ON M*A*S*H ROLE

David Allen Ogden Stiers, actor. Born: 31 October 1942 in Peoria, Illinois, United States. Died: 3 March 2018 in Newport, Oregon, aged 75.

David Ogden Stiers, the tall, balding, baritone-voiced actor who brought articulate, somewhat snobbish comic dignity to six series of the acclaimed television series “M*A*S*H,” died on Saturday at his home in Newport, Oregon. He was 75.

His death was announced on Twitter by his agent, Mitchell K Stubbs, who said the cause was bladder cancer.

Stiers joined the cast of “M*A*S*H” in 1977, when Larry Linville, who had played the pompous and inept Maj. Frank Burns, left the show. The comedy-drama set in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital during the Korean War, required a foil for its raucous, irreverent, Martini-guzzling leads, Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda) and B.J. Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell), and Stiers’ imperious Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester III seemed to fit the bill.

Winchester’s upper-class Boston priggishness, however, turned out to be balanced by impressive medical skills, a heartfelt appreciation of the arts, real wit and a surprising level of compassionate humanity. Winchester was, unlike Frank Burns, a worthy adversary.

From the beginning, Stiers said, he felt confident about playing Winchester. “It’s just a matter of isolating the traits” from others in his own personality, he told the Salt Lake Tribune in 1977.

But he confessed to one definite difference between himself and his aristocratic character. “Where he wears a smoking jacket to bed,” he suggested, “I often wear nothing but socks.”

The role earned Stiers two Emmy nominations (in 1981 and 1982). He was nominated a third time, in 1984, for his lead role in The First Olympics: Athens in 1896, a dramatic mini-series.

Inastatementafterhisdeath, Loretta Swit, who played Maj. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan on “M*A*S*H,” called Stiers “my sweet, dear shy friend,” adding, “working with him was an adventure”.

David Allen Ogden Stiers was born in Peoria, Illinois, the son of Kenneth Stiers and the former Margaret Elizabeth Ogden. The family later moved to Eugene, Oregon, where David graduated from high school.

After briefly attending the University of Oregon, he headed to California to pursue an acting career and worked with the Santa Clara Shakespeare Festival in California for seven years. In the late 1960s he moved to New York to study drama at Juilliard.

There he became a member of John Houseman’s City Centre Acting Company, making his Broadway debut with the company in 1973.

He appeared in The Three Sisters, The Beggar’s Opera and three other plays, which ran in repertory.

He continued to appear on the New York stage in the 1970s and returned to Broadway later in his career, playing a beloved wartime general in the 2009-10 holiday run of Irving Berlin’s White Christmas.

Stiers had made his film debut with a small role in Jack Nicholson’s counterculture classic Drive, He Said (1971). That year, his voice was heard as the announcer in George Lucas’ debut feature film, dystopian sci-fi drama THX 1138.

Voice roles went on

to become an important part of Stiers’ career.

He was in the cast of about two dozen Disney animated films, including Lilo & Stitch (2002), as the villain Jumba Jookiba, and Beauty and the Beast (1991), in which he was the voice of Cogsworth, a strong-willed pendulum clock. That character, often described as “tightly wound” and “ticked off,” suggests to the Beast at one point that he woo his love with “flowers, chocolates, promises you don’t intend to keep”.

Other film work included roles in Oh, God! (1977), The Man With One Red Shoe (1985), The Accidental Tourist (1988) and four Woody Allen films. (He was a peculiar hypnotist in Allen’s The Curse of the Jade Scorpion.) His last screen appearance was in The Joneses Unplugged, a 2017 television movie about technology overload.

Like his “M*A*S*H” character, Stiers was a devoted fan of classical music. He conducted frequently and was resident conductor of the Newport Symphony Orchestra (formerly the Yaquina Chamber Orchestra) in Oregon.

In early 2009, at 66, Stiers announced that he was gay and “very proud to be so” in a blog interview that was reported by ABC News. His secrecy, he said, had been strictly about the fear that openness about his sexuality might affect his livelihood. Now he regretted that.

“I wish to spend my life’s twilight being just who I am,” he said. New York Times 2018. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service

“Where [Maj Charles Winchester III] wears a smoking jacket to bed, I often wear nothing but socks”