Look for the 147th interview at the end of the month. But today, a spotlight on news from another all-time favorite meal with a stranger: Fred Melamed – the 76th interviewee – is back working with Larry David.
Fred appears in the seventh episode of HBO’s “Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness” as William Henry Harrison, America’s shortest-serving president. Harrison insisted on going coatless at his own January inauguration, caught pneumonia, and was dead in 31 days. Fred’s own summary from his Facebook page: “Larry makes those 31 days as unpleasant as possible. Good times!!”
I dined with Fred and his then-wife Leslee back in 2015 at the Palm in Beverly Hills, where we talked about Fred’s decades-long career in acting, from playing Sy Ableman in the Coen Brothers’ movie “A Serious Man” through to countless TV roles (including on David’s other HBO show “Curb Your Enthusiasm”) and much more. We covered so much ground that the article became a two-parter, read part one here and part two here.