As an award-winning actor and director, he appeared in scores of stage plays, movies and TV shows over six decades, most often as unsavory characters.
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 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 TV 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 prime time Emmy Award for playing a crime boss in the TV comedy series “Frasier.” For his work in theater, he won the Lucille Lortel Award from the League of Off Broadway Theaters 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.”
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Source: Theater - nytimes.com
