Harold Gould, a dapper, white-haired character actor best known for playing the swindler Kid Twist in the 1973 movie "The Sting" and for recurring roles on the popular television sitcoms "Rhoda" and "The Golden Girls," died Sept. 11 of prostate cancer at a nursing home in Woodland Hills, Calif. He was 86.
Gould, a former college drama professor, was nominated five times for Emmy Awards in a television career spanning a half-century.
Beginning in the 1960s with series such as "The Twilight Zone" and "I Dream of Jeannie," he appeared in more than 100 television programs in small roles.
His most memorable parts included the archetypal Jewish father of Valerie Harper's Rhoda Morgenstern on "Rhoda," which aired on CBS in the mid-1970s, and the ex-mobster boyfriend of Rose Nylund, played by Betty White, on the NBC show "The Golden Girls" in the late 1980s.
