The Los Angeles county coroner’s office confirmed Bean’s Friday night death, saying it was being investigated as a “traffic-related” fatality. The coroner’s office provided the location where Bean was found, which matched reports from local news outlets.
A man was walking in the Venice neighborhood when he was clipped by a vehicle and fell, Los Angeles police department Brian Wendling initially told local stations. A second driver then struck him in what police say was the fatal collision. Both drivers remained on the scene. Police were investigating and didn’t identify the pedestrian to local outlets, which named Bean based on eyewitness accounts.
Bean enlivened such TV game shows as To Tell the Truth and played a crotchety merchant on Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman.
He appeared in a number of films – notably, Anatomy of a Murder and Being John Malkovich – and starred in several top Broadway productions, receiving a Tony nod for the 1962 Comden-Green musical Subways Are for Sleeping. But fans remembered him most for his many TV appearances from the 1950s onwards.
“Mr Bean’s face comes wrapped with a sly grin, somewhat like the expression of a child when sneaking his hand into the cookie jar,” the New York Times noted in a review of his 1954 variety show, The Blue Angel. It said he showed “a quality of being likable even when his jokes fall flat”.
Born in Burlington, Vermont, in 1928 as Dallas Frederick Burrows, he never lost the Yankee accent that proved a perfect complement to the dry, laconic storytelling that established him as popular humorist. He had picked the stage name Orson Bean “because it sounded funny”.
His father, George, was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and Bean recalled later that his “house was filled with causes”. But he left home at 16 after his mother died by suicide.
Bean’s quick wit and warm personality made him a favorite panelist for six years on To Tell the Truth. The game required the panelists to quiz three contestants to figure out which one was a real notable and which two were impostors. The dramatic outcome inspired a national catchphrase as the host turned to the three and said: “Will the real (notable’s name) please stand up?”
Bean’s style appealed to both Jack Paar and Johnny Carson, and he appeared on The Tonight Show more than 200 times.
But his early career was hobbled for a time when he found himself on the Hollywood blacklist in the early years of the cold war.
“Basically I was blacklisted because I had a cute communist girlfriend,“ he said in a 2001 interview. “I stopped working on TV for a year”
The blacklist didn’t stop him in the theater. Bean starred on Broadway as a timid fan magazine writer in George Axelrod’s 1955 Hollywood spoof Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? alongside Jayne Mansfield and Walter Matthau. He also starred on Broadway with Maureen O’Sullivan in Never Too Late and with Melina Mercouri in Illya Darling, based on her hit film Never on Sunday.
Bean took a break from his career for a time in the 1970s when he dropped out and moved to Australia, where he lived a hippie lifestyle. But he returned to the US and – after a period as a self-described “house-husband” – resumed his career.
In the 1990s, he played the shopkeeper Loren Bray on Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman. He remained active on the screen in recent years with guest shots in such shows as Desperate Housewives, How I Met Your Mother and Modern Family.
Meanwhile, his politics turned more conservative. He became related to a leading rightwing commentator, Andrew Breitbart, when his daughter, Susannah, married him. Breitbart died in 2012 and Steve Bannon, later a top adviser to Donald Trump, took over Breitbart’s eponymous website, for which Bean had penned occasional columns.
He had a daughter, Michele, from his first marriage to Jacqueline de Sibour, and sons Max and Ezekiel and daughter Susannah from his marriage to Carolyn Maxwell.
