Paxton Whitehead, 85, actor who found comedy in stuffy roles
Paxton Whitehead, a British-born stage and screen actor who teased out comedy from the stodgiest heights, most memorably as a snooty academic in Rodney Dangerfield’s campus romp “Back to School” and in haughty roles in sitcoms including “Friends” and “Frasier,” died June 16 at a hospital in Arlington, Va. He was 85.
His daughter, Alex Whitehead-Gordon, said her father had health complications after a fall.
Whitehead built a steady career in film and TV, mastering an accent that dripped of self-styled superiority and using just a flick of an eyebrow or a subtle wince with comedic precision. The theater, however, was where Whitehead thoroughly explored his range as an actor in dozens of roles over five decades.
On Broadway, Whitehead received a Tony Award nomination in a 1980 revival of the musical “Camelot” playing the endearingly wayward King Pellinore opposite Richard Burton’s King Arthur. Earlier, Whitehead brought a comic touch to Sherlock Holmes with co-star Glenn Close (whose character hires the detective) in Paul Giovanni’s “The Crucifer of Blood,” which ran on Broadway from 1978-79.
In the 1998 season of “Friends,” Whitehead was the supercilious Bloomingdale’s boss of Rachel Green (Jennifer Aniston), and he played a stuffy prep school headmaster in “Frasier” in 1996, using his hawklike appearance to full comic effect. The TV roles continued on popular dramas including “The West
Wing” as Bernard Thatch, an annoyingly opinionated White House staffer.
Francis Edward Paxton Whitehead was born on Oct. 17, 1937, in East Malling and Larkfield in England’s Kent countryside.
His father was a lawyer, and his mother, an American-born former actress, was a homemaker. Whitehead was called Paxton since boyhood.
A dual British-U. S. citizen, he struck out for the United States in 1960 with no definite plans. “Perhaps spend a year seeing what happens and seeing the country,” he recounted. He never returned to live in Britain full-time and soon made his way to Broadway, making his debut in the drama “The Affair” in 1962 and returning two years later appearing in “Beyond the Fringe,” the hit British comedy revue.
Whitehead’s first marriage, to actress Patricia Gage, ended in divorce. His second wife, Katherine Robertson, died in 2009. In addition to his daughter, of Arlington, Va., survivors include a son, Charles, of Lincoln, Calif., both from his second marriage; a stepdaughter, Heather Whitehead; and four grandchildren.