Lee Weaver, the familiar character actor known for his work on The Bill Cosby Show, the Loni Anderson-starring Easy Street and the Coen brothers’ O Brother, Where Art Thou?, has died. He was 95.
Weaver died Sept. 22 at his home in Los Angeles, his family announced. He “wove joy, depth and representation into every role he played and everything he did,” they said.
Weaver played Brian Kincaid, the brother of Bill Cosby’s gym teacher, Chet Kincaid, on 1969-71’s The Bill Cosby Show, and he stole scenes as the exhibitionist Buck Naked on the Steven Bochco series Hill Street Blues in 1982-84 and NYPD Blue in 1994.
On the 1986-87 NBC comedy Easy Street, Weaver and Jack Elam portrayed a couple of down-on-their-luck roommates who move into a mansion recently inherited by a former Las Vegas showgirl (Anderson). That show, created by WKRP in Cincinnati’s Hugh Wilson, was canceled after one season.
In O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), Weaver had a memorable scene as the blind man who gives three escaped convicts (George Clooney, John Turturro, Tim Blake Nelson) a ride on a railroad handcar and some mysterious advice about their future.
Weaver, in fact, turned up in several other notable movies during his long career, among them Vanishing Point (1971), Heaven Can Wait (1978), The Onion Field (1979), Bulworth (1998), How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1998), Donnie Darko (2001) and The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005).
The son of a chef, Lee Wellington Weaver was born on April 10, 1930, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was raised by his Aunt Mattie and Uncle Lee until he was 14, when he left home to attend high school in Tallahassee and then Florida A&M.
At 22, Weaver enlisted in the U.S. Army and served for four years, then headed to New York, where he worked as a linotype engineer for The New York Times and moonlighted as a promoter at the legendary Birdland jazz club. There, he booked such acts as Cannonball and Nat Adderley, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Sarah Vaughan, John Coltrane, Herb Ellis, Lee Morgan, Freddie Hubbard and the Heath Brothers.
(Cannonball Adderley, a childhood pal and the best man at his wedding, recorded a Yusef Lateef-written song called “The Weaver” in honor of him that was featured on the saxophonist’s 1964 album, Nippon Soul.)
In one of his first acting gigs, Weaver played assorted natives on the 1955-56 syndicated series Sheena: Queen of the Jungle and a reporter in Al Capone (1959).
In 1967 and ’68, he appeared on episodes of the Cosby-starring NBC series I Spy. And when Cosby was a guest host on The Tonight Show back then, Weaver, in a recurring bit, would be announced as a guest but fail to make it on the show because Cosby would run out of time. Weaver was then seen getting angry in his dressing room.
Years later, Weaver would show up on The Cosby Show and on the Cosby-created A Different World.
Weaver kept busy in the 1970s with work on such TV series as Adam-12, Kojak, Sanford and Son, Good Times, The Jeffersons, Soap and Starsky & Hutch and films including Cleopatra Jones (1973) and House Calls (1978).
He provided the voice of Alpine on the 1985-86 animated series G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero and in a pair of movies.
His résumé also included the features The Lost Man (1969), Kiss Me Goodbye (1982), The Buddy System (1984), Wildcats (1986), The Two Jakes (1990), The Scout (1994), The Thirteenth Floor (1999) and Max Rose (2013) and guest stints on 227, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Most recently, he played Mel Cordray on two episodes of Grace and Frankie.
With his wife, actress Ta-Tanisha (Room 222), he had a daughter, Leis La-Te.
