Earle Hyman, a veteran stage and screen actor who played Bill Cosby’s father, Russell Huxtable, on “The Cosby Show” and whose love for playwright Henrik Ibsen led him to spend much of his career working in Norwegian theater, died Nov. 16 at an assisted-living facility in Englewood, N.J. He was 91.
Jordan Strohl, a representative for the Actors Fund, confirmed the death but did not disclose the cause.
Mr. Hyman made his Broadway debut as a teenager in 1944 and was a charter member of the American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, Conn. He drew praise for his interpretation of the title character of Shakespeare’s “Othello,” but he also played traditionally white Shakespearean leads such as Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear.
Mr. Hyman received a Tony nomination in 1980 for his performance in the Edward Albee play “The Lady From Dubuque,” and he voiced the character Panthro on the 1980s animated television series “Thundercats.”
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But he became best known for "The Cosby Show," which premiered on NBC in 1984 and aired for eight seasons. Mr. Hyman was the trombone-playing, occasionally authoritative father to Bill Cosby's Cliff Huxtable, even though he was only 11 years Cosby's senior. He appeared in 40 episodes, including an Emmy-nominated 1985 appearance in which he and wife Anna (Clarice Taylor) celebrate their 49th wedding anniversary with the help of a lip-sync rendition of the Ray Charles song "Night Time Is the Right Time," performed by the full Huxtable family.
"That's the one episode that was the most loved, most seen," Mr. Hyman told the podcast "Just My Show" in 2009. "We just had a ball, and the atmosphere just went over into a kind of reality. We were no longer Clarice and Earle, we were really Anna and Russell Huxtable."
George Earle Hyman was born in Rocky Mount, N.C., on Oct. 11, 1926, and moved to New York when he was 6. Both his parents were schoolteachers and took him to his first play, a Brighton Beach production of Ibsen’s “Ghosts,” when he was 13.
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The experience inspired him to take up acting and led to a lifelong fascination with Norwegian theater. He eventually learned Norwegian and Danish and spent much of his time in Norway, performing in Norwegian plays as well as in translated works of Shakespeare and other English-language writers.
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Mr. Hyman said he felt like a true star only in Norway — not in the United States, where he sometimes fielded questions and complaints about his decisions to play traditionally white roles in the theater.
"As a young actor, I adored Shakespeare and walked around with a volume of his work under my arm," he told the New York Times in 1991. "One actress saw this and said, 'Ain't somebody told that boy that he's colored?' But I couldn't help it; I loved the plays that weren't written for me."
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“Here I am almost 65 years old and I’m still saying that all roles should be available to all actors of talent, regardless of race,” he continued. “Why should I be deprived of seeing a great black actress play Hedda Gabler? That still makes me angry. Unless something is done — no matter how crazy it may seem — we’ll never get anywhere. We’re still fighting these battles.”
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