Hamilton Camp, folk singer and character actor, is dead at 70 --

LOS ANGELES -- Hamilton Camp, half of the folk-music duo Gibson and Camp whose 1961 album, ''Live at the Gate of Horn," became one of the era's must-have records, has died. He was 70.

Mr. Camp, who had found steady work as a character actor and who helped found the Committee satirical comedy troupe in San Francisco in the mid-1960s, died Sunday after a fall outside his Hancock Park home. The cause of death is still being determined, said his son, Hamilton Camp Jr.

When Albert Grossman, a Chicago manager, was trying to put together a folk trio, he introduced Bob Gibson to the singer-songwriter then known as Bob Camp. The pair decided they weren't interested in adding a female vocalist, so Grossman formed Peter, Paul, & Mary instead.

''They got the opening night in the Garden, and we got the one-way ticket to Palookaville," Mr. Camp joked to the Los Angeles Times in 1987.

The pair worked folk clubs in New York and Chicago and became known for Gibson's 12-string guitar stylings and adventurous harmonies that influenced the folk music scene.

They were ''one of the hottest acts of the time," Dick Cerri, a Washington-area folk disc jockey, told The Washington Post in 1997.

Simon and Garfunkel recorded their ''You Can Tell the World," and Peter, Paul, & Mary covered ''Well, Well, Well."

After more than a year together, and practically penniless, they broke up when Mr. Camp discovered improv and became one of the early members of Chicago's Second City. He later joined the Committee, which also produced Joan Rivers and Howard Hesseman.

A decade later, Gibson and Mr. Camp staged their first reunion show and performed together off and on until Gibson's death in 1996.

Mr. Camp recorded several solo albums and wrote the song ''Pride of Man," which Gordon Lightfoot recorded and the 1960s psychedelic band Quicksilver Messenger Service became known for performing. In all, Mr. Camp wrote 70 songs.

Eventually, he moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting and adopted the name Hamilton Camp.

An entire generation knew him as the voice of Smurfs on the long-running animated Saturday morning TV series, rather than as a folk singer who embraced spontaneity. He appeared in more than 100 films and made-for-TV movies and in dozens of TV shows.

The 5-foot-2 actor had memorable guest roles on three CBS shows. He was the manic salesman Del on ''WKRP in Cincinnati," the insane Boots Miller on ''M*A*S*H," and Mary's height-impaired date on ''The Mary Tyler Moore Show."

''Short jokes are my life," Mr. Camp told the Washington Post in 1997. ''It's like shooting fish in a barrel."

His last television role was as a carpenter on ABC's ''Desperate Housewives."

Mr. Camp was born in London. After World War II, he moved to Canada and then to Long Beach with his mother and sister, and the siblings performed in USO shows. In 1946, he made his first move, ''Bedlam" with Boris Karloff.

On Broadway, he appeared in several productions, including the original ''On a Clear Day You Can See Forever" in the 1960s and ''Paul Sills' Story Theater" in the early 1970s. He also toured Europe and Canada in various productions.

More recently, he was Sir Andrew Aguecheek in a 2004 staging of Shakespeare's ''Twelfth Night" at A Noise Within in Glendale. The Times called Mr. Camp ''a master of the discreet double take . . . outrageously silly but never cheap."

Earlier this year, he finished his final film, ''Hard Four," and completed a CD, ''Sweet Joy," about the fragility of life and his love for Rasjadah, his wife of 40 years who died in 2002.

The CD will be released in November.