George Grizzard | Tony winner, 79

Broadway and screen actor George Grizzard, 79, who won acclaim, and a Tony Award, for performing in Edward Albee's dramas, has died.

Mr. Grizzard died Tuesday at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center of complications from lung cancer, said his agent, Clifford Stevens.

Film roles included a bullying U.S. senator in Advise and Consent in 1962 and an oilman in Comes a Horseman in 1978. On TV, he made regular appearances on Law & Order and won a supporting-actor Emmy for the 1980 movie The Oldest Living Graduate, which starred Henry Fonda. His TV credits stretch back to the '50s, when he appeared in series such as Playhouse 90.

Mr. Grizzard appeared in the original 1962 production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and won a Tony more than 30 years later, in 1996, for his performance in a revival of a 1967 Albee play, A Delicate Balance.

"Grizzard, as Tobias, personifies the ineffectual peacemaker, a man with a good heart who learns that even charity is not enough," the Associated Press drama critic Michael Kuchwara wrote in his review of A Delicate Balance.

In a 1996 interview, Mr. Grizzard said he drew on his own fears as an actor to play the role. "Fear is a universal motivator. . . . I think the only time I really get mean or angry or contentious is when I'm frightened." - Associated Press