Robert Goulet: ‘Camelot’ Broadway singer & ‘Beetlejuice’ Hollywood actor dead at 73
Actor-singer Robert Goulet died at age 73 on Oct. 30 in Los Angeles. He was 73. Born on Nov. 26, 1933, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, Goulet spent much of his youth in Canada. He became a Broadway star in 1960, after playing Sir Lancelot in the Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe musical Camelot. His co-stars were Richard Burton as King Arthur and Julie Andrews as Queen Guenevere.
Robert Goulet movies
In the ensuing decades, besides numerous Las Vegas performances and television appearances (Police Story, Mission: Impossible, Fantasy Island), Robert Goulet was featured in several motion pictures. Among these were the 1964 comedies Honeymoon Hotel, with Nancy Kwan; and more memorably, I’d Rather Be Rich.
The latter is a not disagreeable remake of the It Started with Eve, which had starred Universal’s top box office draw Deanna Durbin. In the Ross Hunter-produced, Jack Smight-directed remake (with music), 1960s Universal star Sandra Dee plays a cute-as-pie young woman who, while attempting to make her (supposedly) dying grandfather Maurice Chevalier happy, wins the heart of fake fiancé Robert Goulet.
Yet Goulet’s film career never quite took off. When Camelot was made into a movie in 1967, he was replaced by Franco Nero – but then again, none of the three original leads was used: Richard Burton was replaced by Richard Harris and Julie Andrews by Vanessa Redgrave. Joshua Logan directed.
More recent Goulet film fare include Tim Burton’s ghostly comedy blockbuster Beetlejuice (1988); The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear (1991); Toy Story 2 (1999), in which he provided the voice for Wheezy the Penguin; and the Burt Reynolds-directed The Last Producer (2000).
Robert Goulet won a Grammy in 1962 for his first two albums, “Always You” and “Two of Us.” Six years later, he received a Tony for his performance in the musical The Happy Time, a musical loosely based on Samuel A. Taylor’s 1950 hit Broadway play. (Charles Boyer, Marsha Hunt, Louis Jourdan, and Bobby Driscoll starred in Richard Fleischer’s 1952 film version of the play.)