Charles Kimbrough, ‘Murphy Brown’ actor, dies at 86
Charles Kimbrough, who received an Emmy nomination for playing uptight anchorman Jim Dial on the sitcom “Murphy Brown,” one of many priggish, comically stuffy characters that he humanized for the stage and screen, died Jan. 11 at a hospital in Culver City, Calif. He was 86.
His death, which was confirmed by the agency SMS Talent, was first reported Sunday by the New York Times. The agency did not share details about the cause.
Tall and handsome, with a patrician bearing and dark curly hair, Kimbrough was first known for appearing in the 1970 Stephen Sondheim musical “Company,” delivering a Tony-nominated performance as Harry, the recovering alcoholic who is thoroughly ambivalent — or “sorry-grateful,” as he puts it — about his marriage.
Over the next half century, he brought to life a parade of buttoned-down aristocrats, pompous executives and genteel society men who wore their business suits like armor.
He was the French painter Jules, a rival of pointillist master Georges Seurat, in Sondheim’s 1984 musical “Sunday in the Park With George.” He was the sedate diplomat in a 1985 revival of Noël Coward’s “Hay Fever.” And he was the embodiment of a fading world of WASP privilege in “Later Life,” “Sylvia” and other off-Broadway plays by A.R. Gurney.
Yet for many years, he remained unhappy at being typecast.
“Unfortunately I’m really good at playing jackasses of one kind or another,” he told the Wall Street Journal in 2012. “I’ve always been slightly self-conscious as an actor, and I guess that sometimes reads as pomposity. Starting when I was 30, I somehow gave off an impression at an audition that had them mentally put me in a three-piece suit or put an attache case in my hand.
“If there was a stiff-guy part,” he continued, “the director would brighten up when I came in. That wasn’t the response I wanted. I was in anguish.”
Kimbrough had what he described as “an epiphany of sorts” while playing the stoic newsman Dial, a fixture of all 10 original seasons of “Murphy Brown.” Premiering on CBS in 1988, the series starred Candice Bergen as Brown, a driven broadcast investigative journalist on the fictional newsmagazine show “FYI.” She was joined by a comic ensemble that included Joe Regalbuto as her friend Frank Fontana, Faith Ford as her perky colleague Corky Sherwood and Grant Shaud as the show’s neurotic producer.
Discovering that “stuffiness is not dullness,” Kimbrough played Dial as a pretentious newsman with heart and sensitivity as well as a charmingly incisive sense of right and wrong. “I always knew the man was a scoundrel,” he says after learning about a character’s misdeeds. “Anyone who makes cellular phone calls from a stall in the men’s room is capable of anything.”
He also drew on his Broadway musical experience, sitting down at a piano in one episode to perform a blustering rendition of “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” with boisterously off-key backing from Bergen.
The show won 18 Emmy Awards, and Kimbrough was nominated in 1990 for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series. When the series was rebooted in 2018, he reprised the role for a few episodes.
“He brought it all: that ramrod posture, the anchor voice, the slicked-back hair. He brought a credibility to the character,” said “Murphy Brown” creator Diane English, in a 2007 interview with the Television Academy Foundation.