Actor
Born: March 7, 1946;
Died: July 21 2017
JOHN Heard, who has died aged 71, won early acclaim as a stage actor and had leading roles in his first few films, but his career became that of a dependable supporting actor; movie and television audiences were familiar with his face, and he was seldom out of work, but he never quite achieved the recognition and star billing his undoubted talent might have won him.
It irked him slightly that the role for which he was best known was the careless father in Home Alone (1990), a humdrum but extremely successful comedy in which Macauley Culkin was a young boy inadvertently left behind when his family goes on holiday, and who has to fend off burglars. Though Heard was good in the film, which for many years held the record as the highest-grossing live-action comedy, his range extended much wider than his performance there.
It was not even his best comic role: he was superb as the ruthless corporate rival to Tom Hanks (who plays a boy suddenly transformed into an adult) in Big (1998) and enjoyed chewing the scenery as a drunk in 2013’s preposterous made-for-TV cult hit Sharknado. On TV, too, he was outstanding as the shady detective Vin Makazian in The Sopranos, for which he received an Emmy nomination as best guest actor in 1999.
He was, in fact, a regular fixture in guest roles in commercially successful TV series. He popped up in almost all the numerous incarnations of shows such as Law and Order, CIS and NCIS, as well as putting in memorable turns on Battlestar Galactica, Elementary, Prison Break, Miami Vice, Person of Interest and MacGyver.
He began, however, as a highly regarded stage actor, who in the late 1970s had won two Obie awards for the best performance in an off-Broadway production, for his roles in the Vietnam war drama G.R. Point and in Othello. His performance in the latter so impressed the director Ivan Passer that he insisted on casting Heard in the title role of Cutter’s Way (1981) opposite Jeff Bridges, though the studio was keen to have star names.
He had by that time played the lead in the romantic comedy Chilly Scenes of Winter (1979) and in 1982 played Nastassja Kinski’s romantic interest in Paul Schrader’s mannered remake of Cat People. But though his performances in all three films were praised, and there is much to admire in the pictures, they were not box office hits. The actor Daniel Stern, who played one of the incompetent burglars in Home Alone, and who shared a flat in New York with Heard while they were young actors, recalled that Heard was, at the time, an enthusiastic party animal who ran through impressive quantities of drink, drugs and beautiful women.
Heard himself thought, in an interview in 2008, that he had perhaps “dropped the ball”. “I went from being a young leading man to just being a kind of hack actor … I think I could have done more with my career than I did, and I sort of got sidetracked.” Characteristically, however, his only complaint about the course of his career was that it might have cost him the chance to play more interesting roles. His wife Sharon, with whom he had a daughter and a son, told the New York Times that he “didn’t care about the Hollywood scene at all.”
John Matthew Heard Jr was born on March 7, 1946 in Washington DC, where his father worked for the defence department. His mother Helen was a keen amateur actress. John had two sisters (one of whom became an actress) and a brother, and was educated at Gonzaga College High School, Clark University in Massachusetts and the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC.
In the 1970s, he moved to New York City, where he was quickly recognised as a talented stage actor, working in classic repertory including Shakespeare and Strindberg and, for a season at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center, in a series of new plays. After his leading roles in Cutter’s Way and Cat People (and the terrible cannibal horror film C.H.U.D. in 1984), he tended to be cast in supporting roles. But in those he was reliably excellent; in 1985, he was in Heaven Help Us and Martin Scorsese’s comedy After Hours, in 1988 he had substantial roles in six films which, as well as Big, included the Bette Midler weepie Beaches.
After Home Alone, he was seldom out of work in supporting roles. His most notable included the medical drama Awakenings, the highly under-rated adaptation of Graham Swift’s novel Waterland (1992), the thrillers In The Line of Fire and The Pelican Brief (both 1993). Not many of his big screen outings thereafter were great successes, but it was never due to Heard’s presence, which was always solid. On television, too, he always produced quality work.
John Heard was married first (for just six days in 1979) to the actress Margot Kidder, best known as Lois Lane in Superman. He had a son, Jack, with his then girlfriend, the actress Melissa Leo (who won an Oscar for her role in The Fighter), with whom he had a turbulent relationship. From 1988 to 1996 he was married to Sharon Heard; their son Max died last year. He was briefly married, in 2010, to Lana Pritchard.
Heard died in a hotel in Palo Alto, where he was recovering from back surgery. He is survived by his son Jack and by his daughter Annika from his second marriage.
ANDREW MCKIE
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