John Cunningham, the busy character actor who appeared in the original Broadway productions of Company, Cabaret and The Sisters Rosensweig and in films including Mystic Pizza and Dead Poets Society, has died. He was 93.
Cunningham died Tuesday at his home alongside the 11th hole at the Rye Golf Club in Rye, New York, his family announced.
During a career that spanned nearly 70 years, Cunningham starred as Flan Kittredge in the original 1990-92 Broadway production of Six Degrees of Separation, then played John in the 1993 film version. (Donald Sutherland portrayed Flan in the movie.)
His 15 Broadway credits included turns as Nikos in Zorba, Robert and Peter in Company, Clifford Bradshaw in Cabaret, Nicholas Pym in The Sisters Rosensweig, John Adams in 1776 and Captain E.J. Smith in Titanic.
“In theater you get to do it again, and again, and again,” he said in an interview with Playbill in 1997. “My whole pleasure is trying to get better. So my ritual is to take time with myself, review what has happened, prepare myself so that inspiration can happen to me in the moment onstage. Be prepared to be alive.”
He portrayed Mr. Windsor, father of Adam Storke and Matt Damon’s characters, in Donald Petrie’s Mystic Pizza (1988), and he was Ethan Hawke’s dad in Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (1989).
He was often cast as uptight fathers or corporate execs.
Offscreen, he got laughs as the voice on the motivational “How to Be a Man” tape that Kevin Kline’s English literature teacher listens to in Frank Oz’s In & Out, and he was heard as the Fed Net newsreel announcer in another 1997 film, Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers.
In 1986, The New York Times wrote a piece about Cunningham in which he was described as “ever-reliable and ever-employed” and “a working actor’s actor.”
The son of a high school principal, Cunningham was born on June 22, 1932, and raised in New Paltz, New York. He graduated from Dartmouth College, then joined the U.S. Army and performed for troops stationed in West Germany and France in plays including The Caine Mutiny Court Martial and The Rainmaker.
After the service, Cunningham earned his master’s degree from Yale Drama School, then headed to New York to pursue an acting career with classmate and lifelong friend Dick Cavett.
Selected after an audition with Moss Hart before he had even hired an agent, Cunningham was 27 in 1960 when he played the Hungarian phonetician Zoltan and served as Edward Mulhare’s understudy for the role of Henry Higgins for more than two years in the national and international company of My Fair Lady.
He made his Broadway debut in 1963 in the musical Hot Spot, starring Judy Holliday, and his final onstage appearance came off-Broadway in Painting Churches in 2012.
Cunningham also worked in soap operas including The Secret Storm, The Doctors, Search for Tomorrow, One Life to Live and Loving, and he appeared eight times on Law & Order from 1991-2008.
His résumé included the films The Big Fix (1978), Hello Again (1987), School Ties (1992), For Love or Money (1993), Roommates (1995), Nixon (1995), The Jackel (1997) and Shaft (2000) and guest spots on 30 Rock, The Good Wife, Damages and Blue Bloods.
With friend and fellow actor Frances Sternhagen, Cunningham initiated and conducted a series of fund-raising shows called Playwrights and Players at the Rye High School Performing Arts Center beginning in 1989 (he was a Rye resident since 1969). The series brought playwrights Wendy Wasserstein, A.R. Gurney, Romulus Linney, Robert Anderson and John Guare to the school.
Survivors include his wife of nearly 70 years, Carolyn Cotton Cunningham, a former Rye City Council member; his children, Christopher, Catherine and Laura; six grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Donations in his memory can be made to the Entertainment Community Fund.
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