An actor until the end, Mr. Podewell was taken to Evanston Hospital after his stroke. The neurologists who were trying to gauge his coherence asked him to name the president of the United States and to tell them how many fingers they were holding up. At the urging of his daughter Polly, he instead regaled them with the Player's Speech, a soliloquy from Shakespeare's Hamlet, which he last had performed in the 1930s.
