Iris Acker obit

Actress, TV host Iris Acker, South Florida’s ‘Golden Girl’ of the arts, dies at 88

 She was not on the list.

The silver screen inspired Iris Acker’s entree into the arts. In a lifetime spent on and off the stage, or as a TV host, or as someone who guided budding actors, South Florida was the beneficiary of her childhood passions. “As a young child I spent every Saturday at the movies. It was the Ginger Rogers, Fred Astaire, Eleanor Powell films that convinced me that I wanted to be a dancer,” Acker, who died Sunday at 88 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer, told the Miami Herald in 2015 of her arts awakening. By 11, Acker, who grew up in the Bronx and would later embody the most endearing qualities of all four “Golden Girls,” was already acting. “I talked my mother into letting me take dance classes, and I quickly excelled,’’ she said. “I was performing professionally in my teens. I always got the lead in my school plays, but I thought it was because I had the loudest voice. As a chorus girl, I always got the lines to say. It was the directors who told me I was a good actress and should pursue it. That was the beginning of my wonderful life in the theater.”

 The South Florida theater community has thrived under many of its staunchest advocates, writers and directors — Charlie Cinnamon, Jan McArt, Michael McKeever, Joseph Adler and David Arisco, among them. Acker stood alongside those greats in promoting South Florida as a viable arts community. Among her many roles, Acker, who lived in Hallandale Beach, hosted her own local TV show for 11 years on WLRN, “On Stage With Iris Acker.” For that program, and during its moves to WXEL and Comcast, and then on to her recent show, “Spotlight on the Arts,” for the last five years, she tapped her national contacts and her friend Cinnamon’s amazing Rolodex to book talent.

On her TV shows, Acker hosted and interviewed national names passing through town to promote plays and musicals like Valerie Harper, Edward Villella, Estelle Getty, Pia Zadora and Theodore Bikel.

While interviewing the diminutive Zadora in 1992, when the actress was to play in a production of “Too Short to Be a Rockette!” at the Coconut Grove Playhouse, Acker let Zadora, and her viewers, know of another credit she’d enjoyed: Acker was an actual Rockette in New York.

“On Stage” and its subsequent incarnations also spotlighted regional talents like folk singer-songwriter Amy Carol Webb and actor Nick Santa Maria, with whom she co-starred in “Bye Bye Birdie.” “She was one of my biggest supporters and we had a ball on her TV show,” said Santa Maria, who affectionately called Acker “Mom,” and who just completed a run in the two-man comedy “The Big Bang” at Actors’ Playhouse. “She was an amazing and formidable woman.”

Actress (12 credits)

 2016 Love Till (Short) (completed)

Tillie

 2009 G.E.D.

Old Lady Fletcher

 2007 Dancin' on the Edge (Short)

Buffie

 1998 Roof (Short)

Older Woman

 1995 The Point of Betrayal

Judge

 1992 Day of Atonement

Court Usher

 1990 Wiseguy (TV Series)

Judge Mary Laverty

- Fruit of the Poisonous Tree: Part 2 (1990) ... Judge Mary Laverty

- Fruit of the Poisonous Tree: Part 1 (1990) ... Judge Mary Laverty

 1988 Cocoon: The Return

Mrs. Cashman

 1986 Whoops Apocalypse

Woman in Boarding House

 1986 Flight of the Navigator

Mrs. Howard

 1986 Intimate Strangers (TV Movie)

Reporter

 1970 Interplay

Hide Hide Writer (1 credit)

 2013 Spotlight on the Arts (TV Series) (1 episode)

- The Importance of the Arts (2013)