RICHARD WATTS, DRAMA CRITIC AT TRIBUNE AND POST (original) (raw)
RICHARD WATTS, DRAMA CRITIC AT TRIBUNE AND POST
https://www.nytimes.com/1981/01/03/obituaries/richard-watts-drama-critic-at-tribune-and-post.html
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- Jan. 3, 1981
Credit...The New York Times Archives
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January 3, 1981
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Richard Watts, drama critic for The New York Herald Tribune and The New York Post between 1936 and 1976 who was also a foreign correspondent and World War II civilian aide, died of cardiac arrest yesterday at Mount Sinai Hospital. He had suffered a stroke recently and had been in a coma for several weeks. He was 82 years old, and lived in Manhattan.
Mr. Watts, a ''gentle and gentlemanly man,'' in the words of his successor as drama critic of The Post, Martin Gottfried, liked to see the best in the works he reviewed.
''The only unpleasant thing in the otherwise agreeable business of pontificating about the drama,'' he once wrote, ''is that you occasionally feel like a bully when you pick on helpless and unprotected plays.'' Interrupted by Wars
''In general,'' he continued, ''I am all for an era of good feeling, but when one sets it in the theater, it is likely to imperil some of the stage's vitality.''
Mr. Watts was a bachelor and once said, ''I've never given a pretty girl a bad review.'' He could take such a motion-picture beauty as Jean Harlow out - to a midnight mass.
Mr. Watts interrupted his work as a critic to try to warn newspaper readers about world troubles. In 1937 and 1938 he sent stories to The Herald Tribune from the civil war in Spain. In 1938 and 1939, he reported from the Far East. After experiencing Japanese air raids, he called the interim Chinese capital of Chungking ''the greatest metropolis of the new caveman who is once more emerging into a savage world.''
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