My friend Bernard came along, and since he knew fewer people at the party than I did, Matthew did his utmost to make him feel welcome at once: speaking French with him and focusing his attention on him. We met again in the 1990s, through my foster mother, Madeline Lee Gilford with her, I visited Matthew and his wife, Christine Baranski, at their home. His eyes were always twinkling, illuminated by the spins and swirls of his constantly active imagination: he was watching, observing, but you could never quite tell what he saw. Matthew was a bit scruffy offstage, too, eccentric and almost otherworldly. Exuding patrician authority and a clubby bonhomie, Chandler was a frequent visitor to the Kurt Weill Foundation, and nothing at all like the scruffy characters his son played. He came to theater naturally: his father, Chandler Cowles, was a sometime actor and the producer who brought Gian Carlo Menotti’s operas to Broadway. I don’t know that anybody ever took seriously a character who, for example, once buried a woman alive, but the reactions were mostly good-natured, and Matthew could sort out gracefully the love that viewers felt for a villain they loved to hate. Matthew loved the role, and he enjoyed the audience response to Billy Clyde’s endless, extravagant awfulness. The show’s writers rose to the occasion, delivering up terrific material: silly plots, yes, but fun dialogue and abundant opportunities for Matthew to chew every scrap of scenery. Matthew stepped between them with a swagger and an irresistible pleasure in his own performance. McClain and Knight brought so much humor to their work and such an easy, appealing chemistry that this viewer somehow didn’t feel guilty for giving a damn about soap opera characters. Knight) in a diabolical explosion that also took Billy Clyde’s life - or so we thought, until Tad returned some time later, and until Billy Clyde showed up again in Pine Valley last year. Maybe he channeled all his demons into Billy Clyde.Ī strutting, scheming pimp, Billy Clyde figured prominently in one of the most satisfying story arcs I saw on All My Children, tormenting Dixie Cooney (Cady McClain) and murdering Tad Martin (Michael E. He’s best known for playing Billy Clyde Tuggle, on All My Children, a villain so outrageous that everybody else in soap operas seems dull by comparison - but in life, Matthew was unfailingly kind. Our paths crossed several times, and to this day he’s the only person ever paid to perform a script I wrote: a concert narration for Weill’s Happy End in Princeton, New Jersey. The actor and playwright Matthew Cowles has died.
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