Abe Vigoda, whose long face and distinctive voice helped establish him as a beloved character actor in TV and film, has died, the Associated Press reports. He was 94, and less than a month shy of his 95th birthday.
Vigoda, who was born in 1921, died in his sleep on Tuesday morning. He’d spent his final days in hospice care near the home of his daughter, Carol Vigoda Fuchs. His cause of death was old age, according to Fuchs.
“This man was never sick,” Fuchs said.
For all of the pop culture acclaim Vigoda built up over the years, he was perhaps most notorious for being the subject of misreported death announcements. The first occurrence happened in a 1982 People magazine report that erroneously referred to him as “the late Abe Vigoda.”
It happened frequently enough in subsequent years that a website was eventually created for the sole purpose of tracking Vigoda’s mortality. The actor always took the running gag in good humor, and was known to bring it up in his various appearances on Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
