Actor made his name in M*A*S*H before reinventing himself as a shapeshifter

In the early 1970s Rene Auberjonois was one of Robert Altman’s go-to actors, starring in four of his movies, starting with playing Father John Mulcahy in M*A*S*H.

‘‘He asked me how I would play this priest. Well, I had a friend who was a priest and I thought of him – a shy, bubbling, and sweetnatured man,’’ he recalled. ‘‘Altman thought that would work, very different from the redhaired robust character in the original screenplay.’’

Auberjonois not only shaped his character, but also contributed one of the film’s most famous lines to the script when asked how someone as unsuitable as

Hawkeye Pierce, played by Donald

Sutherland, could have been given a position of responsibility in the US army.

‘‘He was drafted,’’ Auberjonois’ priest responded.

‘‘I actually made that up when we were rehearsing the scene,’’ he said. ‘‘And it became a kind of an iconic line for the whole film.’’

The film’s anti-war satire fitted Auberjonois’ politics. As a married man he was exempt from the draft, but said if he had been called up he would have refused to go to war and moved across the border to Canada.

He was invited to reprise the role two years later in the television version, but was reluctant to commit to the demands of a longterm series and turned the offer down. He went on to appear in three more Altman movies – Brewster McCloud (1970), in which he played an ornithologist who gradually turns into a bird, McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971) with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie, and Images (1972), in which he played opposite Susannah York.

Rene Murat Auberjonois was born in New York in 1940, the son of Swiss-born Fernand Auberjonois and Princess Laure Louise Napoleone Eugenie Caroline Murat, a greatgreat-granddaughter of the Emperor Napoleon’s youngest sister, Caroline, who served as the Queen of Naples.

His father was a newspaperman and Pulitzer prize-nominated writer who landed on the Normandy beaches in 1944 and who, after the war, moved his family to Paris, where he worked as Time Life’s correspondent. By 1948 they were back in America, living in an artists’ colony in upstate New York.

Auberjonois described his eight years there as ‘‘an idyllic, Norman Rockwell-like life’’ and developed his performing skills, earning $5 an hour as a clown at children’s birthday parties.

His first job in the theatre came at 16, when director John Houseman put him on stage in a Shakespeare festival. By then his father had fallen foul of the McCarthyite witch-hunt, and, although not a communist, felt so betrayed by a country he had served during the war that in 1956 he moved the family to England.

At school, Auberjonois’ headmaster was a theatre buff who encouraged him. He later called his time in Britain a ‘‘life-saving experience’’ and decided to become a character actor after seeing Alec Guinness on the West End stage. He returned to America at 18 to study drama at Carnegie Mellon University, but his parents never went back.

In 1961 he met Judith Mahalyi, a fellow drama student, and they married two years later. They had two children, Tessa and Remy, both of whom are actors.

In what he called the ‘‘golden age’’ of Broadway in the 1960s, Auberjonois played the Fool in a long-running production of King Lear and won a Tony award for best actor for his performance alongside Katharine Hepburn in Coco.His Brutus in Julius Caesar was less acclaimed.

By 1980, having two young children to support, the stability of a TV series seemed more appealing, and he accepted the role of Clayton Runnymede Endicott III, the hypochondriac major-domo of a widowed governor’s mansion in Benson. ‘‘For six years I worked a sitcom schedule, which meant that I could make the kids’ breakfast and lunch, drive them to and from school and then rehearse and shoot the show,’’ he said.

Paying his children’s crippling education fees was also the reason he later accepted a role in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. ‘‘It was a choice of selling the house or I get another television series,’’ he joked.

Auberjonois played Odo, the chief of security on the eponymous space station. His character was a ‘‘changeling’’, an alien capable of assuming any form, but who chose the shape of a male adult humanoid. The actor found that the part perfectly reflected his temperament.

‘‘As a changeling, Odo represents the very thing I believe I am, an actor who changes and plays many different kinds of characters,’’ he said. ‘‘I’m a shy person and never expected I would be a movie star. So being given the opportunity to create a character like Odo personifies the kind of work I do as an artist.’’

Although he claimed he could ‘‘hide’’ behind his characters, his disguises did not always work. Even when his face was completely hidden by a latex mask in Star Trek, fellow actors reported that he invested so much of himself in his performance that you could ‘‘see his soul’’.

‘‘Every inch of him was trained to tell stories – his body, face and voice,’’ said Nana Visitor, who played alongside him in Deep Space Nine over seven seasons during the 1990s.

He had watched the original Star Trek in the 1960s as a fan long before he joined the cast, and he credited it with helping to shape his world view. ‘‘It influenced my life since I was a young person in the lessons that it teaches and the precepts that it puts forward of searching for a universe in which people can live in understanding with one another, no matter how alien we may be to each other,’’ he said. ‘‘We have to find a way to live together in peace; that’s the most important thing.’’

His politics were liberal and idealistic, and he was an activist for many causes, including Amnesty International and Medecins Sans Frontieres, for whom he raised funds while attending Star Trek conventions around the globe. ‘‘It’s incredibly encouraging to come half way across the world to find an audience that still cares about your work and has a response to it,’’ he said.

He continued working almost until the end, and late successes included a third longrunning TV series as lawyer Paul Lewiston in Boston Legal. He was always proud when recognised in public for any of the roles he played. ‘‘I’m all of those characters and I love that. But I also run into people and they think I’m their cousin or their dry cleaner. I love that too.’’

‘‘Every inch of him was trained to tell stories – his body, face and voice.’’ Nana Visitor, fellow Star Trek Deep Space Nine cast member