Character Actor Maury Chaykin Dead at 61

Another fine character actor is gone. He appeared in over 100 movies in his career and had one of those familiar, recognizable faces. It’s hard to believe that Maury Chaykin was only 61 when he died on Tuesday of heart disease. That means he was just 41 when he costarred as the doomed Major Fambrough in DANCES WITH WOLVES. He seemed older but had a great movie face and showed great range in his roles. Chaykin was a talented actor who was a regular in the films of Atom Egoyan (THE SWEET HEREAFTER) and was a regular on the La Femme Nikita and Entourage TV shows.

From THE NEW YORK TIMES:

A hefty man with expressive, doughy features, Mr. Chaykin was the kind of actor whose name was known to few but whose face to many. His screen career lasted 35 years, and he appeared in dozens if not hundreds of movies and television shows, mostly in supporting or cameo roles.

He was perhaps best known for three of them. InKevin Costner’s sprawling, Academy Award-winning epic western, “Dances With Wolves” (1990), Mr. Chaykin played Major Fambrough, the Army officer who, as he is becoming unhinged, interviews Mr. Costner’s character for an assignment and sends him off to the far reaches of the frontier; then he shoots himself.In “My Cousin Vinny” (1992), a comedy with Joe Pesci and Marisa Tome about a fledgling lawyer, an Italian-American from New York, defending murder suspects in the Deep South, Mr. Chaykin played a slow-witted witness whom the lawyer (Mr. Pesci) questions about the preparation of grits.And in the HBO series “Entourage,” Mr. Chaykin made several appearances as Harvey Weingard, a bullying, bloviating movie mogul said to be a sendup of Harvey Weinstein. 

In Canada, where he lived, Mr. Chaykin had more opportunities to play central roles than he did in Hollywood. He appeared frequently in the films of the Canadian directorAtom Egoyan, including “The Adjuster,” “Where the Truth Lies” and “The Sweet Hereafter,” in which he was especially notable as an enraged cuckold.

The long list of Mr. Chaykin’s credits includes the movies “WarGames,” “Harry & Son,” “Mrs. Soffel,” “Hero,” “Unstrung Heroes,” “Mousehunt” “Being Julia, and “Mystery, Alaska,” and the television shows “Boston Legal,” “CSI” and the Canadian series “La Femme Nikita.” He also played Nero Wolfe, the fictional detective created by Rex Stout, in “A Nero Wolfe Mystery,” a series that ran for two seasons in 2000 and 2001 on cable television. ( Timothy Hutton played his sidekick, Archie Goodwin.) It was a rare leading role for Mr. Chaykin, who, in an interview with The New York Times in 2000, explained the thrill it gave him.“There’s an extraordinary billboard up on Sunset Boulevard right now, with a humongous photograph of my face,” he said, referring to an advertisement for “The Golden Spiders,” the cable movie that would spawn the “Nero Wolfe” series. “I drive by it constantly, back and forth, back and forth.

Source: THE NEW YORK TIMES