Harold Gould

For me the most memorable role of Harold Gould, the prolific character actor who died a few days ago, was his four-episode arc on Soap as Barney Gerber, an elderly hospital patient who befriends Jodie (Billy Crystal), who’s in the hospital to get a sex change. One of the episodes ended with a massive monologue delivered by Gould, who is trying to cheer Jodie up after his football-player boyfriend dumps him to enter into a sham marriage with a woman. The scene gets some extra tension because Jodie has just swallowed a lot of pills in an attempt to commit suicide, and Barney doesn’t realize it. The script was written by series creator Susan Harris, who wrote or co-wrote all the episodes, and did most of the first season without even a co-writer. Like many Soap actors, Gould also wound up guesting on Harris’s The Golden Girls.