Stephen Furst

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Stephen Furst, who played naive fraternity pledge Flounder in the hit movie “Animal House,” has died of complications from diabetes, his family said. Furst was 63.

Furst played Kent “Flounder” Dorfman in the 1978 film that also starred John Belushi. It was Belushi’s character, Blutarsky, who drew Flounder into a prank that went terribly wrong and ended up with the frantic Flounder shooting a gun loaded with blanks into a ceiling, frightening a horse so much that it died of a heart attack.

Furst’s long list of credits included the 1980s medical drama “St. Elsewhere,” on which he played Dr. Elliot Axelrod. He played Vir Coto and was an occasional director on the 1990s sci-fi series “Babylon 5.”