Del Close

Del Close (March 9, 1934 – March 4, 1999) was an American actor, writer, and teacher born in Manhattan, Kansas. Over the course of his career he became one of the defining influences on modern improvisational theater and coached a significant number of the most prominent comedians and comic actors of the late twentieth century.

Close left home at seventeen to work in a traveling sideshow before returning to enroll at Kansas State University. At nineteen he performed summer stock with the Belfry Players at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and by twenty-three he had joined the Compass Players in St. Louis. When much of that company's cast, including Mike Nichols and Elaine May, relocated to New York City, Close followed. There he developed a stand-up comedy act and, in 1959, appeared on Broadway in the musical revue The Nervous Set, in which he starred as the Yogi. During this period he also performed briefly with an improv company in Greenwich Village alongside fellow Compass alumni Mark and Barbara Gordon, and collaborated with John Brent on How to Speak Hip, a recorded Beatnik satire structured as a parody of language-learning tools.

In 1960 Close moved to Chicago, where he performed and directed at Second City. He was later fired from that company due to substance abuse. He spent the latter half of the 1960s in San Francisco serving as house director of the improv ensemble The Committee, whose performers included Gary Goodrow, Carl Gottlieb, Peter Bonerz, Howard Hesseman, and Larry Hankin. During that same period he toured with the Merry Pranksters and created light images for Grateful Dead performances. He returned to Chicago and to Second City in 1972, and in 1977 directed and performed for the company's Toronto troupe.

Through the 1970s and into the 1980s Close coached numerous well-known comedians. In the early 1980s he served as house metaphysician at Saturday Night Live, a program whose cast during those years included a substantial number of his former students. He subsequently spent the mid-to-late 1980s and 1990s teaching improv and collaborating with Charna Halpern at Yes And Productions and the ImprovOlympic Theater, which he co-founded, working alongside Compass Players producer David Shepherd.

In 1987 Close mounted his first scripted production, Honor Finnegan vs. the Brain of the Galaxy, developed by members of his and Halpern's Improv Olympics from a scenario he wrote, staged at CrossCurrents in Chicago. Running concurrently at the same venue was The TV Dinner Hour, written by Richard O'Donnell, in which Close performed a recurring routine as The Rev. Thing of the First Generic Church of What's-his-name. His screen work during this era included the role of corrupt alderman John O'Shay in The Untouchables and an English teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. He also co-authored the graphic horror anthology Wasteland for DC Comics with John Ostrander and co-wrote several installments of the Munden's Bar backup feature for Ostrander's Grimjack. In 1993 he performed in the world premiere of Steve Martin's Picasso at the Lapin Agile at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company.

Close had struggled with addiction to heroin and cocaine. Following the 1982 drug-overdose death of his student John Belushi, he resolved to change his lifestyle. He joined a Wiccan coven in Toronto, where Wiccan priests performed a banishing ritual as part of his effort to overcome his drug habit, and he remained an active Pagan thereafter.

He died of emphysema on March 4, 1999, at Illinois Masonic Hospital in Chicago, five days before his sixty-fifth birthday. In his will he bequeathed his skull to Chicago's Goodman Theatre for use in productions of Hamlet, specifying that he be credited in the program as portraying Yorick. Charna Halpern, his long-time professional partner and the executor of his estate, presented a skull in a televised ceremony on July 1, 1999. A front-page Chicago Tribune article in July 2006 questioned the skull's authenticity, noting the presence of teeth — Close had been edentulous at the time of his death — as well as autopsy marks, though Close had never been autopsied. Halpern later acknowledged in a New Yorker interview that she had purchased the skull from a local medical supply company. Following his death, former students in the Upright Citizens Brigade founded the annual Del Close Marathon, three days of continuous improvisation held at various venues in New York City.