Richard Dimitri, ‘When Things Were Rotten’ and ‘Johnny Dangerously’ Actor, Dies at 83

Richard Dimitri, who played twins on the Mel Brooks comedy When Things Were Rotten and other colorful characters in the films Johnny Dangerously and Let It Ride, has died. He was 83.

Dimitri died Dec. 18 in Los Angeles after a decades-long battle with heart and lung illness, his family announced.

A New Yorker of Assyrian descent, Dimitri also co-created the 1993 Fox sitcom Daddy Dearest, starring Richard Lewis and Don Rickles, and wrote for two other network comedies, CBS’ House Calls, starring Wayne Rogers and Lynn Redgrave, and NBC’s Going Bananas, starring the orangutan Roxana Banana.

Dimitri had appeared three times on Broadway when he came to Los Angeles to play the twins Bertram (aide to the Sheriff of Nottingham) and Renaldo (one of the Merry Men) on the 1975 ABC series When Things Were Rotten, a spoof of Robin Hood that starred Dick Gautier. The show, however, lasted just 13 episodes.

In Amy Heckerling’s Johnny Dangerously (1984), starring Michael Keaton, Dimitri portrayed Roman Moronie, a nightclub owner and malapropist (“You lousy cork-soakers”), and he was the gambler known as Johnny Cheeseburger in Let It Ride (1989), starring Richard Dreyfuss and David Johansen.

The youngest of two sons, Dimitri was born in Yonkers on June 27, 1942. His father, Jacob, abandoned the family when Richard was a toddler, and he was raised by his mother, Mary, and her father.

After graduating from Yonkers High School and then the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in 1962, he played Bashir in the 1963 off-Broadway revival of The Immoralist. He made it to Broadway in 1968 in The Guide and Hal Prince’s Zorba opposite Herschel Bernardi and in 1972 in Lysistrata alongside Melina Mercouri.

In 1973, he began to teach acting at Queens College in New York before heading to L.A.

He also showed up in Gene Wilder’s The World’s Greatest Lover (1977) and on episodes of such TV shows as Starsky & Hutch, Welcome Back, Kotter, Hawaii Five-O, Tenspeed and Brown Shoe, Tracey Takes On … and Hearts Afire.

On the side, he performed stand-up at The Comedy Store and other venues.

After leaving show business in 1998 because of health issues, he began a second career as an art and antiques dealer, owning the gallery Engs-Dimitri Works of Art on on La Cienega Boulevard with his wife of 26 years, Christianne Engs. He sold John Deare’s 1787 masterpiece, Venus Reclining on a Sea Monster With Cupid and a Putto, to the Getty museum.

His son, John, who was born with a rare congenital heart defect, Hypoplastic-left-heart syndrome, died at age 19 in 2017.

Donations can be made to The John Dimitri Research Foundation for Congenital Heart Disease.