Veteran character actor Harris Yulin, whose leathery voice and understated menace enlivened everything from Scarface to Ozark, died of cardiac arrest in New York City on 10 June, his family and longtime manager Sue Leibman announced. He was 88.
Over a six-decade career Yulin amassed more than 100 screen credits. Filmgoers remember him as bent Miami detective Mel Bernstein in Brian De Palma’s 1983 gangster classic, as Judge Stephen Wexler in Ghostbusters II, and as the hawkish national-security adviser in Clear and Present Danger.
Television offered equal range: an Emmy-nominated guest turn on Frasier (1996), a chilling Cardassian impersonator on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and, most recently, Buddy Dieker, the irascible basement tenant on Netflix’s Ozark. A devoted stage actor, he debuted off-Broadway in 1963, later appearing on Broadway in Hedda Gabler, The Price and The Diary of Anne Frank, and won a Lucille Lortel Award for directing The Trip to Bountiful.
Yulin was still working. He had been cast opposite Kevin Kline and Laura Linney in MGM+’s forthcoming comedy American Classic and had completed table reads shortly before his death. Director Michael Hoffman, who helms the series, called him “very simply one of the greatest artists I have ever encountered… His marriage of immense technique with an always fresh sense of discovery gave his work an immediacy and vitality I’ve experienced nowhere else.”
Industry tributes poured in on Wednesday, but not all reactions were reverential. In a widely shared Reddit discussion, some film fans questioned headlines that labelled the passing of an octogenarian “tragic,” with one commenter noting that “an 88-year-old dying of a heart attack is not exactly the headline I’d choose to use ‘tragic’ in.” Others celebrated Yulin’s versatility, singling out his tour-de-force performance in the Star Trek episode “Duet” as proof of his range.
Born in Los Angeles on 5 November 1937, Yulin once dated Faye Dunaway and was married to actor Gwen Welles until her death in 1993. He is survived by his second wife, actor Kristen Lowman, along with extended family and a circle of godchildren who, colleagues say, were frequent fixtures backstage.
