David Ogden Stiers obituary

There are some actors who have one role against which a whole career is measured. The touchstone part for David Ogden Stiers, who has died of cancer aged 75, was Major Charles Emerson Winchester III in the superior TV series M*A*S*H, from 1977 to 1983.

Winchester joined the team of doctors at the mobile army surgical hospital stationed in South Korea at the height of the Korean war, replacing the crass and inept Frank Burns. In contrast, the Harvard-educated Winchester was a highly skilled surgeon, extremely well read and a great lover of classical music. In these and other aspects Winchester resembled Stiers in real life, and his character brought a certain gravitas to M*A*S*H. In fact, Winchester was probably the most cultured and articulate character that ever graced an American TV sitcom, if M*A*S*H can be so called.

The show had a limited laugh track and was not afraid to move from comedy to drama. The tall and balding Stiers created a rounded, believable figure in Winchester, the nemesis of his fellow surgeons Hawkeye (Alan Alda) and BJ Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell), who got rid of their frustration and disgust at the war by playing crazy practical jokes and wisecracking.

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Winchester kept his sanity by excoriating everyone and everything around him, and Stiers portrayed his pent-up frustration in one magnificent outburst. “Know this,” he said. “You can cut me off from the civilised world, you can incarcerate me with two moronic cellmates, you can torture me with your thrice-daily swill, but you cannot break the spirit of a Winchester. My word shall be heard from this wilderness. I shall be delivered from this fetid and festering sewer.”

In many episodes Stiers also revealed Winchester’s tender side, such as the one in which he defends a young patient who is bullied because he stutters. Despite his pomposity he shows an overt concern for his patients’ welfare.

Stiers was born the son of Margaret (nee Ogden) and Kenneth Stiers, an accountant and lumber salesman in Peoria, Illinois, but was brought up and educated in Oregon. After attending the University of Oregon, he joined the company of the Santa Clara Shakespeare festival, where he stayed for seven years, during which time, despite his young age, he was able to tackle such parts as Richard III and King Lear.

In 1969 he moved to New York to study drama and singing at the Juilliard school. After a spell at the San Francisco Actors’ Workshop he became a member of John Houseman’s touring City Center Acting Company where, in 1973-74, he had leading roles in The Beggar’s Opera, Measure for Measure and The Three Sisters. From there Stiers went straight to Broadway, where he featured as an ageing alcoholic magician in the one-act hit musical The Magic Show (1974-78), using his rich baritone in several numbers.

Stiers’ long career on television began in 1975 with a small part in Kojak, then as the autocratic TV station boss on The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1976-77) just before M*A*S*H and fame and fortune came his way. He was seldom off television for the next four decades. Among the shows in which he featured were North and South (1985), Murder, She Wrote (1986), Star Trek: The Next Generation (1991), Love and Money (1999-2000), and The Dead Zone (2002-07), in which he was memorable as the enigmatic Rev Purdy.

Stiers managed to make something of the most thankless role in television drama, that of district attorney Michael Reston, who always lost his cases in the Perry Mason series (1986-88). Occasionally the ghost of Winchester would surface, as it did in a 2003 episode of Frasier in which Stiers, as the psychologist Leland Barton, finds he has much in common with the main character, discussing antiques and furniture with him as they sip sherry together. In many ways the snobbish Winchester was actually an antecedent of Frasier.

Stiers’ spasmodic roles in feature films included brief appearances in five of Woody Allen’s least successful movies: Another Woman (1988), Shadows and Fog (1991), Mighty Aphrodite (1995), Everybody Says I Love You (1996) and The Curse of the Jade Scorpion (2001). But much of his other film work was heard and not seen, as he was an exemplary voice artist in a string of animated movies, mainly for Walt Disney.

These began as the voice of the clock and as the narrator in Beauty and the Beast (1991), continuing with Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996) and Teacher’s Pet (2004). On television he also did voices on House of Mouse (2001-02) and as the villain Jumba Jookiba in Lilo and Stitch (2003-06), demonstrating an extraordinary range of accents and timbre.

Another branch of his talents was as resident conductor of the Newport Symphony Orchestra in Newport, Oregon.

In 2009 he chose to come out as gay, saying: “I wish to spend my life’s twilight being just who I am.”