John Cunningham, a character actor who specialized in playing blue bloods and authority figures and who on Broadway originated roles in “Company,” “The Sisters Rosensweig” and “Six Degrees of Separation,” died on Jan. 6 at his home in Rye, N.Y. He was 93.
His son-in-law, Kevin Barrett, confirmed the death.
If Mr. Cunningham’s name was unfamiliar, his handsome face and silky voice were recognizable from a variety of stage roles over six decades. A 1986 profile of him in The New York Times described him as an ever-reliable “working actor’s actor” whose “visibility and versatility” defied the economic insecurities inherent in his profession.
By then, he had become a Broadway regular. Working under the director Harold Prince, he appeared in the late 1960s in two Kander and Ebb musicals: “Cabaret,” as an American writer entranced by the showgirl Sally Bowles in Weimar-era Berlin, and “Zorba,” as a young intellectual who inherits a mine in Greece and befriends the life-affirming title character.
Again under Mr. Prince, Mr. Cunningham played Peter, a soon-to-be divorced husband, in Stephen Sondheim’s Tony Award-winning musical “Company” (1970).
Mr. Cunningham also played classical roles around the country. In a 1965 production of “Romeo and Juliet” at the American Shakespeare Festival Theater in Stratford, Conn., his Mercutio had “a lightness and sparkle worthy of this entrancing Shakespearean expression of winged brilliance,” the critic Howard Taubman wrote in The Times.
Mr. Cunningham said he loved the nightly ritual of stage acting.
“In theater, you get to do it again, and again, and again,” he told Playbill in 1997, when he was cast as the dignified ship captain E.J. Smith in the Tony-winning Broadway musical “Titanic.” “So my ritual is to take time with myself, review what has happened, prepare myself so that inspiration can happen to me in the moment onstage. Be prepared to be alive.”
Reflecting on playing Capt. Smith, he added, “I sometimes feel I’m a character actor trapped inside this WASP look, but one cannot fight that. Inevitably, I’m cast to type.”
In the original 1990 Broadway production of John Guare’s “Six Degrees of Separation,” Mr. Cunningham played Flan Kittredge, a wealthy art dealer whose life, along with that of his wife, Ouisa (played by Stockard Channing), is upended by a charismatic young con man who claims to be Sidney Poitier’s son.
Mr. Guare recalled that Jerry Zaks, the director, insisted that Mr. Cunningham was ideal for Flan. “No one else embodies such authority, intelligence, curiosity and mischief as John,” Mr. Guare wrote in an email.
Three years later, he played a pompous Englishman in Wendy Wasserstein’s comedy “The Sisters Rosensweig.” Jacques le Sourd, a theater reviewer for the Gannett newspaper chain, wrote that Mr. Cunningham’s infused the role of a “twitty Thatcherite” with “dignity and humor.”
John Waldo Cunningham was born on June 22, 1932, in Auburn, N.Y., the younger of two brothers, and grew up in New Paltz, N.Y. His father, Raymond, was a high school principal. His mother, Harriet (Belcher) Cunningham, managed the home.
He began acting as a child, portraying Tiny Tim when he was about 7 in a production of “A Christmas Carol” in New Paltz, and continued to perform in high school and at Dartmouth, where he majored in English and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1954.
He was serving in the Army when he began to envision a theatrical career and performed with the Seventh Army Repertory Company in works like Herman Wouk’s “The Caine Mutiny Court-Martial” and N. Richard Nash’s “The Rainmaker” on military bases in Europe.
In 1959, Mr. Cunningham received a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Yale School of Drama, with a focus on directing, and spent summers acting at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts.
An audition with the director Moss Hart led him to portray the Hungarian professor Zoltan Karpathy (and understudy the role of Henry Higgins) during two years with a touring production of “My Fair Lady.” When the show traveled to Moscow in 1960, Mr. Cunningham spotted the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, and his eventual successor, Leonid Brezhnev, walking in Red Square and filmed them with his Super 8 camera.
“The secret police made him stop,” Mr. Barrett, his son-in-law, said, “but they didn’t take his camera away.”
Mr. Cunningham’s Broadway debut was in the ensemble of “Hot Spot,” a musical flop, in 1963. He began working in television around the same time, particularly in soap operas like “The Doctors,” “Another World” and “Search for Tomorrow,” on which he spent five years before his character was killed off in 1977.
He later had guest-starring roles in prime-time programs like “Miami Vice,” “Law & Order” and “Blue Bloods.” Among his movie roles, he played Matt Damon and Adam Storke’s father in “Mystic Pizza” (1988) and Ethan Hawke’s father in “Dead Poets Society” (1989). He appeared in the 1993 film version of “Six Degrees of Separation” but he played a different role than the one he originated onstage, for which Donald Sutherland was cast.
In two films released in 1997, Mr. Cunningham was heard but not seen: as the news announcer in “Starship Troopers,” and, in “In & Out,” as the amusingly stern, taunting guide on a self-help audio tape that Kevin Kline’s closeted gay teacher plays to learn how to act more macho.
The advice Mr. Cunningham provides includes how to properly adjust one’s private parts and the admonition never to dance. “Be a man!” he says. “Kick someone! Bite someone’s ear!”
Mr. Cunningham is survived by his wife, Carolyn (Cotton) Cunningham, whom he married in 1956; a son, Christopher; two daughters, Catherine Cunningham and Laura Cunningham-Barrett; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
In 2012, Mr. Cunningham replaced Richard Easton in an Off Broadway revival of Tina Howe’s family drama “Painting Churches” a few days before rehearsals started.
Mr. Cunningham, largely retired from the stage by then, and Kathleen Chalfant played aging parents packing for a move with help from their daughter. Mr. Cunningham’s character, a poet, is frail and has memory problems.
“The play is about Tina’s parents, and we needed someone who reminded her of her father, with the same degree of WASP seriousness but with a devilish proclivity for mischief,” Carl Forsman, who directed the production, said in an interview. “And I remember so well, when we were rehearsing a moment in the second act, Tina leaned over to me and said, ‘He reminds me of daddy.’”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
The post John Cunningham, Character Actor and Broadway Stalwart, Dies at 93 appeared first on New York Times.
