A pleasant young comic leading man with a ready smile and a kind of awkward, goofy persona, Charlie Schlatter found a niche in the mid-1990s as second banana to and occasional comic relief for Dick Van Dyke on the CBS series "Diagnosis Murder", in which he filled a spot vacated by Scott Baio. The actor began landing feature film roles right out of Ithaca College, playing Michael J. Fox's younger brother in "Bright Lights, Big City" (1988) and the grandson whose body is taken over by George Burns in "18 Again!" (1988). He had a third film released in 1988, "Heartbreak Hotel", in which he was a