Joby Baker, the Canadian-born actor and comedian who carved out a long career in Hollywood comedies, Disney adventures, and dozens of television guest spots across three decades, died June 22 of natural causes in Mount Kisco, New York. He was 92.
His family announced the death to Deadline. Baker, born Joseph N. Baker on March 26, 1934, in Montreal, had stepped away from the screen in the mid-1980s to devote himself to painting and sculpture, a second act that took him from Hollywood soundstages to gallery walls across the country.
His death came just 10 days after Ronnie Schell, his co-star on the 1967 CBS comedy Good Morning World, also passed away. The two had shared the screen on a show whose cast also included a young Goldie Hawn.
Baker broke into the business in the early 1950s with small roles, working his way through live-television staples like The Red Skelton Hour, Studio One, and The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. By the end of the decade he had landed a part in the original 1959 Gidget, starring Sandra Dee, and stayed with the franchise through Gidget Goes Hawaiian in 1961 and Gidget Goes to Rome in 1963.
In 1960, Baker appeared alongside Jack Lemmon and Ricky Nelson in The Wackiest Ship in the Army. Five years later he co-starred with Elvis Presley in Girl Happy.
Those credits alone would have made for a respectable Hollywood résumé. But Baker also became one of Walt Disney Studio's go-to young actors during a period when the studio was turning out family adventure films at a steady clip. He appeared in The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin in 1967 alongside Roddy McDowall, then in Blackbeard's Ghost with Dean Jones and Peter Ustinov. In 1973 he turned up in Disney's Superdad, sharing the screen with Bob Crane and Kurt Russell.
Hollywood has lost a number of figures from that golden era of studio entertainment in recent months. Wilford Lloyd Baumes, the producer behind The Love Boat, died at 86, a reminder of how quickly the generation that built network television's most beloved shows is thinning out.
Baker's television credits read like a guided tour of mid-century American TV. He appeared on Combat! during its first season, playing Private Kelly. He guest-starred on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Ben Casey, 12 O'Clock High, Death Valley Days, and Mannix.
The list kept growing: The Streets of San Francisco, The Dick Van Dyke Show, F Troop, Love American Style, Barnaby Jones, Police Story, Medical Center, and The City. He also appeared in the television movie Cry Rape.
By the early 1980s, Baker was still working, with credits on Simon & Simon and Quincy, M.E. in 1981. His final guest appearance came in 1984, on the TV adaptation of The Paper Chase.
That same year, Baker married Emmy-winning lyricist and singer-songwriter Dory Previn. The couple eventually left Los Angeles and settled in an old farmhouse in Southfield, Massachusetts, deep in the Berkshires.
Baker had begun establishing himself as a visual artist in the 1970s, and by the time he left acting behind, his paintings and sculptures were appearing in galleries in Los Angeles, New York, and New England, as well as in private collections.
It was a genuine pivot, not a celebrity vanity project. Baker put the camera behind him and picked up a brush. Previn, his wife, died in 2012. Baker remained in the Northeast.
The trajectory, from Hollywood to a quiet farmhouse, from soundstages to canvases, says something about the kind of career Baker built. He was never the lead. He was the guy who made the lead funnier, the scene livelier, the ensemble tighter. That kind of work doesn't always generate headlines, but it holds up.
Other actors of Baker's generation have passed in circumstances that drew wider attention. Paul Avery, a veteran actor and Vietnam-era serviceman, died alongside his wife in a New Jersey house fire, a loss that underscored how fragile even the steadiest lives can be.
Baker is survived by two daughters, Michelle Wayland and Fredricka Baker; Scott Zimmerman, whom Baker helped raise as a son; six grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter. A recent photograph of Baker was taken by Wayland.
The entertainment world has also recently marked the passing of figures from adjacent creative fields. Bestselling novelist Judith Krantz, whose books sold more than 80 million copies in over 50 languages, died of natural causes on June 22 at age 91, a coincidence of date that links two very different careers shaped by the same postwar American culture industry.
Baker's death at 92 closes a chapter on a Hollywood that prized reliable, funny, versatile performers, the kind of actors who never needed their name above the title to earn their place on the call sheet. That era doesn't come back. The least we can do is notice when its last members leave.