American comedian Jonathan Winters dies at 87 Editor

By Victor Enengedi

Jonathan winters. Photo: Vintage Stand-up Comedy

Comic actor, Jonathan Winters is dead.

According to NewYork Times, the comedian’s whose death was announced on his website, Jonathanwinters.com on Thursday April 11, 2013, died from natural causes at his Montecito, California home surrounded by family and friends.

Winters burst onto the comedy scene in the late 1950s and instantly made his mark as one of the funniest, least definable comics in a rising generation of great actors. The comedic film and TV actor became very huge in the ’70s and ’80s on shows like ‘Mork and Mindy’.

Born on November 11, 1925, in Dayton, Ohio, Jonathan Harshman Winters who appeared in close to 80 movies both in person and as a voice, ‘was a brilliant, effortless comic and a master at improvising’.

In his early age, Winters studied Art at Kenyon College and the Dayton Art Institute.

Winters won an Emmy in 1991 for his work on the short-lived sitcom ‘Davis Rules’ and was given the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 1999.

Some of his most notable movies which he either appeared in or as a voiced character include; ‘The Smurfs’, ‘Arabian Night’ and ‘Flintstones’.

In 1948 he married Eileen Schauder, who died of breast cancer in 2009.

Winters’s survivors include two children, Jonathan Winters IV, daughter, Lucinda, and five grandchildren.

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