Michael Vale, 83, Actor And Icon of Doughnuts
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Michael Vale, who died Saturday at 83, was recognizable as “Fred the Baker,” the face of Dunkin’ Donuts in more than 100 television ads.
Before playing the character of an early rising deep fryer operator, he played Sam Breakstone, a grumpy cream cheese manufacturer who was regularly attacked by a tiny dog.
“Breakstone was his really big break in the whole commercial thing,” Vale’s wife, Nancy, said, adding that her husband won a Clio award for the campaign in 1981. She said that Vale’s association with food advertisements reflected his real-life status as a “foodie.” She recalled trying to re-create, at his request, a special tomato sauce originally concocted by Vale’s roommate from his early acting days, Rod Steiger. The secret ingredient turned out to be roast chestnuts.
Vale was an actor with a dozen Broadway credits, plus roles in several films, including “Marathon Man,” in which he played a jewelry salesman. In 1981, he played the shopkeeper in the original production of “Little Shop of Horrors.”
But it was in advertising that Vale found real fame, and he claimed to have appeared in more than 1,000 commercials, starting with an ad for Utica Club beer. “I played a bottle of beer,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times. He once got a job playing a grape in a Fruit of the Loom commercial, but lost it to F. Murray Abraham when it was discovered that he could not fit into the costume.
Advertising analysts chalked up Vale’s success as “Fred the Baker” to his vaguely dumpy appearance and wisecracking way of speaking. From 1982 until 1997, when Dunkin’ Donuts celebrated his retirement by distributing 6 million free doughnuts, he was as recognizable as the Maytag Man or Madge the Manicurist of Palmolive detergent. His signature tagline, “Time to make the doughnuts,” was nearly as memorable as Clara Peller’s challenge from Wendy’s: “where’s the beef?”
The founder of Dunkin’ Donuts, Bill Rosenberg, said that the public thought Vale ran the chain. In 2000 Rosenberg told the Boston Globe, “There will be a group of people, and someone will mention to someone I’m the founder of Dunkin’ Donuts, and they’ll say, ‘You don’t look like what I expected. I expected you to be shorter and have a mustache and be cuter.’ They think I’m Fred the Baker.”
So thoroughly did Vale come to represent doughnuts that Dunkin’ Donuts retired him so it could change the subject. “Fred was more of a doughnut icon,” a Dunkin’ Donuts spokeswoman told Nation’s Restaurant News in 1997. “But we have to move beyond doughnuts.” New ads featured a man licking jelly off his own tie. The humor was intended to “delve deeper into the human condition,” according Dunkin’ Donuts’s new agency.
The company kept him on as its “Dunkin’ Diplomat,” making personal appearances at sports events and at individual franchises. “The franchises had these wonderful junkets, and Michael was always an invited guest,” Mrs. Vale said. “They loved him.”
This was in part because Vale was demonstrably effective. A 1991 commercial featuring him and the diminutive Herve Villachaise for “mini donuts and eclairs” was cited by 78% of Dunkin’ Donuts customers as a factor that persuaded them to buy the pastries.
Vale grew up in an apartment beside a bagel factory in East New York, where his father, a Polish immigrant, was a moving man. After attending Thomas Jefferson High School, Vale served in the Signal Corps and Infantry during World War II. He later attended the Dramatic Workshop at the New School. He appeared in many roles Off Broadway. He also played a cabdriver in the film “A Hatful of Rain” (1957), and in the early 1960s was an occasional repeating character on “Car 54, Where Are You?” Of his first appearance on Broadway, in “The Egg,” he liked to joke, “It laid one.” He found more success in the long running “The Impossible Years” (1965), and Neil Simon’s “California Suite” (1976), among others. His most fulfilling experience as an actor, he said, was in “Marathon Man,” which starred Laurence Olivier. “He called [us actors] schmucks, but he did it with love,” Vale told Entertainment Weekly in 1997. “It was the most wonderful experience of my life.”
Michael Vale
Born June 28, 1922, in New York; died December 24 of complications from diabetes; survived by his wife, Nancy; his children, Ivy Vale Reil and Tracy Vale, and a granddaughter.