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Cleveland-born Franklin Cover was a very active theatre actor before he became a familiar face to the television audience as Tom Willis, half of television's first black-white couple, on The Jeffersons.
His career began in Shakespeare’s plays Henry IV and Hamlet, followed by early television roles on Naked City and The Jackie Gleason Show.
After replacing another 1970s TV star, Soap’s Robert Mandan, in the Broadway musical Applause, Cover made his way to the big screen as a husband of one of The Stepford Wives (the original). The same year, he took the role of Tom Willis. In 1982, he did a made-for-TV movie double duty as two “Double-H” characters: Hubert Humphrey in A Woman Called Golda and Herbert Hoover in The Day the Bubble Burst. He also made a The Love Boat appearance and guested on 227.
In the late ‘80s, he appeared on film in Wall Street and on stage with Edward Asner and Madeline Kahn in the revival of the play Born Yesterday.
With TV appearances on Mad About You and Coach, Cover made took his final TV role as a judge on Will & Grace before dying of pneumonia in February, 2006.
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