Jonathan Haze, Actor Who Played Seymour in Original “Little Shop of Horrors”, Dies at 95

Jonathan Haze made over a dozen movies with the independent film producer Roger Corman, who died at 98 in May

Jonathan Haze, an actor best known for his starring role in the 1960 movie The Little Shop of Horrors, has died. He was 95.

On Monday, Nov. 4, Deadline reported that Haze's daughter Rebecca said he died peacefully on Saturday, Nov. 2 at his home in Los Angeles. She did not provide a cause of death.

Haze was a frequent collaborator of Little Shop of Horrors director Roger Corman, a prolific independent filmmaker who died at 98 earlier this year in May.

Deadline noted that Corman discovered Haze while Haze worked in a gas station, and he soon after cast him in 1954's Monster from the Ocean Floor and The Fast and the Furious, his first two movie roles.

Haze went on to an acting career that spanned more than five decades, with 41 roles to his credit between 1954 and 2010. Haze had already appeared in more than half the movies he made in his career when he starred in Little Shop of Horrors, which was later adapted into a musical by composer Alan Menken and into a movie musical by Frank Oz.

In that 1986 film, Rick Moranis portrayed the story's lead role as Seymour, a florist who unwittingly begins growing a monstrous plant known as Audrey II.

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Haze appeared in only nine onscreen roles after Little Shop of Horrors, including a 1998 appearance in a voice role on the Nickelodeon series The Angry Beavers. He did not act onscreen between 1999 and 2010, when he made his final film appearance in the movie Nobody Smiling. In total, Haze and Corman made nearly 20 movies together.

"It seems like everything just came together right, you know," Haze said of Little Shop of Horrors back at a fan convention in 2001, per a video shared on YouTube that shows him and costar Jackie Joseph discussing memories of making the movie.

"Sometimes it just all works for you; somedays you get home runs and some days you strike out, well that was a home run situation," he added. "We were shooting it on the stage that Charlie Chaplin used to make his films on, which maybe there was some kind of spiritual ghost or something that affected us all, but it is magical. And not only is it magical, you can't really put your finger on what makes it wonderful."

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As Deadline reported, Haze is survived by two daughters, three grandchildren and one great-grandson.