John Karlen
Actor best known as Harvey in the US cop show Cagney & Lacey
JOHN KARLEN, the American actor, who has died aged 86, was best known to British viewers as Harvey Lacey, the warmhearted husband of Tyne Daly’s New York cop in the hit 1980s television drama Cagney & Lacey.
Its creator, Barney Rosenzweig, came up with the idea after discovering that there had never been an action series with two female leads; his original title for it was “Newman & Redford”. Daly was cast as Mary Beth Lacey, a voluble but sympathetic detective who juggles her job with caring for her family. Her partner, the single and more ambitious Christine Cagney, was played by Sharon Gless (who went on to marry Rosenzweig).
While the duo cleaned up the streets of Manhattan, hampered as much by chauvinism as by criminality, it fell to Karlen to depict the consequences of the changing world of employment. His moustachioed character was originally a construction worker on high-rise buildings, but an ear infection led him to lose his balance – and his job.
Although he later made a success of his own contractor’s business, for much of the run between 1982 and 1988 “Harv” was something of a househusband, taking care of the couple’s three children. In a reversal of roles notable for the times, he was the dependable presence, the one to whom the breadwinner could tell her troubles.
The nuanced depiction of the Laceys’ strong marriage added an extra dimension to a drama at least as much concerned with humanity as it was with crime. For a record six consecutive years, one or other of the two leads won the Emmy award for Best Actress in a Drama, while Karlen was nominated in the Supporting Actor category in 1985, 1986 and 1987.
To his delight, he won in the second of those years, attributing his triumph to his sister having gone to church to pray for him. “I need this more than a working man needs a loaf of bread,” he said at the time.
Of Polish descent, and one of four children, he was born John Adam Karlewicz in Brooklyn on May 28 1933. His father worked in the shipyards.
After winning a scholarship to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan, Karlen landed some early roles on television before making his stage debut in 1959 in the first production of Tennessee Williams’s Sweet Bird of Youth. Directed by Elia Kazan, this starred Paul Newman and Geraldine Page, with Karlen taking over his part from Rip Torn.
He got his break in 1967 in the television series Dark Shadows, a curious mix of soap opera and Gothic horror. Karlen was Willie Loomis, a conman who after breaking into a mausoleum unwittingly releases the vampire Barnabas Collins from the coffin in which he has been trapped for two centuries. Drained of his blood, Loomis becomes the servant of Collins (Jonathan Frid).
The show, in which Karlen replaced another actor after a handful of episodes, had begun as a conventional afternoon soap before lurching into the supernatural when its creators decided they had nothing to lose given poor ratings. Karlen appeared in some 180 episodes, and the show ran until 1971, achieving cult status with younger viewers. Among these was Tim Burton, who directed a film version in 2012 with Johnny Depp.
Karlen also appeared in two film spin-offs, House of Dark Shadows and Night of Dark Shadows. This led to his featuring in one of the erotic vampire films of the era, the French-made Daughters of Darkness (1971), before he established himself as a guest star in television staples from Kojak and The Waltons to Hawaii Five-o and Murder, She Wrote.
In the 1990s he returned to the role of Harv in four television specials .
John Karlen and his wife Betty, to whom he was married in 1963, divorced in 1998. He is survived by their son.
John Karlen, born May 28 1933, died January 22 2020