Emil Sitka, Leading Stooges Foil, Dies At 83 Beyond Madcap Ties, He Played Bit Parts In Hundreds Of Movies
Emil Sitka, a character actor who portrayed butlers and others with such exquisite dignity and in such rarefied company it was inevitable that if he didn’t get poked in the eye or bopped on the head, he was sure to catch a cream pie in the kisser, died Jan. 16 at a hospital near his home in Camarillo, Calif. He was 83 and had been a favorite foil of the Three Stooges.
Since the death of the last of the Stooges, Joe DeRita, in 1993, Sitka had been widely regarded by the Stooges’ dedicated fans as the last living link to a madcap, slapstick era that to virtually everyone else’s dismay shows no signs of going away.
Whether he was playing a butler, a businessman, a society figure or a mad scientist, with the Three Stooges on the loose, before the 20-minute short had run its manic, two-reel course, Sitka could be counted on to suffer at least one indignity, sometimes several.
For although he appeared in only 35 of the 190 Stooges shorts made by Columbia Pictures from 1934 to 1958, Sitka, a tall, slender man with a quavering voice, once estimated that he had portrayed 70 different characters, sometimes four in a single picture.
If he wasn’t being attacked directly by one of the Stooges, Sitka, who also appeared in five of the Stooges’ six feature films, was always susceptible to mechanical menace. As he once recalled it, he would be the actor with a tube up his sleeve who would pick up a phone and get a face full of water.
Such sight gags coupled with his precise comic timing and the surprising nuance he brought to his roles helped make Sitka a favorite among the Stoogies, as the group’s fans are known.
Sitka, who was born in Johnstown, Pa., and orphaned at 12, got his first taste of acting as a teenager in church passion plays while living with a priest in Pittsburgh. But it was only after a rails-riding hobo period in the Depression that he made his way to Los Angeles in 1936 and found a home in the theater, literally. He lived in the dressing room of a small theater for two years while taking small parts and eventually graduating to directing.
Recruited by a scout for Columbia in 1946, Sitka became a fixture in the comedy shorts the studio was grinding out by the mile.
Sitka later said he appeared in 450 movies, but for all his other work, including bit parts in a number of feature films, it was his roles with the Stooges that assured him apparently permanent fame through the seemingly endless television showings of the Three Stooges.
Making his Stooges debut in “Halfwits Holiday,” Sitka joined the troupe just in time to claim the distinction of appearing with each of the six men who portrayed Stooges over the years: Moe Howard, his brothers Shemp and Curly (Jerome), Larry Fine, Joe Besser and Joe DeRita.
The movie, released in 1947, was the last major appearance by Curly, who had a stroke during production. He was replaced by Shemp, who had been a member of the Stooges’ original vaudeville troupe.
For all the varied characters Sitka portrayed, his most memorable role was as a harried justice of the peace in the 1947 short “Brideless Groom,” in which Shemp, who is to inherit a fortune if he marries within 24 hours, is besieged by so many fortune-hunting prospective brides that a free-for-all erupts every time Sitka tries to begin the service with the words, “Hold hands, you lovebirds.”
The line became so famous that Sitka, who was forever being asked to inscribe the words on wedding photographs, would sometimes be called during a Stoogie wedding service and asked to intone the words over the phone.
The man who proudly drove a car with the license plate “STOOGES” always obliged.
After all, on paper at least, he was one of the Three Stooges. In 1974, Sitka signed a contract to replace the ailing Larry Fine in a planned Stooges feature, but with the death of Moe Howard the next year, the film was never made.
If the Three Stooges are a decidedly specialized taste, they have a way of insinuating themselves into mainstream movies.
In Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 hit, “Pulp Fiction,” for example, Sitka’s voice can be heard from an off-camera television set as he yet once again says the magic words: “Hold hands, you lovebirds.”
Sitka, who regarded naming children a creative exercise, is survived by two daughters, Eelonka Klugman of Simi Valley, Calif., and Little-Star Martotella of Victorville, Calif.; four sons, all of California, Rudigor of Lawndale, Storm of Anaheim, Darrow of Hesperia, and Saxon of Camarillo; 13 grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren.