Jack Betts has passed away at 96 years old.
The actor starred on the soap opera “One Life to Live” from 1979 to 1985, appearing in 20 episodes as Llanview Hospital’s Dr. Ivan Kipling.
Betts’ nephew, Dean Sullivan, told The Hollywood Reporter that the star died in his sleep at his house in Los Osos, California, on Thursday.
Before her death at the age of 90 in 2016, “Everybody Loves Raymond” actress Doris Roberts lived with Betts. The two would often attend events together, and Roberts even directed a play written by Betts, focusing on a soap opera, titled “Screen Test: Take One.”
Their friendship began in 1954 when they met at The Actors Studio in New York City. Years later, in 1988, Betts took Roberts up on her offer to relocate from the Big Apple to the downstairs apartment of her home in the Hollywood Hills.
“We were best friends to the very end, we had wonderful times together,” he gushed following her death.
Betts was also recognized for his role as Henry Balkan, the Oscorp board chair who dismissed Norman Osborn (played by Willem Defoe), in Sam Raimi’s 2002 film “Spider-Man.”
Norman then became the villainous Green Goblin and vaporized Henry and the board.
While on “The Dev Show” in 2020, Betts spoke about filming the Oscorp boardroom shot and how he asked Raimi, 65, if he could add some of his own spin onto the scene.
“I really looked [Defoe] right in the eye, and I had kind of a smile in my eye — you know, like, ‘You’re fired, you motherf–ker,’” the actor explained. “After, I finished it, [Raimi] said, ‘That’s it. Terrific. Print that one.’”
“My point being is that I wanted to add something just a little different to it instead of doing it the same way over and over and over and over. [Raimi] he was willing to do that. He really was. Wonderful man to work with.”
The Hollywood vet was raised in Jersey City, New Jersey, before moving to Miami with his family at age 10. The actor received his degree in theater from the University of Miami, and shortly after graduation, relocated to New York to begin acting.
Betts landed his first role as a supporting actor in the 1953 Broadway adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Richard III.”
For two seasons, from 1960 to 1962, Betts played detective Chris Devlin in the CBS mystery series “Checkmate” opposite Anthony George, Sebastian Cabot and Doug McClure. The show, created by Eric Ambler, followed private detectives solving cases in San Francisco with the help of a British criminologist.
Betts appeared four times on CBS’ Perry Mason from 1961-66 before he met Giraldi about starring in Sugar Colt. He told the director that he could ride a horse and had just won a shooting contest — of course, he had never been on a horse or handled a gun — but he spent the next three weeks learning those skills at John Wayne’s ranch before reporting for duty at Cinecittà in Rome.
Shortly after, he entered the soap opera world, landing a role on “General Hospital” from 1963 to 1965.
From there, Betts made his mark on the franchises, and along with “One Life to Live,” he had parts on “The Edge of Night,” “The Doctors,” “Another World,” “All My Children,” “Search for Tomorrow,” “Guiding Light,” “Loving,” “The Young and the Restless,” and “Generations.”
Some of Betts most memorable television roles included “Seinfeld,” “Frasier,” “Everybody Loves Raymond,” “Monk,” and “Friends.”
His last credited series was on the Freeform drama “Good Trouble” in 2019.
When Betts stepped onto the spaghetti Western scene in 1966 as the title character Hunt Powers in Franco Giraldi’s “Sugar Colt,” he was able to turn that film into 15 others until 1973.
But Betts didn’t get the same credit as a certain fellow western star did.
“In the hotel next to mine was Clint Eastwood,” he recounted in a 2021 interview. “He’d go up to his mountain and do his Western and I’d go up to my mountain and do my Western. But while his films had distribution all over the world, my films were distributed [everywhere] except Canada and America.”
Betts is survived by his sister, Joan – who is set to turn 100 this year – nephew Dean, and nieces, Lynee and Gail.
