Alfie Wise, Actor in ‘The Cannonball Run' and Lots of Other Burt Reynolds Movies, Dies at 82

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7 days ago

Alfie Wise, the actor who showed up in Smokey and the Bandit, The Cannonball Run and eight other films with his fun-loving pal Burt Reynolds, has died. He was 82.
Wise died July 22 of natural causes at Thomas H. Corey VA Medical Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, his longtime fiancée, Stephanie Bliss, told The Hollywood Reporter.
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Wise played a trooper in the prison-set The Longest Yard (1974), his first onscreen collaboration with Reynolds, and he worked with the movie star in The End (1978), Hooper (1978), Starting Over (1979), Paternity (1981), Stroker Ace (1983), City Heat (1984) and Heat (1986) as well.
The 5-foot-5 Wise also was the butt of Reynolds' jokes as marina owner Oliver Wardell on all 12 episodes of the 1989-90 ABC crime series B.L Stryker, and he appeared on a 1991 installment of Reynolds' longer-lasting CBS sitcom, Evening Shade.
'He loved his friends, and he really kept us very close,' Wise said of Reynolds in an interview with The New York Daily News shortly after Reynolds' death in 2018. 'His films were like an ongoing block party. I think the audience caught on to that. You always knew you were going to have a great time with a Burt Reynolds movie.'
Wise also portrayed Charles Nelson Reilly's sidekick, Mr. Rabbit Ears, on the 1975-76 kids show Uncle Croc's Block and was one-half of a paramedic team (Lou Ferrigno was the much bigger other half) on the 1983 ABC series Trauma Center, starring James Naughton, Wendie Malick and Dorian Harewood.
Born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on Nov. 17, 1942, Ralph Louis Wise attended Keith Jr. High School and Altoona Area High School, where he served as class president for three years before graduating in 1960.
After graduating in 1964 from Penn State, where he was class president for four years, he served in the U.S. Navy — he produced and hosted shows on his ship — and moved to the Los Angeles area, where he landed a job as an NBC page.
In 1972, he appeared in the ABC pilot telefilm Call Her Mom, starring Connie Stevens, and on an episode of CBS' The Sandy Duncan Show.
In one of his more prominent roles, Wise played the cowardly assistant to the director (Robert Klein) of the action film The Spy Who Laughed at Danger at the center of Hooper, which features Reynolds as a stunt coordinator.
He was a patrolman in Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and the tow-truck driver known as 'Batman' in The Cannonball Run (1981).
He also served as Reynolds' assistant during their many years together.
'I've been very lucky to get to know and work with such a good friend,' he said in the late '70s in a story published in his hometown Altoona Mirror. 'Burt is one of the true gentlemen in the business as well as a caring and warm man.'
Wise's résumé also included the films Midway (1976), Swashbuckler (1976), Hot Stuff (1979), Rad (1986) and Catherine's Grove (1997) and the TV shows Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, The Fall Guy, The Jeffersons and S Club 7 in Miami. He showed up as a panelist on Match Game, too.
More recently, he worked as a real estate agent in Reynolds' old stomping grounds of Jupiter, Florida.
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