Actor Rip Torn, one of the most versatile and respected character actors of his generation, died Tuesday in Lakeville, Connecticut, his publicist announced that night. Torn was 88. He reportedly died peacefully with his wife, Amy Wright, and two daughters, Katie and Angelica, by his side. No cause of death was given.

Albert Brooks, with whom Torn costarred in Brooks’s afterlife comedy, Defending Your Life, responded to the news with a heartfelt tweet: “I’ll miss you Rip, you were a true original.”

It was Torn’s performance in that film as Bob Diamond, an attorney defending Earth’s “Little Brains,” that put him on the radar of the creators of The Larry Sanders Show. Torn joined that show in the role of Artie, the veteran producer who used his show business wiles to protect neurotic late-night talk show host Larry—played by Garry Shandling—from “the bullshit.” In a 2010 New York Times interview, Shandling said that reading with Torn during the casting process was like trying to describe a good date to a friend the next day. “I had to say to HBO…‘Honestly, this is the best sex I have had,’” he said.

Torn called Artie his favorite role in an interview on rogerebert.com—but confessed that he only took the part because he said he owed a lot of people money. “Some said I’d never pay them back,” Torn recalled, “but I did.” He was Emmy-nominated for each of the series’s six seasons, winning once in 1996. The best of the show’s Artie-centric episodes include “Artie and Angie and Hank and Hercules,” in which Artie reveals his and Angie Dickinson’s torrid past, and “Arthur After Hours,” a long night’s journey into day as Artie, resentful of being taken for granted by Larry, quits the show.

Torn’s career spanned the 1950s golden age of live television to feature films and Broadway, where he made his debut in 1959 in his Tony Award–nominated role in Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth. He appeared in independent films such as the X-rated Coming Apart in 1969, major studio blockbusters such as the Men in Black, franchise and popular mainstream comedies such as Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story.

Among his most affectionately recalled credits—for genre film fans, anyway—is his role as the evil wizard Maax in the 1982 cult favorite The Beastmaster. His last major role was as General Electric CEO Don Geiss, mentor to Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy, in the TV series 30 Rock. Baldwin also celebrated Torn on Tuesday: “He was a deeply committed, phenomenal actor. See you down the road, Rip. You wonderful madman,” he wrote.

An award-winning stage director, Torn had less success as the director of the film The Telephone (1988), a trouble-plagued production in which he was at odds with star Whoopi Goldberg, who sued to keep the movie from being released. She lost, and the film was a box office and critical flop.

Torn could be a volatile and unpredictable presence onscreen and off. While shooting Norman Mailer’s Maidstone, Torn once attacked Mailer with a hammer during a scene; Mailer, in turn, bit his ear. Both drew blood. The scene had to be broken up by cast and crew. “I had to do that, you know I did,” Torn can be seen telling Mailer, with the cameras still rolling, in footage from the incident. In a 1971 interview that appeared in Filmmaker’s Newsletter, Torn addressed the infamous moment: ”He was angry for several years till he put the film together. The film doesn’t make it without that scene.”