Josip Elic, best known as the mental patient Bancini in 1975’s classic drama “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” has died at age 98.
His manager Matt Beckoff confirmed the news on Facebook Thursday saying the actor’s death in a New Jersey rehabilitation facility was the result of a recent fall.
Elic’s Bancini was an oft-confused patient living in the Oregon mental facility in director Milos Foreman’s “Cuckoo’s Nest,” who would frequently lament, “I’m tried.” Bancini’s iconic scene involved carrying Jack Nicholson’s Randall P. McMurphy on his shoulders in an impromptu basketball lesson, a scene which the 6′ 2″ Montana-born Elic said was ad-libbed.
More: The 10 greatest Oscar best-picture winners, ranked (yes, ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ is included)
Elic played a restaurant violinist who gets a bottle of champagne poured down his pants by Zero Mostel in Mel Brooks’ 1967 comedy “The Producers.” It was on that film Elic crossed paths Lee Meredith, who played the campy Swedish secretary Ulla.
The two met again in 1975 at a Manhattan Theatre Club called “A Straightman, a Comic and a Talking Lady,” later renamed “Burlesque Humor Revisited.”
“We had so much fun in the burlesque show, and that was the beginning of working together,” Meredith told The North Jersey Record in 2018.
The two became inseparable friends and Meredith would become his caretaker when, at 97, Elic suffered a fall in his New York apartment. After he got out of the hospital, Elic moved in with Meredith and her husband, producer Bert Stratford, at their home in River Edge, New Jersey. He was there for more than a year, before transferring to a nearby assisted-living residence.
Elic’s last public appearance was with Meredith at an event commemorating “The Producers” in 2018.
Elic starred in two episodes of the original “Twilight Zone” TV series, playing an electrician in 1962’s “One More Pallbearer” (1962) and a de-humanized Subaltern in “The Obsolete Man” (1961) alongside Burgess Meredith.
The fandom over “Twilight Zone” due to sci-fi conventions grew to be even larger than Elic’s “Cuckoo’s Nest” fandom.
“My big autographs used to be ‘Cuckoo’s Nest,'” Elic told the Montana Standard in 2015. “Now it’s ‘Twilight Zone.'”
The “Twilight Zone” work also allowed Elic to meet creator Rod Serling, whom he found to be surprisingly light-hearted.
But Elic’s favorite film role was as Darcey Henchman in director Frank Capra’s 1961 comedy-drama “Pocketful of Miracles,” starring Betty Davis and Glenn Ford.
