Actor remembered as Winchester on ‘M*A*S*H’
David Ogden Stiers, who played the snobbish but sympathetic surgeon Winchester on television’s M*A*S*H and later delighted a generation of children with voice roles in Disney movies, including as the clock Cogsworth in Beauty and the Beast, died Saturday at his home in Newport, Ore. He was 75.
He had bladder cancer, his agent Mitchell Stubbs wrote in a tweet announcing the death.
Stiers, who once declared that “villains are a slice of heaven,” lent his large stature and booming voice to King Lear, scheming scientists and occasionally sympathetic physicians in more than 150 plays, movies and television programs, including the Stephen King series The Dead Zone and eight Perry Mason courtroom dramas.
He performed as the alcoholic magician Feldman the Magnificent in the 1974 Broadway musical The Magic Show, appeared in five Woody Allen films and eventually established a second career in music, working as a guest conductor for orchestras and helping found a symphony in Newport, his home for more than two decades.
But he was best known for his work on M*A*S*H, which premiered on CBS in 1972. The series offered comedic and caustic commentary on the Vietnam War, which was then in its closing stages, through its depiction of Army surgeons in Korea 20 years earlier.
Stiers, a Juilliard-trained Midwesterner, deployed a Boston Brahmin accent that he developed without the help of a voice coach, and supplied Winchester with a love of Wagner and Mussorgsky that mirrored his own affection for classical music.
Stiers was nominated for two Emmy Awards for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy, and received a third nomination for his role in the 1984 miniseries The First Olympics: Athens 1896, in which he played U.S. Olympic Committee founder William Milligan Sloane.