Jack Betts, the debonair character actor who starred in spaghetti Westerns, played Dracula for a fleeting moment on Broadway and appeared in such notable films as Spider-Man and Gods and Monsters, has died. He was 96.
Betts died Thursday in his sleep at home in Los Osos, California, his nephew, Dean Sullivan, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Betts was great friends with Everybody Loves Raymond actress Doris Roberts, with whom he shared a home and escorted her to events throughout Hollywood from the late 1980s until her death in April 2016.
A member of The Actors Studio, Betts portrayed Llanview Hospital doctor Ivan Kipling on ABC’s One Life to Live from 1979-85, and his soap opera résumé also included stints on General Hospital, The Edge of Night, The Doctors, Another World, All My Children, Search for Tomorrow, Guiding Light, Loving and Generations.
Betts bluffed his way into starring as the avenging title character in Franco Giraldi’s Sugar Colt (1966), where he was billed as Hunt Powers for the first time. The film kicked off a run of about 15 spaghetti Westerns for him through 1973 but left him without the fame enjoyed by another American star of similar Italian fare.
“In the hotel next to mine was Clint Eastwood,” he recalled 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.”
In Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man (2002), Betts’ character, Henry Balkan, tells Willem Dafoe’s Norman Osborn that he’s through at Oscorp Technologies — “You’re out, Norman” — but the Green Goblin will soon turn him and his fellow board members into skeletons during an attack on Times Square.
Jack Betts with Doris Roberts at the Hollywood Film Awards in Beverly Hills in 2015.
Mark Davis/Getty Images
Jack Fillmore Betts — he said he was related to the 13th U.S. president, Millard Fillmore — was born on April 11, 1929, in Jersey City, New Jersey. When he was 10, he moved with his family to Miami and was inspired to become an actor after seeing Laurence Olivier in Wuthering Heights (1939).
After graduating from Miami Senior High School, he studied at the University of Miami, where he studied theater and acted in the Moss Hart play Light Up the Sky in Cuba. He then moved to New York and made it to Broadway in 1953 in Richard III, starring José Ferrer.
Betts had a job in a lamp factory when a friend asked him to do a scene with her for her audition for The Actors Studio, and that led to Lee Strasberg giving him a three-year scholarship to study there. He later earned a place at the famed studio, with Elia Kazan putting him in a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
He made his big-screen debut in The Bloody Brood (1959), starring Peter Falk, then joined Anthony George, Sebastian Cabot and Doug McClure in 1961 to play detective Chris Devlin on the second and last season of CBS’ Checkmate, created by Eric Ambler.
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.
Betts also was working for actress-turned-publicist Helen Ferguson at the time, and she gave him the stage name Hunt Powers.
Betts returned to Broadway for Kazan in a 1959-60 production of Tennessee Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth before landing on the 1977-80 revival of Dracula. He portrayed Dr. Seward, and as Raul Julia’s standby, he got to step in as the count — but only once — a highlight of his career.
Keeping with that theme, he played Boris Karloff in Bill Condon’s Gods and Monsters (1998), starring Ian McKellen.
Betts also showed up in such films as The Assassination of Trotsky (1972), Falling Down (1993), Batman Forever (1995), Batman & Robin (1997), 8MM (1999) and Office Space (1999) and on TV series including Gunsmoke, The F.B.I., It Takes a Thief, Kojak, Remington Steele, Frasier, Everybody Loves Raymond, Friends, My Name Is Earl, The Mentalist and Monk.
Betts first met Roberts at The Actors Studio in 1954, and he accepted her offer to move from New York into a downstairs apartment in her Hollywood Hills home in 1988. “We were best friends to the very end, we had wonderful times together,” he said.
Roberts also directed a play Betts wrote, Screen Test: Take One, about a soap opera that originated on a film set.
In addition to his nephew, survivors include his nieces, Lynne and Gail, and his sister, Joan, who turns 100 in November.