obit

David Schramm, noted stage actor who played loutish airline owner on sitcom ‘Wings,’ dies at 73

He was not on the list.

David Schramm, a stage actor who portrayed King Lear in his early 30s and appeared in more than a dozen Broadway plays but was best known for his role as the blustery, unscrupulous owner of a small airline on the TV sitcom “Wings,” died March 28 at his home in the Bronx. He was 73.

The cause was a heart attack, said Margot Harley, a longtime colleague and a co-founder of the Acting Company, with which Mr. Schramm was associated.

Possessed of a portly physique and resonant baritone voice, Mr. Schramm was among the first graduates of the acting program at New York’s Juilliard School, and in the 1970s, he became a charter member of the Acting Company, founded by Harley and Oscar-winning actor John Houseman.

Mr. Schramm was a veteran of the Broadway stage in his 20s, had the title role in Shakespeare’s “King Lear” at 31 and appeared with Houseman in a 1983 production of Marc Blitzstein’s left-wing drama set to music, “The Cradle Will Rock.”

His profile rose after a 1988 California production of Garson Kanin’s “Born Yesterday,” in which Mr. Schramm played a corrupt, loutish businessman who, among other things, tried to bribe members of Congress. Critics lauded his performance, favorably comparing Mr. Schramm with Jackie Gleason and John Belushi.

“Because of those reviews, I landed in every casting office in town,” Mr. Schramm told the Los Angeles Times in 1989. “I was the flavor of the month. I ended up doing movies, TV gigs and plays. . . . My specialty seems to be playing the loud, pompous, bombastic, verging-on-hysteria guy.”

One of those TV shows turned out to be “Wings,” a sitcom developed by writers and producers whose credits included “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Taxi,” “Cheers” and “Frasier.” The show focused on two brothers — played by Tim Daly and Steven Weber — who own a one-plane regional airline on the island of Nantucket.

Mr. Schramm played Roy Biggins, the scheming owner of a competing airline, Aeromass, who flouts regulations, ethics and common decency to get ahead. He has a signed photo of former president Richard M. Nixon in his office and sets up phony charities to enrich himself.

At times, however, his character had a certain charm, including in one episode in which he teaches a shy immigrant taxi driver, played by Tony Shalhoub, how to dance so he can entertain elderly women from a cruise ship.

“I don’t know what it is about these old widows,” Mr. Schramm says as Biggins, “but once they put a husband in the ground, it makes them want to mambo.”

Mr. Schramm appeared in every episode of “Wings,” which ran for eight seasons from 1990 through 1997 and was one of the most popular sitcoms of the decade.

“I knew when we started it was going to be a success,” he told the Newark Star-Ledger in 2008. “When we sat around the table reading the first script, and I saw this buffoon they created for me, this pompous guy who said garish things to women, and all the other rich characters, I turned to Rebecca [Schull, who played a scatterbrained ticket agent] and said, ‘I think we’ve landed in a tub of butter.’ ”

David Michael Schramm was born Aug. 14, 1946, in Louisville. He said in one interview that his father was a bookie who spent a lot of time at racetracks.

His parents encouraged his youthful interest in acting and public speaking. At Western Kentucky University, from which he graduated in 1968, his drama teacher recommended him for the newly launched acting program at Juilliard.

“She told me, ‘You are going to go to school in New York’ — to which I said in my Southern twang, ‘Doctor, they ain’t gonna take me in no school in New York,’ ” Mr. Schramm told the Star-Ledger. “She worked on two audition pieces with me, arranged for the flight, packed a lunch, and said, ‘Go!’ ”

He won a scholarship to Juilliard, where his classmates included Patti LuPone and Kevin Kline, and received a master’s degree in 1972.

His first major television credit came in 1983, when he played Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara in a miniseries about President John F. Kennedy.

In addition to his TV role in “Wings,” Mr. Schramm continued to act on the New York stage and in regional theaters across the country in such plays as Alan Ayckbourn’s “A Chorus of Disapproval,” Reginald Rose’s “Twelve Angry Men” and Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”

He was in a 2009 Broadway revival of “Finian’s Rainbow” and in 2012 played Falstaff in “The Merry Wives of Windsor” at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington. His final stage role came in a 2019 off-Broadway production of “Enter Laughing,” based on the memoirs of Carl Reiner.

Mr. Schramm’s survivors include a son from an early relationship and four grandchildren.

Recalling his theatrical debut in Louisville, Mr. Schramm told the Star-Ledger that he was paid $25 a week “to clean the toilets and be in a play. My big line in my very first one was, ‘I’m the station master, madam,’ and on opening night, I said, ‘I’m the station madam, master.’ People must have been thinking, ‘Get this kid off the stage.’

“Not my parents, though. When my father heard I could get a full scholarship to Juilliard, he was packing my bags.”