Charles Kimbrough, actor best known for ‘Murphy Brown,’ dies at age of 86

Charles Kimbrough, an actor known for his patrician looks and stately bearing who was nominated for an Emmy Award for portraying a comically rigid news anchor on the hit sitcom “Murphy Brown,” died Jan. 11 in Culver City, California. He was 86.

His son, John Kimbrough, confirmed the death.

After decades of stage work in New York, including a Tony Award-nominated performance in the original 1970 Broadway production of the Steven Sondheim musical “Company,” Kimbrough finally got his first taste of mainstream fame alongside Candice Bergen on “Murphy Brown,” the popular series set in a television newsroom that ran for 10 seasons on CBS starting in 1988. (He reprised his character for three episodes of the 2018 reboot.)

As Jim Dial, Kimbrough artfully toyed with the wooden archetype of a 1980s newsman, with his lacquered helmet of hair, Walter Cronkite-like air of seriousness and old-boy swagger (he lovingly referred to Bergen’s investigative reporter character as “Slugger”).

His rigid, pompous manner made him the ideal straight man for the show’s ever-topical plotlines. In one 1997 episode, Jim is tasked with finding marijuana for Murphy, who is seeking to ease the symptoms of her chemotherapy. “Wow, look at all of this, you must have spent a fortune,” Murphy exclaims as she holds aloft a large plastic bag of cannabis. “Damn right I did!” Jim responds. “Nickel bag, my Aunt Sally.”

It was hardly the first role that allowed him to explore fussy or priggish characters. In the 2012 Broadway revival of “Harvey,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1944 play about a man (played by Jim Parsons) who ends up in an sanitarium because of his friendship with a 6-foot-tall imaginary rabbit, Kimbrough played the exacting psychiatrist who is obsessed with the image of his institution.