A former basketball scout and wanna-be politician (in 1998, Lewis ran against New York’s incumbent Gov. George Pataki, and got 52,000 votes), Lewis is best known as an actor.
His first big break was on the classic 1961-1963 sitcom Car 54, Where Are You?, but he truly shot to fame on the even more memorable 1964-1966 The Munsters, where he played Grandpa, usually upstaging the rest of the actors with his campy Dracula outfit and attitude. He died at home in New York on February 3. Some sources reported he was 95, but his son says he was 82.