It’s Fred Gwynne’s 99th Birthday! 5 Things You Never Knew About the ‘Munsters’ Star
Fred Gwynne, who died in 1993 and would have turned 99 this July 10, is best known for starring in the classic TV sitcoms Car 54, Where Are You? and The Munsters … but did you know he was also a military veteran and an accomplished illustrator? And that he wrote a successful series of children’s books?
If you only know Gwynne from his roles as Car 54’s Officer Muldoon and The Munsters’ Frankenstein-ish Herman Munster — or from his roles in films like Pet Sematary and My Cousin Vinny — read on for biographical details about this towering talent. (And we do mean towering — the guy was 6-foot-5.)
1 He grew up with artistic ambitions
Paramount Television/Courtesy: Everett Collection
“The thing I always wanted to be, ever since I can remember, was a portrait painter,” Gwynne told The New York Times in 1978.
While studying at Groton School — and getting, in his estimation, “the highest number of black marks of any boy who’d ever been there” — he drew a campus map that still hangs in the alumni office at the Massachusetts boarding school.
After a stint in the Navy, Gwynne attended commercial art school and “worked [his] tail off” with the dream of creating covers for the Saturday Evening Post.
2 His first film role was in On the Waterfront
After segueing to acting, Gwynne appeared in Broadway productions — joining Helen Hayes, for instance, in the comedy play Mrs. McThing. He also appeared on television, in episodes of the TV shows The Philco Television Playhouse , You Are There, Robert Montgomery Presents, and Jamie.
In 1954, however, Gwynne made his big-screen debut in the Oscar-winning picture On the Waterfront with Marlon Brando. Gwynne had an uncredited role as Slim. Slim was given the last name Sekulovich at the insistence of costar Karl Malden, who was born Mladen Sekulovich but gave up that name for his screen career, according to BBC News.
> 6 Things You Didn’t Know About ‘Car 54, Where Are You?’
3 He almost starred in Punky Brewster
Everett Collection
Gwynne was so determined to get the part of father figure Henry Warnimont on the 1980s sitcom Punky Brewster that he gave himself a makeover, redoing his hair and donning a stylish white suit for his tryout, according to the audition-anecdote tome What Have You Done?
But his efforts to remake his image were undone when Soleil Moon Frye, the young actor who’d end up playing Punky, asked, “Aren’t you Herman Munster?” Rattled by her comment, Gwynne didn’t give the audition his all and lost the part to George Gaynes.
4 He and Fay Wray bonded over their monstrous Hollywood jobs
Everett Collection
Gwynne told the Times he once met Fay Wray, star of 1933’s King Kong, at a Rutgers University event and took the chance to vent about being typecast. “She was absolutely charming to me, and I decided to let it all out,” he recalled. “I said things about alienation, and about feeling like a household product, and she looked at me in a kindly way that made me go on and on. ‘I mean, I really like The Munsters,’ I told her, ‘but I feel I’m typed forever!’ and so on.”
Throughout Gwynne’s diatribe, Wray kept smiling, he said. “Finally I was finished, and she knew I was finished,” he added. “She looked at me quite casually and said, ‘Honey, you’ve got The Munsters, and I’ve got King Kong, and we’re in the same boat. We can’t live with it. and we can’t live without it.’ That kept me going.”
5 He wrote many successful children’s books
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Add author to the list of Gwynne’s many occupations. The actor was the author of A Little Pigeon Toad, A Chocolate Moose for Dinner, The King Who Rained, and other children’s books based on homonyms.
And his books ended up selling 20,00 to 25,000 copies a year, as former Simon & Schuster children’s book publisher John Sargent told Publisher’s Weekly in 1990, per Atlas Obscura. “For a lot of years now, they are among our bestselling children’s books,” Sargent added.
Gwynne illustrated the books himself and relished in the wordplay. “I love making puns,” he told the New York Daily News in 1989. “I started writing [the books] when my kids were small.”
In that interview, he showed the reporter a prized possession, brandishing a brass bell in the shape of a banana and making it ring. “Banana peal!” he said with a booming laugh.
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