René Auberjonois, R.I.P.

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‘Benson,’ ‘Star Trek’ actor René Auberjonois has died at 79



René Auberjonois, a prolific actor best known for his roles on the television shows “Benson” and “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and his portrayal of Father Mulcahy in the 1970 film MASH, has died. He was 79. The actor died Sunday of metastatic lung cancer at his home in Los Angeles his son Rèmy-Luc Auberjonois told the Associated Press.

René Auberjonois worked constantly as a character actor in several golden ages, from the dynamic theater of the 1960s to the cinema renaissance of the 1970s to the prime period of network television in the 1980s and ’90s — and each generation knew him for something different. For film fans of the 1970s, he was Father John Mulcahy, the military chaplain who played straight man to the doctors’ antics in MASH. It was his first significant film role and the first of several for director Robert Altman. For sitcom watchers of the 1980s, he was Clayton Runnymede Endicott III, the hopelessly highbrow chief of staff at a governor’s mansion on “Benson", the ABC series whose title character was a butler played by Robert Guillaume. And for Sci-Fi fans of the 1990s and convention-goers ever since, he was Odo, the shape-shifting Changeling and head of space-station security on “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine".

“I am all of those characters, and I love that,” Auberjonois said in a 2011 interview with a Star Trek website. “I also run into people, and they think I’m their cousin or their dry cleaner. I love that, too.”

Auberjonois was born in New York in 1940, the son of Fernand Auberjonois, Swiss-born foreign correspondent for U.S. newspapers, and the grandson of a Swiss post-Impressionist painter also named René Auberjonois. The younger René Auberjonois was raised in New York, Paris and London, and for a time lived with his family in an artists’ colony in Rockland County, N.Y., whose residents included actors John Houseman, Helen Hayes and Burgess Meredith. After graduating from Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Institute of Technology, now Carnegie Mellon, Auberjonois hopped around the country joining theater companies, eventually landing three roles on Broadway in 1968, including playing the Fool in a long-running version of “King Lear”. The following year he would play Sebastian Baye opposite Katharine Hepburn in “Coco,” about the life of designer Coco Chanel that would earn him a Tony for best actor in a leading role in a musical. He would later see Tony nominations for 1973’s “The Good Doctor,” 1984’s “Big River”, and 1989’s “City of Angels.”

In 1970, Auberjonois began his run with Altman, playing Mulcahy in MASH. In his most famous exchange from the movie, Sally Kellerman’s Margaret Houlihan wonders how such a degenerate doctor as Donald Sutherland’s Hawkeye Pierce could reach a position of responsibility in the U.S. Army. A Bible-reading Auberjonois responds, deadpan: “He was drafted.” “I actually made that line up when we were rehearsing the scene,” Auberjonois said on the podcast The Gist in 2016. “And it became a kind of an iconic line for the whole film.” The same year he played an off-the-wall ornithologist in Altman’s “Brewster McCloud” and a saloonkeeper alongside Warren Beatty in the director’s western “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” in 1971. He appeared in Altman’s “Images” in 1972.

He spent much of the rest of the 1970s doing guest spots on TV before joining the cast of “Benson” in its second season in 1980, where he would remain for the rest of the show’s seven seasons, playing the patrician political advisor and chronic hypochondriac Endicott. Much of his later career was spent doing voices for animation, most memorably as the French chef who sings the love song to fish-killing “Les Poissons” in Disney’s 1989 The Little Mermaid.

He played Odo on “Deep Space Nine” from 1993 to 1998 and became a regular at Star Trek conventions where he raised money for Doctors Without Borders and signed autographs with a drawing of Odo’s bucket, where the character would store himself when he returned to his natural gelatinous state.

Auberjonois was also a regular on the ABC law-firm dramedy “Boston Legal” from 2004 to 2008. Late in his career, Auberjonois would work with independent filmmakers including the artful director Kelly Reichardt, for whom he appeared in 2016’s Certain Women and 2019′s First Cow, his final role.

In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife of 56 years, writer Judith Auberjonois; sisters Marie-Laure Degener and Anne Auberjonois; daughter Tessa Auberjonois; son-in-law Adrian Latourelle; daughter-in-law Kate Nowlin; and three grandchildren.

https://www.latimes.com/obituaries/s...has-died-at-79
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René Auberjonois had a long career in television and film, but for me he is most indelible in those four early Robert Altman films. First he was Father John Mulcahy, aka "Dago Red", trying to negotiate his way around MASH (1970). The scene where he delicately enlists Hawkeye's (Donald Sutherland) help with a potential suicide he overheard in a confession without breaking his oath is perfection.



Next he shows up as the eccentric avian Lecturer and mentor to Bud Court's title character in the satirical Brewster McCloud (1970), serving as a quasi Greek Chorus of one. "The flight of birds. The flight of man. Man's similarity to birds. Birds similarity to man. These are the subjects at hand. And we will deal with them for the next hour or so and hope that we draw no conclusions; else wise, the subject shall cease to fascinate us and, alas, another dream would be lost. There are far too few."



In McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971) he is Sheehan, the saloon keeper in the cold town of Presbyterian Church who is at first threatened by John McCabe's (Warren Beatty) arrival then becomes a proponent. His watching powerlessly as Keith Carradine's cowboy is goaded by one of the hired killers into drawing his Colt on the icy bridge is one of his best moments.



In Images (1972) he got his biggest role for Altman as Susannah York's husband Hugh. York's Cathryn has a tenuous hold on reality which has her and the audience wondering if her husband is there in the remote cabin with her or dead or another man entirely (Marcel Bozzuffi). The film is a trippy, sexy, disturbing meditation on identity, paranoia, and schizophrenia. It is one of Altman's best and least-seen pictures (co-written by York), even among film buffs.

The only other Altman film he would appear in is in the background in one of the scenes of The Player.



Apart from those roles, though I watched "Benson" as a kid and most definitely remember him in it that was never a favorite show. And I have never seen a single episode of "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine". But David E. Kelly's "Boston Legal" was fun, and though once again he played the uptight by-the-book foil he was a nice addition to the mix chastising Bill Shatner's Denny Crane and James Spader's Alan Shore for their antics at the firm of Crane, Poole, and Schmidt.

He did soooooo much other television, one-off guest spots and plenty of voice work in cartoons. For me his best film role other than the Altmans was the thriller Eyes of Laura Mars (1978). He shows up in two would-be 1970s blockbusters Robert Wise's all-star historical disaster pic The Hindenburg (1975) and in Dino De Laurentiis' cheesy remake of King Kong (1976). He also made it into the spoof of '70s disaster movies The Big Bus (1976). But mostly he was a TV actor and he worked an awful lot over the decades.






OMG, I just saw this thread...this is a major loss...one of the most versatile actors in the business. I think the first time I ever saw him was when he played Carol Burnett's gay BFF in Pete-N-Tillie. One of the busiest actors in the business. This guy was everywhere from the 1960's to the 1990's...television, movies, even theater...a lot of people might not remember that he won a Tony for his performance in the Broadway musical Big River. A great talent, RIP.