Dick Cavett (1936)
Dick Cavett excelled athletically and scholastically in high school, receiving a
scholarship to Yale. Upon arriving in New York, he tried and failed to get a job
at RCA's broadcast subsidiary NBC, but managed to land a leading role (and a
100-dollar salary) in an Army Signal Corps film after which Cavett took a
variety of odd jobs. While working as a copy boy at Time magazine, he
impulsively wrote a two-page monologue for TV talk host Jack Paar, then passed
his notes along to a bemused Paar at NBC's Radio City headquarters. Thus began
Cavett's career as a comedy writer, not only for Paar but for his Tonight Show
successor, Johnny Carson. Encouraged by such showbiz friends as Woody Allen and
Groucho Marx, Cavett became a standup comedian. His success in this field led to
an offer from ABC to host a daytime talk show in 1968. Having never completely
abandoned acting, he occasionally appeared in dramatic roles on TV and Broadway,
served as a commercial spokesman for a variety of products, and was seen in a
handful of films. Cast as "himself," he made fleeting appearances in Annie Hall
(1977), Health (1979), Nightmare on Elm Street 3 (1987), and Forrest Gump
(1994), and was afforded a rare character part as a snooty intellectual in
Beetlejuice (1988). Since 1964, Dick Cavett has been married to actress Carrie
Nye.
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