Maurice Gosfield

Maurice Lionel Gosfield was born on January 28, 1913 in New York City, but raised in Philadelphia and later Evanston, Il., where he began acting with the Ralph Bellamy and Melvyn Douglas Players, later joining the summer stock theater circuit in 1930. He made his Broadway debut as Manero in the play Siege in 1937, and his other stage credits included The Petrified Forest, Three Men on a Horse and Room Service. During World War II, he served in the U.S. Army as a Tech 4 in the 8th Armored Division. From 1955 to 1959, Gosfield played Pvt. Duane Doberman in The Phil Silvers Show (originally titled You'll Never Get Rich in it's first season). In the biography of the show's creator Nat Hiken, he detailed the casting of the role and the effect that Gosfield had on him, the producer and Phil Silvers when he appeared in front of them: "The dumpy, spectacularly ugly Maurice Gosfield ambled into an open casting call one day, brandishing an enormous list of credits. A handful of his bit parts on stage are easy enough to confirm; more difficult to pin down are his claims of two-thousand radio credits and one hundred TV appearances...None of the man's background, though, really mattered to Hiken and Silvers once they got a good look at him. Nat had already picked someone to play the most woebegone member of Bilko's platoon (Maurice Brenner), but immediately he knew that here was the man born for the part." Brenner was later recast as Pvt. Irving Fleischman. In 1959, Gosfield was nominated for a Primetime Emmy for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series. He was also the voice of Benny the Ball in the animated cartoon series Top Cat (1961-62), which was partially based on the Sergeant Bilko series. On October 14, 1964, while Gosfield was performing in a play at New York Theatre, he kept losing his balance and repeatedly falling asleep. He was diagnosed as having critical hypertension and was given seven different medications, which he was told to take for the rest of his life. On October 17, he suffered a heart attack and was rushed to New York Hospital, where he was reportedly not breathing and CPR was performed. After he was admitted, his condition improved, and as a result his close friend Arnold Stang (the voice of Top Cat) told him that a remake of Top Cat was in the works, and that his role was waiting for him when he recovered. Tragically, only two hours after Stang left, Gosfield suffered a second and instantly fatal heart attack on October 19, 1964, and Stang was phoned the next morning. He then broke the sad news to producers William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, who were both devastated by Gosfield's sudden death, and they decided not to make a new Top Cat series, as they could not find an adequate replacement for Benny the Ball's voice. Maurice Gosfield was buried at Long Island National Cemetery, Suffolk County, New York.