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 Wednesday 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.”
Early in his career, in 1963, he was cast in “Next Time I’ll Sing for You,” starring James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons at the Off Broadway Phoenix Theater. The play bombed, he recalled to The Times in 2000.
Mr. Yulin made his Broadway debut in 1980 starring 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 Dublin’s Gate Theater, got rave reviews.
Mr. Yulin’s first major film was in the offbeat comedy “End of the Road” (1970), as a fellow 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 in shows like “Ironside,” “Kojak” and “Little House on the Prairie.” 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 in “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 Jeff Corey, the actor and drama coach.
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 38. 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.”
By most accounts, he did it well.
In the lead role in the American premiere of Athol Fugard’s “A Lesson From Aloes” in 1980, at the Yale Repertory Theater, playing an Afrikaner and comrade of a Black revolutionary (James Earl Jones), Mr. Yulin delivered “a beautifully modulated, contemplative performance,” Mel Gussow wrote in The Times.
And in reviewing “The Price” in 1999, The Times’s Ben Brantley said that Mr. Yulin “seems to have been destined to play” Walter Franz, the son of a businessman who went bankrupt after the 1929 Stock Market crashed.
“The actor’s natural self-important stateliness works beautifully,” he wrote, “and you’re always aware of the friction between the smooth surface and the roughness of angry confusion beneath.”
Mr. Yulin never stopped working. At his death he was preparing for a role in the television series “American Classic,” with Kevin Kline and Laura Linney. Its director, Michael Hoffman, said of him in a statement after his death, “His marriage of immense technique with an always fresh sense of discovery gave his work an immediacy and vitality and purity I’ve experienced nowhere else.”
Sam Roberts is an obituaries reporter for The Times, writing mini-biographies about the lives of remarkable people.
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