Richard Dysart, best known as the wise and gentle-mannered L.A. Law character Leland McKenzie, has, at age 86, left this mortal coil. Dysart ruled as the basketball coach in the original 1973 Broadway production of Jason Miller‘s That Championship Season. (Robert Mitchum played the role in the 1982 film version.) That happened two years after my all-time favorite Dysart performance — as the “greedy, inept, unconscionable” Dr. Welbeck in Arthur Hiller and Paddy Chayefsky‘s The Hospital [clip below]. Dysart also shone in The Falcon and the Snowman, John Carpenter‘s The Thing, Mask, Steve McQueen‘s An Enemy of the People and Back to the Future, Part III. Superb actor, good fellow, conveyer of gravitas.
