Caroll Spinney, the actor and puppeteer who portrayed Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street over five decades, died Sunday at age 85.
The Sesame Workshop said Spinney had died at home in Connecticut, and that he had long lived with dystonia, a disorder that causes involuntary muscle contractions.
“Caroll and Big Bird are very similar in their genuine niceness and sweetness and lovingness,” said Joan Ganz Conney, co-founder of the Sesame Workshop said in a video tribute to Spinney last year. “He’s just so respectful and so nice to all the kids, and all that comes across in Big Bird.”
At a celebration for the show’s 15th anniversary in 1984, Muppet-master Jim Henson recounted how he and Spinney had met in August 1969 at a puppetry festival in Salt Lake City.
“He’s a very talented performer and he had a great sense of ad-libbing,” Henson remembered. “And he was doing this strange-looking cat on local television in Boston. And so we started talking at that point about doing this show, and I asked Caroll if he’d enjoy coming and being part of this very strange bird.”
(Excerpt) Read more @ NPR
