ALL SCI-FI

[bulldogtrekker]

StarTrek.com is saddened to report the passing of actor David Ogden Stiers, who succumbed to bladder cancer on Saturday at the age of 75. According to his agent, he died peacefully at home in Oregon. The Emmy-nominated Stiers was best known for his role as Major Winchester on M*A*S*H, provided voices for such films as Beauty and the Beast and Lilo & Stitch, co-starred on the TV iteration of The Dead Zone, and made his mark in the Star Trek universe with his role as Dr. Timicin in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “Half a Life.”...

For Full Story:
http://www.startrek.com/article/remembering-david-ogden-stiers-1942-2018

[Bud Brewster]

________________________________

Just today (March 4th, 2018), I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “Half a Life” while chatting on Facebook with Bulldogtrekker, and I commented on how dynamic his performance was, as well as how much I enjoyed him in the movie Doc Hollywood.

David will be missed by all of us.
_________________
____________
Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)

[Pow]

David was terrific as the affluent, snooty surgeon Charles Emerson Winchester III on one of the finest TV shows ever: M*A*S*H.

But he was always wonderful in any role he ever performed.

[Brent Gair]

For those of us who watched M*A*S*H when it was in it's original run, it's hard to believe that most of the cast is now in their 80s. David Odgen Stiers was actually one of the youngsters at 75...even Gary Burghoff is 74.

If the commanding officers of the 4077 (Blake and Potter) were still alive, they would be 90 and 102 respectively! Allan Arbus who played psychiatrist Dr, Sidney Freedman would be 100 years old...he died when he was 95.

I'm getting old .

[Krel]

I loved him as the oh-so-patient Father in "Better Off Dead".

David.

[Custer]

If I can sneak this portion of his obituary out from behind the paywall at The Times:

On December 20, 1977, a writer for the hit TV show M*A*S*H told David Ogden Stiers: “In one hour your life will change forever.” That evening Stiers was introduced as a new character: the snooty Boston surgeon Major Charles Emerson Winchester III.

Although naturally imposing — he was 6ft 3in and had striking blue eyes — the actor assumed the writer’s remark to be an exaggeration. Three days later Stiers approached him saying, “My God. You’re right. I can’t go anywhere without being recognised.”

Twice nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of the condescending Winchester, Stiers found that viewers relished the Harvard-qualified doctor’s pithy one-liners as his colleagues play pranks. Winchester once described the South Korean medical army camp as “an inflamed boil in the buttocks of the world”. And when accused of spying, he declared, “There are no informers in my family. Winchesters do not spy . . . we do on occasion hire them.”

Hints of a patrician background seeped out amid the rough conditions of army medical camps. The character dispatched an orderly to “fetch my opera glasses” and handed a tin of wild boar goulash to Captain Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda). and moaned that he was unhappy enough to shoot himself in the foot — “but you know how much I love the deb’s cotillion”. Winchester was the perfect foil to the wise-cracking Hawkeye and Mike Farrell’s BJ Hunnicutt.

Perhaps the best-loved scene in the series, which ran for 11 years from 1972, featured Winchester treating a marine whose mouth is stuffed with a snooker ball. Observing it to be painted with the number six, Winchester asked, “Is that your age?” before offering to pull the marine’s teeth out to release the ball: “Come on, sport! Are you a marine or a mouse?” He tantalises his victim with the use of muscle relaxant. As well as wit, Stiers displayed a certain vulnerability. The show’s final episode saw Winchester on the verge of tears as he watched the prisoners he had been conducting in a makeshift orchestra depart in the back of a truck. Seeing Winchester, they raised their instruments to play a snatch of a Mozart quintet. That moment had personal resonance for Stiers, for in his spare time he was an accomplished conductor. He led some 70 orchestras, including the Toronto Philharmonic, in more than 100 appearances. “Music,” he once declared, “is the great open-book test . . . you’re recreating something that only lives on the page until you offer your energy and breath and spirit.”

David Ogden Stiers was born in Peoria, Illinois to Margaret Elizabeth (née Ogden) and Kenneth Truman Stiers. On moving to Eugene, Oregon, he became a school contemporary of the future film critic Roger Ebert who once compared Stiers to the character the Baron de Charlus in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, as “the slightly elevated, bemused observer”. He claimed that the actor had always spoken like Winchester: “Tall, confident and twinkling, he would ask, ‘And what have we here?’ ”

After attending the University of Oregon Spiers moved to San Francisco to perform with the California Shakespeare Theater Company. From 1968 to 1972 he trained as a baritone at the Juilliard School in Manhattan.

When he joined the cast of M*A*S*H, he filled the gap left by the departure of Larry Linville, who played Frank Burns. In his audition Stiers played Winchester with an impenetrable Boston accent. When the producers complained they could not understand every word, the actor decided to reel in the accent. Winchester was introduced in an episode focused largely on a poker game: his fellow doctors planned to clean him out in revenge for his superior airs with Hunnicutt, to whom he has loaned $200 for a house deposit. The series ended in 1983, but even 20 years on passers-by would regularly cry out: “Winchester!” if they spotted the actor in the street. “I cringe,” he said in an interview in 2002. “That’s why I walk so fast and kind of disguise myself. I just can’t have the same conversation 85 times a day.”

Easily bored, and a natural comic, Stiers worked on several television series, including Perry Mason and Star Trek: the Next Generation. He was cast in five Woody Allen films, including Mighty Aphrodite (1995).

[Pow]

Also sadly deceased is Edward Winter who played the fanatical Captain Flag in some episodes.