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Harris Yulin, the acclaimed character actor who starred in films including Scarface and Ghostbusters II, has died. He was 88.
Over the course of his career, the California-born actor played more than 100 roles on stage and screen, including working extensively on Broadway.
As Deadline reports, Yulin’s family and his manager, Sue Leibman, announced that he died June 10 in New York City of cardiac arrest.
Harris Yulin was born on November 5, 1937, in Los Angeles, but made his acting debut on stage in New York, performing in Next Time I'll Sing to You in 1963.
He made his film debut in 1971’s Doc, playing Wyatt Earp opposite Stacy Keach’s Doc Holliday, and his Broadway debut in 1980’s Watch on the Rhine. He later returned to Broadway for productions including The Diary of Anne Frank, The Price and Hedda Gabler.
Yulin landed one of the most memorable roles of his career in Brian De Palma’s Scarface in 1983, playing corrupt police officer Mel Bernstein alongside Al Pacino’s titular drug lord. In a 2023 retrospective of the film for The Independent, Geoffrey McNab praised their work together, writing: “In certain moments here, for example, when [Pacino] confronts his sleazy, double-crossing mentor Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia) and the crooked cop (Harris Yulin), he behaves as if he is on the Old Vic stage in some blood-soaked tragedy. He’s hammy but magnificent.”
In 1989, Yulin had another celebrated role as Judge Stephen Wexler in Ghostbusters II. In the following decade, he showed his knack for both thrillers and comedies, playing a corrupt national security advisor in the Harrison Ford movie Clear and Present Danger in 1994 and then acting opposite Rowan Atkinson in 1997’s slapstick farce Bean.
He also had roles as a lawyer of boxer Rubin Carter in 1999’s The Hurricane, a secret service agent in 2001’s Rush Hour 2 and Detective Doug Roselli in the same year’s Training Day.
Yulin made a string of memorable television appearances, performing in shows including Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, 24, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Frasier and Entourage. More recently, from 2017 to 2018, he played the key role of Buddy Dieker in the Netflix crime drama Ozark.
In the early 1970s, Yulin had a high-profile relationship with Faye Dunaway. He was married to fellow actor Gwen Welles from 1975 until her death in 1993. He is survived by his second wife, Kristen Lowman, whom he married in 2005.
