"He had a lot of health problems,"
writer Bill Scheft told American magazine
The Hollywood Reporter
to announce the death of Richard Belzer on Sunday.
The actor died on the morning of February 19 at the age of 78 at his home in Bozouls in the south of France.
The man had made his debut in the comedy film
The Groove Tube
in 1974 before becoming in 1993 the inspector John Munch.
A sarcastic but determined policeman, this character has been integrated into eight different series, spin-offs, derivative series... The main one remains
New York, special unit
, broadcast in France on TF1, in which Richard Belzer was in the cast from 1999 to 2016, from seasons 1 to 15 before making a final appearance there in the seventeenth.
The cast of New York special unit reacts
As cynical as his character, the actor did not have a common goodbye to his old friend Bill Scheft.
“Fuck you motherfucker!”
, he told her before going out.
Richard Belzer in the 15th season of New York Special Victims Unit NBC Universal
The news of his death caused his former partners in
New York to react, special unit
starting with Mariska Hargitay, the interpreter of Olivia Benson.
“I will miss you with your light and your singular personality.
I feel so lucky to have known you and to have worked with you for all these years”
, she wrote on Instagram in tribute to her
“dear, dear friend”.
The actress did not fail to underline the comic personality of her comrade by concluding her message with a simple:
“I can already hear the angels laughing by your side”
.
Ice-T, known for his role as Odafin Tutuola,
"loses a friend"
of life and fiction.
Finally, Christopher Meloni, who plays Elliot Stabler on screen, recognizes that "
having learned the last words,
of the one he nicknamed
The Belz, helped to digest the news of his death".
“I will never meet someone like you again,”
he concluded.