A life of M*A*S*H and music
David Ogden Stiers, actor: b Peoria, Illinois, October 31, 1942; d Newport, Oregon, March 3, 2018, aged 75.
On December 20, 1977, a writer for the hit television 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 openbook 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 (nee 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 Theatre 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, who he had lent $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 mini-series, including Perry Mason and Star Trek: the Next Generation. He was cast in five Woody Allen films, including Mighty Aphrodite (1995).
By then he had built a solid career as a voice actor and worked frequently with Disney on animated films, including Pocahontas (1995). For his role as Jumba Jookiba, a four-eyed alien in Lilo and Stitch (2002), he deployed a Russian accent. He was best known as the voice of Cogsworth in Beauty and the Beast (1991) and imagined a grandfather clock with a deep, booming voice.
To reflect the character’s small stature, he tightened his vocal cords. He was said to have adlibbed the final line of Cogsworth’s counsel to the Beast on gifts for his prisoner, Belle: ‘‘Well, there’s the usual things: flowers, chocolates, promises you don’t intend to keep.’’
In 2009, aged 66, Stiers revealed he was gay, blaming his earlier reticence on his work for Disney. ‘‘Many have this idealistic belief that studios such as Walt Disney are gay-friendly. For the most part they are, but that doesn’t mean that business does not come first,’’ he explained. He admitted to being overcautious: ‘‘Many of my fears in modern times were selfinvented.’’
Something of a hermit, he retired to a house overlooking tranquil waters in Oregon. Actors, he said, were lucky to make a living ‘‘by playing, just playing’’.
– The Times