LYNN ELBER
AP Television Writer
LOS ANGELES (AP) — Charles Keating, a British-born Shakespearean actor who was amused by the fame that came with being an American soap opera star on “Another World,” has died, his son, Sean Keating, said Monday. He was 72.
Keating, who was diagnosed with lung cancer three years ago, died Friday in his home in Weston, Connecticut, with family members including his wife, Mary, and his other son, James, at his side, Sean Keating said.
“He had promised my mom when he was first diagnosed that he would make it to their 50th anniversary. He made it almost to the hour” on Friday, Sean Keating said. The couple was married on an Oklahoma Army base after Keating was drafted, he said.
Keating, who in the 1980s was on the daytime serials “All My Children” and “As the World Turns,” won a Daytime Emmy Award in 1996 for his role as villainous Carl Hutchins on NBC’s “Another World.”
Although Keating primarily considered himself a stage actor, he was able to enjoy the attention he got from playing Hutchins from 1991-99.
“It was fun because he played the villain role with gusto. At a restaurant, people would come up and grab him by the lapels and say, ‘You’re evil!'” Sean Keating recalled.
His father was “wonderfully eccentric in many ways but the most loving person,” he said.
The London-born Keating moved to Canada with his family as a teenager and then to the United States, where he worked briefly as a hairdresser before he turned to acting, at which he worked steadily throughout his life, his son said.
He was with the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, then moved back to England to found a theater company in Sheffield. He later worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company and on British TV, including the acclaimed series “Brideshead Revisited.”
Other credits include the film “The Thomas Crown Affair” and the TV miniseries “Edward & Mrs. Simpson.”
Besides his wife and sons, Keating is survived by six grandchildren.
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Lynn Elber is a national television columnist for The Associated Press. She can be reached at lelber@ap.org and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/lynnelber.
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