Jonathan Winters

Jonathan Winters was improvising before American television had a name for it. He came out of Dayton, Ohio and 1950s stand-up, and the act was not really built on jokes: it was characters, generated on the spot, most famously Maude Frickert, the sweet-looking old woman with a wicked mouth, whom he was still performing decades later on The New Scooby-Doo Movies.

Film used perhaps a third of what he could do. It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is the exception. As Lennie Pike he takes a gas station apart with his bare hands in a sequence of escalating physical comedy that no script could have written as well as he played it. The Loved One let him play two roles in the same film, and The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming! aimed the same panicky energy at Cold War farce.

Television and animation kept him working for sixty years, from a 1950s panel show to a documentary series about comedy shortly before the end. He played Mearth on Mork & Mindy, an adult-sized infant, a premise that only functions if you have someone capable of improvising inside it. Later generations knew him entirely as Papa Smurf in the two live-action Smurfs films, the second of which arrived in the year he died.

He received two Grammy Awards, a Primetime Emmy Award, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 1999. He was born in 1925 and died in 2013.