David L. Lander, who played Andrew “Squiggy” Squiggman for all eight seasons of the popular ABC sitcom Laverne & Shirley, has died. He was 73.
Lander died Friday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of complications from multiple sclerosis, his wife, Kathy Fields, told TMZ. The actor was diagnosed with the disease in May 1984 but kept it a secret for 15 years.
Lander also provided the voice of Jerry Lewis on a 1970 Saturday morning cartoon, portrayed taxidermist Tim Pinkle on ABC’s Twin Peaks — he was cast by his Hollywood Hills neighbor, David Lynch — and played a tech geek opposite longtime comedy partner and Laverne & Shirley castmate Michael McKean in Robert Zemeckis’ Used Cars (1980).
Lander and McKean, who had been doing raunchy comedy in an act known as Lenny & Anthony since they had met as freshmen at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh, were hired as writers on Laverne & Shirley after the show sold to ABC in 1976.
Producers realized the pair also could be used in a pinch if the script “ever needed two funny characters to go out and get a bag of sauerkraut,” Laverne & Shirley co-creator Lowell Ganz said in 2011 in a chat for the TV Academy Foundation website The Interviews. “We put them in the very first episode and then put them in every episode. We closed up their writers office, and they were part of the cast.”
Laverne & Shirley, of course, revolved around the exploits of the wisecracking Laverne DeFazio (Penny Marshall) and the idealistic Shirley Feeney (Cindy Williams), two romantically challenged brewery workers and roommates in Milwaukee in the late 1950s.
Squiggy and McKean’s Lenny Kosnowski (his last name was Polish for “Help, there’s a hog in my kitchen”) were the knuckleheaded greasers who drove trucks for the brewery and shared the apartment above Laverne and Shirley’s.
“Squiggy is a combination of people I knew and despised. You have more freedom playing people you hate. There are people like them who haven’t outgrown their silly dreams,” Lander told People magazine in 1978. “Squiggy looks in the mirror and thinks he’s the handsomest guy in the world.”
Lander and McKean went on to record Lenny and the Squigtones, a 1979 album from Casablanca Records — featuring Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) of Spinal Tap on guitar — and even market a line of Lenny and Squiggy dolls.
The younger of two sons, David Leonard Landau was born on June 22, 1947, and raised in the Bronx. His parents, Sol and Stella, were teachers.
After graduating from the High School of the Performing Arts in Manhattan, Lander met McKean in 1965 when both were freshmen at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Tech. Working on their act and too busy to attend classes, they were “not asked to come back” for a second year, as McKean once put it.
Lander moved on to NYU and wrote one-liners for columnists Walter Winchell and Earl Wilson before heading for Hollywood in 1968. Albert Brooks, a Carnegie Tech classmate, put him in touch with Rob Reiner, and they wrote for a 1968 NBC special Romp!!! that featured Steve Allen, Jimmy Durante and Cream.
In 1970, Lander did his best Lewis impersonation for the ABC cartoon Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down, then appeared on episodes of Barney Miller, Rhoda and The Bob Newhart Show. Meanwhile, he had reunited with McKean in The Credibility Gap, a comedy troupe that worked in clubs and on the radio.
(Excerpt) Read more in: The Hollywood Reporter