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Gilbert Gottfried, the actor and legendary standup comic known for his raw, scorched voice and crude jokes, has died. He was 67.

Gottfried died from a rare genetic muscle disease that can trigger a dangerously abnormal heartbeat, his publicist and longtime friend Glenn Schwartz said in a statement.

“In addition to being the most iconic voice in comedy, Gilbert was a wonderful husband, brother, friend and father to his two young children. Although today is a sad day for all of us, please keep laughing as loud as possible in Gilbert’s honor,” his family said in a statement posted on Twitter.

Gottfried was a fiercely independent and intentionally bizarre comedian’s comedian, as likely to clear a room with anti-comedy as he was to kill it with his jokes.

“The first comedian I saw who would go on and all the other comics would go in the room to watch,” standup comic Colin Quinn said on Twitter.

He first came to national attention with frequent appearances on MTV in its early days and with a brief stint in the cast of “Saturday Night Live” in the 1980s.

Gottfried also did frequent voice work for children’s television and movies, most famously playing the parrot Iago in Disney’s “Aladdin.”

“Look at me, I’m so ticked off that I’m molting,” a scratchy-voiced Gottfried said early in the film as his character shed feathers.

He was particularly fond of doing obscure and dated impressions for as long as he could milk them, including Groucho Marx, Bela Lugosi and Andrew “Dice” Clay. He would often do those voices as a guest on the Howard Stern show, prompting listeners by the dozens to call in and beg Stern to throw him off.

In his early days at the Comedy Store, a club in Hollywood, the managers would have him do his impression of then-little-known Jerry Seinfeld at the end of the night to get rid of lingering patrons.

Gottfried was especially beloved by his fellow comedians and performers.

“I am so sad to read about the passing of Gilbert Gottfried,” actor Marlee Matlin said on Twitter. “Funny, politically incorrect but a softie on the inside. We met many times; he even pranked me on a plane, replacing my interpreter.” (Gottfried bore a close resemblance to Matlin’s American Sign Language interpreter Jack Jason.)

“Seinfeld” actor Jason Alexander tweeted that “Gilbert Gottfried made me laugh at times when laughter did not come easily. What a gift.”

Gottfried was interviewed by The Associated Press last month following Will Smith’s Oscar night slap of Chris Rock. While he took the attack seriously, saying it might imperil other comedians, he couldn’t resist wisecracks.

He said that before on stage, he “just had to worry about wearing a mask. Now I have to worry about wearing a football helmet.” He later added: “If Will Smith is reading this, dear God, please don’t come to my shows.”

The year has already seen the loss of several beloved comedians, including Louie Anderson and Bob Saget.

In January, Gottfried tweeted a picture of the three men together, with the text, “This photo is very sad now. RIP Bob Saget and RIP Louie Anderson. Both good friends that will be missed.”

Gottfried was born in Brooklyn, the son of a hardware store owner and a stay-at-home mom. He began doing amateur standup at age 15.

He thought he was getting his big break when he landed a spot on “Saturday Night Live” alongside Eddie Murphy in 1980. But he was given little to do on the show.

He later said a low point was playing the body in a sketch about a funeral. He would last only 12 episodes.

But he would find his own way, doing bits on MTV and as both a beloved and hated guest on talk shows.

He had roles in “Beverly Hills Cop II” and the “Problem Child” films and presented bad movies as host of “USA Up All Night” from 1989 to 1998.

And he had recurring voice roles on “Ren and Stimpy,” “The Fairly OddParents” and several spinoffs of “Aladdin.”

Gottfried’s shtick wasn’t always popular. In 2011, Aflac Inc. fired him as the voice of the duck in its commercials over tasteless tweet the comic sent about the earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

Less than a month after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, at the Friars Club Roast of Hugh Hefner, Gottfried made jokes about planes making stops at skyscrapers, and was met with boos and shouts of “Too soon!” He responded with an especially foul version of the comedians’ inside joke “The Aristocrats,” which many in the audience took as a message that he believed it was the comic’s job to remain crude at all costs.

“To me, funny is funny,” he told the AP last month. “I’ll regret a bit I do that just doesn’t get a laugh, because it’s not funny or an ad lib that doesn’t work. But if it gets a laugh, I feel like I’m the comedian and that’s my job.”

Gottfried is survived by his wife, Dara, sister Karen, 14-year-old daughter Lily and 12-year-old son Max.
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Sultry musical “Cabaret” and fantastical literary adaptation “Life of Pi” were among the winners Sunday at British theater’s Olivier Awards, which returned with a live ceremony and a black-tie crowd after a three-year gap imposed by COVID-19.

The celebration of London theater, opera and dance came back to London’s Royal Albert Hall for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic shuttered Britain’s performance venues more than two years ago, weeks before the scheduled 2020 Oliviers show.

Kit Harington, Tom Felton, Emma Corrin and Jonathan Pryce were among the stars who walked the sustainable green carpet, made from reusable grass, before the glitzy, music-filled ceremony.

An intimate production of “Cabaret” that transformed London’s Playhouse Theater into the Kit Kat Club in 1930s Berlin had 11 nominations for the Oliviers, Britain’s equivalent of Broadway’s Tony Awards. Eddie Redmayne and Jessie Buckley are nominated in musical leading actor categories for their roles as the Emcee and Sally Bowles.

“Cabaret” director Rebecca Frecknall took the directing trophy and said the war in Ukraine gave John Kander and Fred Ebb’s musical about the collapse of democracy and rise of fascism added poignancy.

“In a way it’s quite sad that every time it’s on it feels like it’s been written for today,” she said.

“Life of Pi,” adapted from Yann Martel’s Booker Prize-winning novel about a boy adrift at sea with a tiger, was named best new play. Hiran Abeysekera was named best actor in a play as title character Pi, while — in a first — the supporting actor prize went to seven performers who collectively play the show’s puppet tiger.

Fred Davis, one of the seven, said it was “a landmark moment for puppetry.”

Redmayne is up for best actor in a musical alongside Olly Dobson for “Back to the Future – The Musical;” Arinze Kene for “Get Up Stand Up! The Bob Marley Musical;” and Robert Lindsay for “Anything Goes.”

Buckley is competing for best actress in a musical against Sutton Foster for “Anything Goes;” Beverley Knight for “The Drifters Girl;” and Stephanie McKeon for “Frozen.”

Knight said the theater community was ready to celebrate after a difficult couple of years.

“We have been bereft of theater for so long, just had nothing. And people only realize the importance of the place that theater and live entertainment played in any society when it was taken away,” she said.

“We bring in multi-millions and that’s week in, week out. So we are part of giving the economy buoyancy, but more than that, we feed the nation’s soul,” she added.

The contenders for best new musical are “Back to the Future – The Musical;” “The Drifters Girl;” “Frozen;” “Get Up Stand Up! The Bob Marley Musical;” and “Moulin Rouge!”

The show also paid musical tribute to a theater titan — composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim, who died last year at 91.

The last Oliviers ceremony, held largely remotely in October 2020, awarded work done before the British government ordered U.K. theaters to shut down in March 2020.

Venues began reopening in mid-2021, and shows are largely up and running again, although the number of international visitors, vital to sustaining West End shows, remains well below pre-pandemic levels.

The awards were founded in 1976 and named for the late actor-director Laurence Olivier. Winners in most categories are chosen by a panel of stage professionals and theatergoers.
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“Sonic the Hedgehog 2” sped to the top of the charts in its opening weekend, earning an impressive $71 million according to studio estimates Sunday. Paramount’s PG-rated sequel easily bested the weekend’s other major newcomer, Michael Bay’s “Ambulance,” which faltered in theaters.

“Sonic 2,” which brings back the first film’s director, writers and cast, including James Marsden, Jim Carrey and Ben Schwartz, who voices the blue video game character, opened in 4,234 locations and actually surpassed its predecessor’s opening weekend. The first “Sonic the Hedgehog” opened over the Presidents Day holiday weekend in February 2020, earning $58 million in its first three days.

“The normal pattern domestically is that sequels slide a little bit,” said Chris Aronson, the president of domestic distribution for Paramount. “But we certainly bucked that trend.”

For a sequel to open 22% above the first, Aronson added, is “quite remarkable.”

“Sonic 2” got mixed to positive reviews from critics and audiences were even more enthusiastic. They gave the CG/live-action hybrid a strong “A” CinemaScore.

“The filmmakers did a great job of being in service of not only the general audience but Sonic fans themselves,” Aronson said. “Many feel it’s a bigger, better film than the first one.”

It’s an important weekend not just for the “Sonic” franchise, but for PG-rated family films too. Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian said that one of the big questions of the pandemic was whether families would return to movie theaters with seemingly limitless viewing options available at home. According to exit polls, families made up 58% of the “Sonic 2” audience.

“There’s been some indication that they wanted to go back with movies like ‘Sing 2,’ but it’s moved in fits and starts,” said Dergarabedian. “This says once and for all that families want to go back. It’s a really good indicator of things to come for family films in 2022 with ‘Lightyear’ and the next ‘Minions’ movie.”

“Sonic 2” is also the latest in a string of theatrical hits for Paramount in 2022, including “Scream,” “Jackass Forever” and “The Lost City,” which is still in the top five.

“A lot of credit goes to our marketing and distribution teams,” Aronson said. “We’ve been judicious about picking our dates and knowing who our audience was for each.”

And their next release could be their biggest yet. “Top Gun: Maverick” opens on May 27.

Meanwhile, “Ambulance” got off to a bumpy start in its first weekend. With an estimated $8.7 million in grosses, it opened behind Sony’s “Morbius,” down 74% in weekend two, and “The Lost City.” Bay’s nail-biter about a botched bank robbery was released by Universal and stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II and Eiza Gonzalez.

Its tepid launch proved a head-scratcher for many. Reviews weren’t terrible (it’s at a 69% on Rotten Tomatoes versus “Sonic 2’s” 67%) and on paper “Ambulance” appears to be the kind of throwback, big screen blockbuster spectacle that would draw significant crowds to the theaters.

“This is a filmmaker who will forever be looked at as a blockbuster director, whether you like his movies or not. The bar is always raised for someone like that,” Dergarabedian said. “But this is a different kind of movie and I think that’s why we’re seeing these numbers. It’s not trying to be ‘Transformers.’ If Bay’s name wasn’t on it, expectations wouldn’t be as high.”

“Sonic 2” wasn’t the only success of the weekend. A24’s critical darling “Everything Everywhere All at Once” expanded nationwide in its third weekend in theaters and earned $6.1 million from only 1,250 screens.

“A24 has done a spectacular job of rolling it out on a platform release and building buzz,” Dergarabedian said.

The film, directed by the Daniels and starring Michelle Yeoh, will expand to more theaters in the coming weeks.

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Comscore. Final domestic figures will be released Monday.

1. “Sonic the Hedgehog 2,” $71 million.

2. “Morbius,” $10.2 million.

3. “The Lost City,” $9.2 million.

4. “Ambulance,” $8.7 million.

5. “The Batman,” $6.5 million.

6. “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” $6.1 million.

7. “Uncharted,” $2.7 million.

8. “Jujutsu Kaisen 0,” $825,000.

9. “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” $625,000.

10. “RRR,” $570,000
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