Los Angeles Times

Actor best known for ‘L.A. Law’ role

- By Steve Chawkins steve.chawkins@latimes.com Twitter: @schawkins

Richard Dysart, an actor whose quiet air of authority helped him play presidents, generals, corporate executives and his best-known character, low-key senior partner Leland McKenzie of “L.A. Law”, has died. He was 86.

Dysart’s death Sunday at his Santa Monica home was caused by cancer, said his wife, Kathryn Jacobi Dysart.

While Dysart was a veteran of the Broadway stage and had appeared in many movies, he didn’t land his trademark role until he was in his late 50s. “L.A. Law”, a legal drama spiced with sex and dark humor, ran from 1986 to 1994 with a cast that over the years included Harry Hamlin, Corbin Bernsen, Jimmy Smits, Susan Dey, Michael Tucker and Jill Eikenberry.

As his firm’s founding partner, Dysart’s character was a voice of calm and probity amid office rivalries, sizzling affairs, toxic clients, and brutal courtroom battles.

Dysart’s work on “L.A. Law” brought him a 1992 Emmy for supporting actor as well as unending invitation­s to bar associatio­n luncheons.

He recorded public service messages urging attorneys in 23 states to do more pro bono work for the poor.

He also used several “L.A. Law” episodes to battle the sense of shame experience­d by many people with hearing problems. In one of them, Leland McKenzie argued an age discrimina­tion case in court wearing the hearing aids that Dysart himself had started to use several years earlier. He won the case.

In interviews, Dysart talked about the isolation imposed by hearing difficulti­es.

“I think we put up with not hearing,” he said. “We guess, and then, after a while, as the hearing loss increases, we’re so used to guessing that pretty soon we’re left out. We’re not part of the lives that are going on around us. It’s very sad.”

By its second season, his show was a favorite of attorneys for what Michael J. Kelly, then dean of the University of Maryland Law School, called its “flavor of reality” — its depiction of office flirting, balky phone systems and difficult clients. Law students loved it, he said, partly because of “the inspiratio­n it gives them for the infinite possibilit­ies of sex.”

Even staid old Leland was swept into a whirlpool of passion. In a memorable 1991 scene, he tries to calmly, reasonably part with his ex-lover, played by Diana Muldaur, moments before she accidental­ly plunges down an elevator shaft.

“It was the moment,” TV Guide critic Jeff Jarvis wrote, “that the show lost us, when it went too far and broke the spell.”

As the series ended in 1994, Dysart told interviewe­rs that it had veered too much “from the courtroom into the bedroom.”

“It’s the right time to end it,” he said.

Born in Brighton, Mass., on March 30, 1929, Richard Allan Dysart grew up in Maine, where as a boy in Skowhegan he was entranced with radio. When he was 16, he narrated the farm report — “the price of butter and eggs with everything I could give,” as he later described it — on an Augusta, Maine, radio station.

Dysart studied speech communicat­ions at Emerson College in Boston, leaving as an undergradu­ate for a four-year stint in the Air Force. After returning for his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, he headed for New York and the life of a struggling actor.

At the famed Circle in the Square theater, he sold tickets part time but also became an understudy in Eugene O’Neill’s tragedy “The Iceman Cometh.” After his first performanc­e, his fellow actors applauded him, his wife said.

He went on to star in numerous production­s on and off Broadway, including about 500 performanc­es as Coach in the Pulitzer Prize-winning “That Championsh­ip Season.” He also was a founder of the San Francisco-based American Conservato­ry Theatre.

In films, he appeared as a U.S. secretary of defense in “Meteor” (1979) and as the ill-fated captain Ernst Lehmann in “Hindenburg” (1975). He was President Truman in two TV movies; Ulysses S. Grant in a 1977 drama about Gen. George Custer; and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in “Churchill and the Generals”, a 1979 BBC production.

In the 1987 film “Wall Street”, he played the chief executive of a company besieged by Gordon (“Greed is good”) Gekko.

His favorite role, his wife said, was as Dr. Robert Allenby, a kindhearte­d physician in the quirky Peter Sellers comedy “Being There.”

“It was so full of humanity and sweetness and humor,” she said. “Like him.”

In addition to Kathryn, his wife since 1987, Dysart’s survivors include stepson Arie and two grandchild­ren. Two previous marriages ended in divorce.

 ?? Doug Pizac
Associated Press ?? TRIUMPHANT Richard Dysart celebrates his Emmy Award at the 1992 ceremony. He played Leland McKenzie,
the low-key senior partner in the television series’ law firm.
Doug Pizac Associated Press TRIUMPHANT Richard Dysart celebrates his Emmy Award at the 1992 ceremony. He played Leland McKenzie, the low-key senior partner in the television series’ law firm.
 ?? NBC ?? VERSATILE Dysart was a veteran Broadway actor who played Coach in “That Championsh­ip Season.”
NBC VERSATILE Dysart was a veteran Broadway actor who played Coach in “That Championsh­ip Season.”

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