Conrad Bain, 89; played father on TV's 'Diff'rent Strokes'

NEW YORK - Conrad Bain, 89, a veteran stage and film actor who became a star in middle age as the kindly white adoptive father of two young African American brothers in the sitcom Diff'rent Strokes, died Monday of natural causes in Livermore, Calif., according to his daughter, Jennifer Bain.

The show that made him famous debuted on NBC in 1978, an era when TV comedies tackled relevant social issues. Diff'rent Strokes touched on serious themes but was known better as a family comedy that drew most of its laughs from its standout child actor, Gary Coleman. The series lasted six seasons on NBC and two on ABC.

In the show's heyday, Mr. Bain didn't mind being overshadowed by the show's children, but Diff'rent Strokes is remembered now mostly for its child stars' adult troubles.

Coleman, who died in 2010, had financial and legal problems in addition to continuing ill health from the kidney disease that stunted his growth and required transplants. Todd Bridges and Dana Plato, who played Mr. Bain's teenage daughter, both had arrest records and drug problems, and Plato died of an overdose in 1999 at age 34.

Mr. Bain said in interviews later that he struggled to talk about his TV children's troubled lives because of his love for them. After Bridges started to put his drug troubles behind him in the early 1990s, he told Jet magazine that Mr. Bain had become like a real father to him.

Mr. Bain went directly into Diff'rent Strokes from another comedy, Maude, which aired on CBS from 1972 to 1978.

As Dr. Arthur Harmon, the conservative neighbor zinged by Bea Arthur's liberal feminist, Mr. Bain became so convincing as a doctor that a woman once stopped him in an airport seeking medical advice.

Before those roles, Mr. Bain had appeared occasionally in films, including I Never Sang for My Father and Woody Allen's Bananas. He also played the clerk at the Collinsport Inn in the 1960s television show Dark Shadows.

A native of Alberta, Canada, Mr. Bain arrived in New York in 1948 after serving in the Canadian Army during World War II. He was still studying at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts when he acquired his first role on television's Studio One.

For two decades he was a journeyman stage actor, appearing in the original Broadway production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide and off-Broadway in Jose Quintero's revival of Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh.

It was an audition for a role in the 1971 film Cold Turkey that led Mr. Bain to TV stardom. He didn't get the part, but Cold Turkey director Norman Lear remembered him when he created Maude.

He married artist Monica Sloan in 1945. She died in 2009. He is survived by three children: Jennifer, Kent, and Mark.