Forrest Compton, the actor who played Mike Karr on The Edge of Night, is dead at 94 of COVID-19.
Forrest Compton, the television actor who for 12 years played Mike Karr in the soap opera The Edge of Night,died on April 4 in Stonybrook Southampton Hospital from complications of COVID-19. He was 94. Tall and handsome, with a voice that carried the authority of the word of God, he often represented the moral center in his television roles, and his experience of war and soldiering informed his acting.
Born in 1925, Compton grew up in Reading, Pa. In 1944 he entered the Army and served with the 103st Infantry Division in France, where he was wounded by a German mortar shell, recovered, and returned to his company in time to witness the liberation of a concentration camp. He later recalled that moment: “Skeletons in purple and white stripes— Jews from the concentration camp…hundreds of them asking us, Warum, Why? Why did you take so long?”
Compton attended Swarthmore and the Yale Drama School, where Paul Newman was a classmate. “He was a great guy, charming sharp, six months older than me. I remember Paul making salad dressing, even back then.” Cast in Playboy of the Western World, Compton remembered his fine blond hair falling out from having a curling iron applied to it every night.
In television comedies of the 1960s, he played it straight, appearing in 42 episodes of Gomer Pyle as Lieutenant Colonel Edward Gray and in five episodes of Hogan’s Heroes as a German soldier. He also appeared in The Twilight Zone, My Three Sons, Mannix, That Girl and Mayberry RFD.
In 1971, while visiting his ailing father in New York, Compton was cast as Mike Karr, the principal character on the long-running soap opera The Edge of Night. Slated to appear in two episodes a week for 13 weeks, he needed an apartment in the city immediately and asked the super of a building on East 72nd about a one-bedroom he’d heard might be available.
Compton later learned that the super was such a devotee of The Edge of Night that he locked his office door every day at 2 p.m. to watch uninterrupted and was once ticketed on a Florida highway when he stopped on the shoulder to watch the soap opera on a portable television. When Compton mentioned that he had just been hired to play Mike Karr, the super said the apartment was his.
Compton's wife, Jeanne Sementini died less than a month after him. They met when she was almost 40 and he almost 50, and neither had been previously married. “She was just different enough from me that it was going to be an adventure,” said Compton. “I think she felt the same way.” They married in 1975.
After his work on The Edge of Night ended in 1984, Compton began spending most of his time at the home he and Ms. Sementini bought in 1978 on Shelter Island, N.Y. Compton was active in regional theater and served as president of the Shelter Island Friends of Music. As erudite as he was charming, he sought out up-and-coming classical musicians to perform for Shelter Island music lovers at the Presbyterian Church, introducing each artist with a timbre that gave their biographies the heft of scripture.