Phil Bruns, Dad on "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," Dies at 80 Phil Bruns, a familiar-face character actor best known on television as the cigar-chomping hard-hat dad on the 1970s soap-opera parody "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman," died on Feb. 8 at a hospital near his home in Los Angeles. He died of natural causes, his friend Joseph Armilla said. Mr. Bruns, who received critical praise for his roles on the New York stage in the early 1960s, went on to appear in more than 40 movies and 60 television shows. On "Mary Hartman," in 1976 and 1977, he played George Shumway, a schlumpy, rubber-faced assembly-line mechanic who never quite gets what's going on with his daughter Mary (Louise Lasser) or the rest of the world. "He was this middle-aged working man, the middle class we're all talking about today, bewildered by the torrent of information thrown at him from all sides, absent context," Norman Lear, the show's creator and producer, said in an interview on Tuesday. He was too ill-informed to be sure of much. The show, a convention-breaking spoof of the soap operas of its time, dealt with subjects like infidelity, sexual perversion, racism and religious intolerance. In one episode George is set up in a hotel room with a prostitute by a rival faction of his union. In another he tries to comprehend why stress on the job has made him impotent. As Reader's Digest wrote in 1977, George combined "a know-it-all stance with profound ignorance." Mr. Bruns could nail that role, Mr. Lear said, because "he was an extremely intelligent man who brought that character out of the 10,000 he could play." Among his film credits, Mr. Bruns played a faithful production manager to the filmmaker played by Peter O'Toole in "The Stunt Man" (1980) and a small-town doctor battling zombies in "Return of the Living Dead, Part II" (1988). He also had roles in "Flashdance" (1983), "The Out-of-Towners" (1970) and "The Great Waldo Pepper" (1975) and appeared on television in "Route 66," "The Defenders," "Sanford and Son," "M*A*S*H," "Kojak," "Naked City," "Barney Miller," "Maude" and "Seinfeld" (in which he was the first actor to play Jerry Seinfeld's father), among many other series. Phillip Bruns was born on a farm near Pipestone, Minn., on May 2, 1931, the youngest of three children of Henry and Margie Trigg Bruns. He is survived by his wife, the former Laurie Franks, and a sister, Dorothy Boese. A 1953 graduate of Augustana College in South Dakota, Mr. Bruns received a master's degree from the Yale School of Drama and studied at the Old Vic Theater School in England. He won an Obie Award in 1964 for the Off Broadway production of "Mr. Simian," an exploration of the misery of the human condition, in which he played the title role: an ape that morphs into a human. In 1961, in "Seven Come Eleven," a cabaret show in Manhattan, Mr. Bruns performed in a spoof of Method acting in which he transformed into a toad because, as his character said, "I projected too much." "Mr. Bruns's impersonation of a toad - stance, facial gesture and voice - is miming on a level of brilliance that might be envied by Marcel Marceau," Arthur Gelb wrote in The New York Times.