'Wizard of Oz' Actor Meinhardt Raabe

[TV_Paige]

'The Wizard of Oz' Actor Meinhardt Raabe

Actor Meinhardt Raabe in 2009 (left photo) and as the Munchkin Coroner (right photo)

in a scene with Actress Judy Garland playing Dorothy in the film, 'The Wizard of Oz'

ORANGE PARK, Florida -- Meinhardt Raabe, who played the Munchkin Coroner in "The Wizard of Oz" and proclaimed that the Wicked Witch of the East was "really most sincerely dead," died Friday, April 9 at a hospital in Orange Park, Florida, after an apparent heart attack, said his caregiver, Cindy Bosnyak. He was 94.

Raabe -- [pronounced RAH'-bee] -- was one of 124 Munchkins in the 1939 classic film and one of only nine who had speaking parts. He portrayed the Munchkin official who solemnly pronounces the witch dead after Dorothy's farmhouse lands on her: "As coroner I must aver, I thoroughly examined her, and she's not only merely dead, she's really most sincerely dead."

In 2007, Raabe was one of seven surviving Munchkins who attended the unveiling of the Munchkins