Don Adams

Don Adams, who died in Los Angeles on Sunday aged 82, starred as the bumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart in the 1960s television series Get Smart, conceived by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry as a spoof of the James Bond pictures, The Man From UNCLE and similar espionage capers; the show was screened on BBC1 between 1965 and 1967.
Maxwell Smart, ostensibly a salesman with a greeting card company, was Agent 86 for CONTROL, an intelligence network with a headquarters deep underground in Washington DC; entry was through the floor of a telephone kiosk.
As he combated his adversaries in KAOS (headed by Siegfried and his deputy Starker), Smart's sole talent was for incompetence; his most frequent utterance was "Sorry about that, Chief".
He was assisted by an array of gadgets (which tended to malfunction); by a clever female partner who became his wife (Agent 99, played by Barbara Feldon); and by a spy in drag and a dog called Fang (or Agent K13).
Don Adams was born Donald James Yarmy in New York City on April 13 1923, the son of a Hungarian Jew who ran several small restaurants in the Bronx. In 1941 he left school to join the Marines, but was struck down with blackwater fever in Guadalcanal; he returned to America to become a drill instructor, which was how he acquired the clipped delivery that was to serve him so well as a comedian.
After the war he worked in New York as a commercial artist by day, and, using his gift for mimicry, performed stand-up comedy in clubs by night; it was at this time that he took the surname of his first wife, Adelaide Adams, partly because he was tired of being heard last in alphabetically-organised auditions.
In 1954 he won when he performed his comedy act on the television show Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts; he was soon working alongside the comedian Bill Dana, who was also a friend and helped him to write material, and in the early 1960s he won a regular spot on the Perry Como Show.
By the time he was offered the role in Get Smart, Adams was under contract to NBC. At first he was wary of the idea, but when he heard that Brooks and Henry had written the pilot script, he accepted immediately. Get Smart first appeared on NBC in September 1965. It went on to win two Emmys for best comedy series, while Adams himself won three Emmys for best comedy actor.
The show ended in 1970, although it lived on in syndication and in a cartoon series. In 1995 it was revived by the Fox network; in this incarnation, Maxwell Smart was now the Chief and Agent 99 had become a congresswoman. It lasted only seven episodes.
In 1980 he appeared as Maxwell Smart in a feature film, The Nude Bomb, about a madman with a bomb which destroyed people's clothing.
Adams made a good deal of money from Get Smart, but complained afterwards that he had been typecast: "The character was so strong, particularly because of that distinctive voice, that nobody could picture me in any other type of role." He certainly never repeated that success.
In 1971 Adams attempted another spoof series, The Partners, in which he played a police detective, Lennie Crook; but it folded after just 13 weeks. He fell back on nightclub appearances and guest spots on television shows such as The Love Boat. He also directed television commercials.
Adams is best known to children of the 1980s as the voice of the cartoon blockhead Inspector Gadget and of Tennessee Tuxedo.
Don Adams was married and divorced three times. He had seven chi