NEW YORK (NYT NEWS SERVICE ).- Orson Bean, the free-spirited television, stage and film comedian who stepped out of his storybook life to found a progressive school, move to Australia, give away his possessions and wander around a turbulent America in the 1970s as a late-blooming hippie, was killed in a traffic accident Friday in Venice, California. He was 91.

His death was confirmed Saturday by the Los Angeles County coroner’s office. Capt. Brian Wendling of the Los Angeles Police Department said Bean was struck by a car while crossing the street.

Early in his career, in the 1950s and ’60s, Bean, a subtle comic who looked like a naive farm boy, was ubiquitous on TV. He popped up on all the networks as an ad-libbing game show panelist (a mainstay on “To Tell the Truth”), a frequent guest of Jack Paar and Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show,” a regular on drama anthology shows and, in 1954, the host of his own CBS variety show, “The Blue Angel.”

He also starred on and off Broadway, made Hollywood films, founded a society of Laurel and Hardy aficionados, amassed a fortune and was blacklisted briefly as a suspected Communist.

In 1964, captivated by a progressive-education theory, he created a small school in Manhattan, the 15th Street School, that made classes and most rules optional, letting children pretty much do as they pleased. For the remainder of the decade Bean devoted himself to the school, paying its bills, covering its deficits and working harder and harder.

He was often seen on five television panel shows a week, squeezed in nightclub acts and a Broadway show, married (for the second time) and added more children to his growing family. But he felt overwhelmed by the trappings of success and by turmoil in a nation caught up in conflicts over the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the assassinations of leaders and a political drift to the right.

“We were having babies and the money was rolling in so fast we had to push it out,” he recalled in an interview with The New York Times years later. “We had a four-story townhouse and a live-in maid. We loved it, but I was starting to freak out. I became convinced that the country was going fascist.”

Believing that America’s generals were planning an imminent coup d’état, Bean abandoned his thriving career and moved his family to Australia in 1970. He became a disciple of Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich and wrote a book about his psychosexual theories, “Me and the Orgone.” (Orgone is a concept, originally proposed by Reich, of a universal life force.)

When the book appeared in 1971, Bean returned to the United States with his wife and four children. For years he led a nomadic life as an aging hippie and self-described househusband, casting off material possessions in a quest for self-realization.

“We were so sure we didn’t want to be possessed by things and so intent on not having them that we gave away almost everything we owned,” he wrote in a 1977 op-ed in The Times. “We entered what I now call our late hippie stage. We tossed the kids into the van, bummed around the country, sponging on our friends and putting the kids in school wherever we happened to light.”

In his dropout years, as he recalled in a memoir, he experimented with psychedelic drugs, communal sex and other excursions into self-discovery. His peripatetic family collected driftwood and books, and at night read aloud to one another. When he had to, Bean scratched out a living by making commercials and doing voice-overs for animated films.

By 1980, he was bored with inactivity. Moving back into the public spotlight, he reappeared in TV movies, soap operas, game shows and episodic series. Over the next three decades, he took recurring roles in “Murder, She Wrote,” “Normal, Ohio” and “Desperate Housewives.” He also appeared in many movies, notably “Being John Malkovich” (1999), in which he played the eccentric owner of a mysterious company.

Although he eventually performed in some 50 TV series and 30 films, he may be best remembered for his appearances on early panel shows, which, in contrast to the greed, noise and kitsch of many modern game shows, were low key, relatively witty and sophisticated.

“We were much more intelligent then,” Kitty Carlisle Hart, a frequent panelist with Bean, told The Times in 1999. “It sounds like an awful thing to say, but it’s true.”

Bean was born Dallas Frederick Burrows on July 22, 1928, in Burlington, Vermont, to George and Marian (Pollard) Burrows. His father, a founder of the American Civil Liberties Union, was a Harvard campus police officer. His mother, a cousin of President Calvin Coolidge, killed herself when Bean was a teenager.

After graduating from Cambridge Rindge and Latin School in 1946, Bean was drafted into the postwar Army and served with occupation forces in Japan. He was an accomplished magician, and after being discharged he changed his name to Orson Bean and worked Boston nightclubs with tricks and gags that evolved into comedy routines.

He was blacklisted for attending two Communist Party meetings, but that blew over and hardly slowed his career. Nightclub work in Baltimore and Philadelphia finally landed him in New York at the Blue Angel and the Village Vanguard, joining a comedic pantheon that included Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl and, a little later, Woody Allen.

Fame followed him onto the Ed Sullivan, Steve Allen and Merv Griffin shows. He was on “The Tonight Show” so often that he became a vacation substitute for Jack Paar and Johnny Carson. He appeared on “Playhouse 90,” “Studio One” and other television drama series, and starred on Broadway with Jayne Mansfield in the 1955 comedy “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” and with Melina Mercouri in the 1967 musical “Illya Darling,” based on the movie “Never on Sunday.”

Bean married actress Jacqueline de Sibour in 1956. They had a daughter, Michele, and were divorced in 1962. He and his second wife, Carolyn Maxwell, were married in 1965, had three children, Max, Susannah and Ezekiel, and were divorced in 1981. He married actress Alley Mills in 1993 and lived for many years in Venice, California. His son-in-law was Andrew Breitbart, the conservative blogger who died in 2011.

Survivors include his wife and his four children.

Taken with the unorthodox ideas of A.S. Neill’s Summerhill School in England, Bean, who never got beyond high school, bought a building in Chelsea in 1964, hired four teachers and opened the 15th Street School with 40 pupils in the nursery, kindergarten and lower elementary grades. It taught self-reliance by making lessons and most rules optional, hoping to instill responsibility.

In 1964, Bean also helped found the Sons of the Desert, an international fraternal organization devoted to the films and lives of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. Named for the duo’s 1933 movie, it has a Latin motto: “Duae tabulae rasae in quibus nihil scriptum est” (“Two blank slates on which nothing has been written”).

Bean wrote a memoir, “Too Much Is Not Enough” (1988), and a humorous book, “25 Ways to Cook a Mouse for a Gourmet Cat” (1994), which included recipes for Corned Mouse and Cabbage, Burritos con Raton, Mouse Bourguignon and Souris Printemps.

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