, died last Tuesday at the age of 87.
Harris Yulin, a chameleonic character actor who for more than six decades portrayed guys whom critics described as unsympathetic, soulful, menacing, corrupt and glowering, both onstage and onscreen, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 87. His wife, Kristen Lowman, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was cardiac arrest.
Inspired to pursue an acting career when he first took center stage at his bar mitzvah, Mr. Yulin never became a marquee name. But to many audiences he was instantly recognizable, even as a man of a hundred faces.
He played at least as many parts, including J. Edgar Hoover, Hamlet and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Other roles ranged from crooked cops and politicians to a lecherous television anchorman.
“I’m not always the bad guy,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “It just seems to be what I’m known for.”
He wasn’t just any bad guy. One reviewer characterized him as “an eloquent growler.” Another wrote that “his whiskeyed voice sounds just like that of John Huston.”
Honors followed. Mr. Yulin was nominated in 1996 for a Primetime Emmy Award for playing a crime boss on the comedy series “Frasier.” For his work in theater, he won the Lucille Lortel Award from the League of Off-Broadway Theaters and Producers for his direction of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful” in 2006. In the late 1990s he won Drama Desk nominations for acting on Broadway in “The Diary of Anne Frank” and Arthur Miller’s “The Price.”
Early in his career, in 1963, he was cast in “Next Time I’ll Sing to You,” starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons, Off Broadway at the Phoenix Theater. The play bombed, he recalled to The Times in 2000.
Mr. Yulin made his Broadway debut in 1980 in a revival of Lillian Hellman’s “Watch on the Rhine.” He also appeared in Broadway productions of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s “The Visit” (1992) and Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” (2001). And his performance in 2010 as Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” at the Gate Theater in Dublin, got rave reviews.
Mr. Yulin’s first major film was the offbeat comedy “End of the Road” (1970), as a college teacher opposite Stacy Keach. He played Wyatt Earp in “Doc” (1971); a corrupt Miami police detective in “Scarface” (1983), alongside Al Pacino; an irate judge in “Ghostbusters II” (1989); and a White House national security adviser in “Clear and Present Danger” (1994), with Harrison Ford.
Reviewing “Doc” in 1971, Roger Ebert wrote that Mr. Yulin and Mr. Keach “have such a quiet way of projecting the willingness to do violence that you realize, after a while, that most western actors are overactors.”
On television, beginning in the 1960s, Mr. Yulin appeared on “Ironside,” “Kojak,” “Little House on the Prairie” and other shows. In the following decades he took on roles in the 1985 mini-series “Robert Kennedy and His Times”(playing Senator McCarthy), “Murphy Brown” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” More recently he was seen on “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and “Ozark.”
“Mr. Yulin’s characters are quintessentially weary of this world, worn out by its ugliness and many disappointments,” Tara Ariano and Adam Sternbergh wrote in the book “Hey! It’s That Guy!” (2005), a who’s who of character actors. “No one knows better than those characters all the ways in which humanity and its various institutions can be corrupted and destroyed — primarily because Yulin’s characters have been tasked with destroying them.”
Mr. Yulin was born Harris Bart Goldberg on Nov. 5, 1937, in Los Angeles. Abandoned as an infant on the steps of an orphanage, he was adopted when he was 4 months old by Dr. Isaac Goldberg, a dentist, and his wife, Sylvia. (Yulin was a surname in Dr. Goldberg’s family in Russia; Mr. Yulin adopted it for professional reasons.)
He attended the University of Southern California without graduating and served in the U.S. Army for a year. He then embarked on a short-lived career as an artist in Italy. “I tried to be a painter for a while in Florence, and I was extremely bad at it,” he told The Times in 2000.
In 1962, after trifling with architecture as well, he moved to Tel Aviv, where friends urged him to try directing and acting. He did. At some point, through one of his father’s patients, he was introduced to the actor and drama coach Jeff Corey.
Mr. Yulin married the actress Gwen Welles in 1975; she died in 1993. In 2005, he married Ms. Lowman. His stepdaughter, the actress Claire Lucido, died in 2021 at 30. His wife is his only immediate survivor.
In addition to acting and directing, Mr. Yulin taught at the Juilliard School and the Graduate School of the Arts at Columbia University.
He acknowledged his stature in the acting world in an interview with The Irish Times in 2010. “I’m not that high-profile,” he said. “I just do the next thing that comes along.”
