Harris Yulin, the ever-present Emmy-nominated actor who appeared in such films as Scarface, Clear and Present Danger and Training Day and on television in Frasier, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Ozark, has died. He was 87.
Yulin died Tuesday of cardiac arrest in New York City, his family and manager, Sue Leibman, announced.
Although he never found a starring role that made him a household name, Yulin was a familiar face who worked constantly during a career that spanned more than 50 years. “I’m not that high-profile,” he admitted in a 2010 interview with The Irish Times. “I just do the next thing that comes along.”
On Broadway, the character actor performed in 1980’s Watch on the Rhine, 1992’s The Visit, 1997’s The Diary of Anne Frank, 1999’s The Price and 2001’s Hedda Gabler.
He also helmed off-Broadway productions of Baba Goya in 1989, This Lime Tree Bower in 1999 and The Trip to Bountiful in 2005 as well as a 1970 production of Candida at Canada’s Shaw Festival and a 1995 staging of Don Juan in Hell for London’s Riverside Studios.
Yulin stood out as the corrupt Miami detective who tries to extort money from Al Pacino’s Tony Montana in Scarface (1983), as the manipulative national security adviser who matches wits with Harrison Ford’s Jack Ryan in Clear and Present Danger (1994) and as the corrupt cop Rosselli in Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day (2001).
On the lighter side, he played the judge whose courtroom is decimated by spirits in Ghostbusters II (1989) and the goofy scientist who creates four versions of Michael Keaton’s Doug Kinney in Multiplicity (1996).
Yulin more recently appeared on two Netflix series as Orson, the father of David Cross’ character, on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and as Buddy Dieker, an eccentric old man with a criminal past, on Ozark.
Viewers might also recognize Yulin as Quentin Travers, head of the Watchers’ Council, on Buffy the Vampire Slayer or as NSA director Roger Stanton on 24.
He received his guest-star Emmy nomination in 1996 for playing a wiseguy with a girlfriend who presses Dr. Crane (Kelsey Grammer) for help on Frasier.
Harris Yulin was born in Los Angeles on Nov. 5, 1937. He was abandoned as an infant and left on the steps of an orphanage.
Yulin was adopted when he was 4 months old and raised in a Jewish household by a Russian family who gave him his last name. He said the “life-changing” inspiration to become an actor came during his bar mitzvah.
“I enjoyed it so much,” Yulin said. “Most of my friends had said that they didn’t enjoy it, that it was a horrible thing to have to be up there before all those people, saying whatever they were saying, and I found the opposite to be so.”
Yulin attended UCLA to study acting before heading to New York to hopefully establish a career in the theater. He made it to the stage in 1963 opposite James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons in the James Saunders play Next Time I’ll Sing to You, then appeared in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1964, Richard III in 1966 and King John in 1967.
In 1970, Yulin debuted on the big screen opposite Stacy Keach in the offbeat comedy/drama End of the Road. The following year, he earned accolades for playing Wyatt Earp in the revisionist Western Doc alongside Keach as Doc Holliday.
“Its greatest strength is in the acting,” Roger Ebert wrote in his 1971 review of the film. “Stacy Keach and Harris Yulin … have such a quiet way of projecting the willingness to do violence that you realize, after a while, that most Western actors are overactors.”
“There’s a kind of private club of actors who have conspired to make Westerns: John Wayne, of course, and Lancaster, Eastwood, Douglas, Widmark, Mitchum and the rest. But they’ve made so many, many Westerns with each other, in different combinations, that they’ve established a kind of acting tone that you expect in ALL Westerns. Keach and Yulin are outside the club, are new to the Western and create Doc Holliday and Wyatt Earp out of new cloth.”
Yulin later portrayed J. Edgar Hoover in the 1974 CBS telefilm The F.B.I. Story: The FBI Versus Alvin Karpis, Public Enemy Number One and Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1985 CBS miniseries Robert Kennedy and His Times.
And on the Steve Allen PBS series Meeting of Minds, he was Leonardo da Vinci in one 1979 episode and Shakespeare in another.
Yulin played a news anchor on a struggling TV station on the 1990-91 CBS drama WIOU and through the years appeared on many other shows, including Kojak, Ironside, Cagney & Lacey, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, La Femme Nikita, The X-Files, Entourage, The Blacklist, Veep, Murphy Brown and Billions.
Among Yulin’s notable films were Night Moves (1975), St. Ives (1976), Another Woman (1988), Narrow Margin (1990), Murder at 1600 (1997), Bean (1997), Cradle Will Rock (1999), Chelsea Walls (2001), Rush Hour 2 (2001) and Norman (2016).
Harris was prepping to start production this week with a role in the Michael Hoffman-directed MGM+ series American Classic, starring Kevin Kline and Laura Linney. Said Hoffman, “Harris Yulin was very simply one of the greatest artists I have ever encountered.”
Yulin was married to actress Gwen Welles (Nashville) from 1975 until her death in 1993 at age 42 from cancer. He married actress Kristen Lowman (Picket Fences) in September 2005, and she survives him, as does son-in-law Ted, nephew Martin and godchildren Marco and Lara. His also was predeceased by his daughter, actress Claire Lucido.