Skip to footer

The Partridge Family: Dave Madden remembered for grouchy agent role

The Partridge Family was a situation comedy that ran on ABC-TV from 1970 to 1974. Dave Madden played the role of manager of The Partridge Family, a pop music band consisting of a mother and her four children.

|
CPT Holdings Inc, Sony Pictures Television/AP
This 1970 photo released by courtesy of Sony Pictures Television shows, back row, from left, cast members, Shirley Jones, Dave Madden, David Cassidy, Susan Dey, and front row, from left, Brian Forster, Danny Bonaduce and Suzanne Crough of the television series, "The Partridge Family."
  • By Frazier Moore Associated Press

| New York

Comic actor Dave Madden, who played the child-hating agent on the hit 1970s sitcom "The Partridge Family," died in Florida on Thursday at age 82.

Madden died at a hospice center near his home in the Jacksonville area, his niece Mary Frances Miller said.

Towering and rumpled, Madden was best known for his role as Reuben Kinkaid, who managed the Partridge family band and regularly clashed with its impish pre-teen bassist, played by Danny Bonaduce.

While the series starred Shirley Jones, with her real-life stepson David Cassidy as the resident heart-throb, it was Madden and the freckle-faced Bonaduce who became the reigning comic duo.

Jones said Madden "made the show, I felt."

"His relationship with Danny Bonaduce is what made the show work: this strange, mad little boy and the grown man who was even worse as a father figure," she said Thursday. "It was hysterical!"

But though Madden played a guy bedeviled by the youngsters who surrounded him, Jones said that off-camera he "loved kids."

And Bonaduce later wrote how during his troubled youth Madden served as his surrogate father.

Before "The Partridge Family," Madden was part of the ensemble on the "Laugh-In" comedy series, sipping and sometimes spitting milk along with joining in the show's zany sketches and crazy jokes. He later had a recurring role as one of the customers at Mel's Diner on the long-running sitcom "Alice."

Madden was born in Ontario, Canada, and grew up in North Terre Haute, Ind. He began show business as a nightclub comic and then landed his first acting job on the short-lived sitcom "Camp Runamuck" in the mid-1960s.

During his career, he also appeared on such series as "Bewitched," ''Barney Miller," ''Happy Days," ''The Love Boat" and "Fantasy Island."

In 2007 he published a memoir, "Reuben on Wry."

Survivors include his wife, a daughter and a son.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to The Partridge Family: Dave Madden remembered for grouchy agent role
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Latest-News-Wires/2014/0117/The-Partridge-Family-Dave-Madden-remembered-for-grouchy-agent-role
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe