Actor Tom Bosley, best known as  Happy Days dad Howard Cunningham, died last week of lung cancer. He was 83.Bosley, who was Jewish, was a Tony Award winner, but he gained his greatest fame as the patriarch of the Cunningham clan on Happy Days, the 1970s sitcom about life in 1950s Milwaukee.
 

Bosley, who was Jewish, was a Tony Award winner, but he gained his greatest fame as the patriarch of the Cunningham clan on Happy Days, the 1970s sitcom about life in 1950s Milwaukee.

Bosley was nominated for an Emmy Award in 1978. The show ran from 1974 to 1984.

Bosley was also known for his portrayal of the crime-solving priest on Father Dowling Mysteries and Sheriff Amos Tupper in Angela Lansbury’s Murder She Wrote.

He played himself in the 2004 movie Paper Clips, about the efforts of middle-school students in Whitwell, Tenn., to collect six million paper clips in memory of Holocaust victims.

The effort and the paper clip he contributed was meaningful to him, Bosley told the Philadelphia Jewish Exponent.

“It was important for me as a Jew to do it,” he told the newspaper. “I had lost a great uncle, whom I never met, in the Holocaust.”

Bosley reportedly found it amusing that he played numerous priests during his acting career, even though he was Jewish.