Pulse logo
Pulse Region

A Hollywood Actor Remembered as a Working Dad

(California Today)

To close out the year, we have got a personal remembrance of Donald Moffat, an actor whose name you may not have recognized when his obituary appeared recently, but whose face you might know from dozens of movies.

For Kevin McKenna, the deputy business editor, Moffat wasn’t simply another character actor. He was a working dad and, despite coming from England, someone who helped make up the fabric of Southern California life. Here’s Kevin:

I had known Donald and his family for decades, since his daughter Lynn and I were high school debate partners in Southern California.

Donald’s westward odyssey began almost on a whim.

“We said, ‘Let’s go for the summer,'” his wife, actress and director Gwen Arner, recalled.

It was 1969, and Donald had a part in a French farce at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. They rented a house in Manhattan Beach.

“And at the end of the summer,” she said, “we decided to stay.”

They bought a home in Hermosa Beach that they never gave up, the surf audible from its windows.

While his on-screen credits grew, Donald didn’t want to leave theater behind. Many actors took parts in local stage productions “because it was something you would do to get an agent” rather than “something you do because it’s worthwhile,” Gwen said.

As an alternative, their friend Ralph Waite founded the Los Angeles Actors’ Theater in the mid-1970s. The company lasted only a few years, but it produced Donald’s favorite stage role, as Estragon in “Waiting for Godot,” half of a comic pair that The Los Angeles Times described as “practically perfect,” with Gwen directing.

Some of Donald’s screen roles reflected California’s social upheaval. One was as an alcoholic trying to maintain his sobriety on Fifth Street in Los Angeles — the city’s longtime Skid Row — in “On the Nickel.” Another was as advertising executive Edgar Halcyon in the miniseries of Armistead Maupin’s San Francisco saga, “Tales of the City.”

My favorite was his turn as Vice President Lyndon Johnson in “The Right Stuff.” LBJ’s raucous “Welcome to Texas” event, ostensibly in Houston, was filmed at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. Donald didn’t think he looked right for the part, his daughter Wendy told me, so for the audition he got some vintage eyeglasses from a Goodwill store in Torrance and put wads of Juicy Fruit gum behind his ears. It worked.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Subscribe to receive daily news updates.