Roberts Blossom | Veteran actor, 87

Roberts Blossom, 87, a durable character actor who was known for playing cantankerous old coots, both comic and sinister, but who may be best remembered as the kindly next-door neighbor in the comedy

Home Alone

, died Friday in Santa Monica, Calif.

Mr. Blossom amassed a long string of theater credits before hitting his stride as a character actor in the movies in the 1970s. He performed in dozens of films, usually in small but memorable roles.

He was an ill-fated patient in the George C. Scott film The Hospital, the delirious Wild Bob Cody in Slaughterhouse-Five, Paul Le Mat's ornery father in Citizens Band, the farmer who once saw Bigfoot in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the convict who paints the warden's portrait in Escape From Alcatraz, and the irate judge who sentences Michael J. Fox to community service in a local hospital in Doc Hollywood.

In a rare starring role, he was Ezra Cobb, a crazed farmer who unleashes mayhem, in the cult horror film Deranged.

He played against type in the hugely popular Christmas film Home Alone. As Old Man Marley, he was a threatening-looking geezer rumored to have killed his entire family, but the scary Marley turns out to be a sweet old fellow who befriends the character played by Macaulay Culkin.

Roberts Scott Blossom was born in New Haven, Conn., and grew up in Cleveland. After graduating from the Asheville School in North Carolina in 1941, he enrolled at Harvard but entered the Army after a year.

He made his off-Broadway debut in 1955 in the Shaw play Village Wooing, for which he received the first of three Obie Awards. The others were for Do Not Pass Go (1965) and the Tankred Dorst play The Ice Age (1976).

His Broadway credits included Edward Albee's adaptation of Carson McCullers' Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Sam Shepard's Operation Sidewinder.

On television, Mr. Blossom appeared in the series Naked City in the 1950s and later in Northern Exposure, Moonlighting, The Equalizer, and Amazing Stories. - N.Y. Times News Service