Denis Arndt, prolific TV actor and Tony Award nominee, dies at 86

Boston Globe

01-04-2025

When he returned to the stage in the early 1970s, he became a self-described 'migratory arts worker,' acting in theater, television, and film during a career that lasted a half-century. He spent years as an 'I-5 player,' as he put it, driving up and down the West Coast highway to regional theaters where he found work.
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His first major TV role was in the short-lived CBS sitcom "Annie McGuire" (1988)
starring Mary Tyler Moore in the title role. She and Mr. Arndt played newlyweds trying to balance their careers and form a blended family with their children from previous marriages.
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Mr. Arndt went on to have a long collaboration with TV writer-producer David E. Kelley on shows including 'L.A. Law.' Mr. Arndt played the lawyer Jack Sollers, an aggressive courtroom practitioner with a deeply sympathetic personal side, in 11 episodes in 1990 and 1991.
He later worked with Kelley on 'Picket Fences,' in which he played another lawyer, as well as
'The Practice,' 'Ally McBeal,' 'Boston Legal,' and the medical drama 'Chicago Hope.'
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Mr. Arndt gave his most notable film performance in the thriller 'Basic Instinct' (1992) as one of the police officers who become distracted as they interrogate a murder suspect played with erotic charge by Sharon Stone.
But Mr. Arndt was always most at home in the theater and moved into TV in large part to support his family, his wife said.
He took to the stage again when he was cast opposite Mary-Louise Parker in 'Heisenberg,' a two-hander by playwright Simon Stephens, in 2015. The actor first selected to play the male lead had bowed out, and Mr. Arndt stepped in days before rehearsals began.
'Heisenberg' centers on the unconventional romance between Mr. Arndt's character, an aging Irish butcher named Alex Priest, and Parker's much younger Georgie. The two characters are strangers when Georgie kisses Alex on the neck in a London train station.
After opening at the Manhattan Theatre Club in 2015, the show moved to the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre in New York, where, at 77, Mr. Arndt made his Broadway debut.
His performance 'has to be the most unlikely and irresistible Broadway debut of the year,' theater critic Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times. 'He lends roiling, at first barely detectable energy to the seeming passivity of a man who, on occasion, finds himself crying for reasons he cannot (nor wants to) explain. But this ostensibly confirmed celibate oozes a gentle, undeniable sensuality. He never lets Alex be overwhelmed by Georgie's relentless, full-frontal attacks.'
Mr. Arndt's performance brought him a 2017 Tony nomination for best actor in a play. The award ultimately went to Kevin Kline for the Noël Coward comedy 'Present Laughter.'
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'I've lived several lives,' Mr. Arndt told the publication Broadway World, 'and I'm one of the lucky ones who got back to what I was supposed to be doing.'
Denis LeRoy Arndt — his first name was pronounced 'de-KNEE,' as in the French, but he also answered to 'Denny' — was born in Clyde, Ohio, on Feb. 23, 1939. His mother was a seamstress who made curtains, and his father was a railroad worker.
The family, which included two daughters, moved frequently before settling in Spokane, Wash. He credited a drama teacher with sparking his interest in the arts.
Mr. Arndt told the Daily Beast that he "came from a socioeconomic background that meant the military was an opportunity." Shortly after his high school graduation
in 1957, he joined the Army. He served for roughly a decade as a helicopter pilot and received two awards of the Purple Heart for his service in Vietnam, according to his family.
He later flew commercial helicopters in Alaska before settling in Seattle, where, on the suggestion of a friend, he tried out for a part in a local theater company. When he returned to the stage after years flying helicopters, he once remarked to the Los Angeles Times, it was 'as though a circle had been closed.'
Mr. Arndt became a regular with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, among other companies.
Mr. Arndt's marriage to Marjorie Arveson ended in divorce. Besides his wife, he leaves four children from his first marriage, Scott Arndt, Tammy Arndt, Laurie Arndt, and Kirsten Arndt; three children from his second marriage, Bryce Brooks, McKenna Rowe, and Tanner Arndt; and numerous grandchildren, great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren.