Nicholas Pryor, the busy character actor who portrayed Tom Cruise’s father in Dangerous Enterprise and Kathleen Robertson’s dad on Beverly Hills, 90210 throughout a profession that spanned seven a long time, has died. He was 89.
Pryor died Monday of most cancers at his house in Wilmington, North Carolina, his spouse, actress Christine Belford, informed The Hollywood Reporter.
In a notice to be delivered to THR after his dying, he wrote: “Nicholas Pryor was enormously grateful to have been, for practically 70 years, a working actor.”
From 1997-2002, Pryor performed the previous spy Victor Collins on the Common Hospital spinoff Port Charles, culminating a protracted profession in daytime cleaning soap operas that included stints on The Secret Storm, The Fringe of Evening, Love Is a Many Splendored Factor, All My Kids and One other World.
Pryor recurred on Fox’s Beverly Hills, 90210 as A. Milton Arnold, the chancellor of California College and father of Robertson’s Claire Arnold, from 1994-97. And he was the daddy of Paula Devicq’s character, Kirsten Bennett, on one other Fox sequence, Social gathering of 5.
Earlier, he performed vice principal Jack Feldspar on the 1987-88 NBC drama The Bronx Zoo, created by Gary David Goldberg and starring Edward Asner.
On the large display, Pryor was Barbara Feldon’s hapless husband in Michael Ritchie’s Smile (1975); the pipe-smoking faculty professor who rides with Michael Sarrazin in an AC Cobra in Charles Bail‘s The Gumball Rally (1976); the museum director who meets his finish in a practice yard in Damien: Omen II (1978); and the daddy of Robert Downey Jr.’s drug-addled Julian in Much less Than Zero (1987).
Nicholas David Probst was born in Baltimore on Jan. 28, 1935. His father, Stanley, labored within the pharmaceutical business.
Whereas attending the all-boys Gilman Faculty in Baltimore and Yale College, Pryor honed his appearing abilities on the stage with the Drummond Gamers in Baltimore, the Camden Hills Theatre in Maine, the Oregon Shakespeare Pageant and the Star Theatre in Minneapolis.
After graduating from faculty in 1956, the lanky Pryor appeared in 4 Broadway performs in 1957-59: with Karl Malden in The Egghead, with Joan Bennett in Love Me a Little, with Leon Ames in Howie and with Diana Douglas in The Highest Tree. The 4, nonetheless, lasted a complete of 56 performances.
Nicholas Pryor (proper) and William Holden in 1978’s ‘Damien: Omen II.’
twentieth Century Fox Movie Corp./Courtesy Everett Assortment
He made his first cleaning soap appearances in 1958 in The Brighter Day and in 1959 in Younger Dr. Malone. In 1964, he joined NBC’s One other World as an unique castmember, however his character, Tom Baxter, was killed off six months later. He then was employed on a primetime cleaning soap, CBS’ The Nurses.
Pryor was top-billed as a person within the midst of a midlife disaster in his film debut, The Method We Dwell Now (1970), and he adopted that with turns in Man on a Swing (1974), The Joyful Hooker (1975), The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh (1979) and Airplane! (1980).
He returned to Broadway within the ’70s with substitute roles in That Championship Season and Thieves.
Along with having his Porsche 928 wrecked by Cruise’s Joel Goodsen in Dangerous Enterprise (1983), Pryor additionally confirmed up in The Falcon and the Snowman (1985), Morgan Stewart’s Coming House (1987), Pacific Heights (1990), Hoffa (1992), Sliver (1993), Hail Caesar (1994), The Chamber (1996), Molly (1999), Collateral Harm (2002), The Checklist (2007), The Starvation Video games: Mockingjay — Half 1 (2014), Physician Sleep (2019) and Halloween Kills (2021).
And with greater than 170 appearing credit on IMDb, he was seen on TV in dozens of exhibits, from Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Eight Is Sufficient, M*A*S*H and Little Home on the Prairie to Dallas, St. Elsewhere, L.A. Legislation, The West Wing and NYPD Blue, and within the miniseries The Adams Chronicles, Washington: Behind Closed Doorways and East of Eden.
He and Belford, his fourth spouse, had been married in July 1993, and so they labored collectively on Beverly Hills, 90210. He is also survived by his daughter, Stacey, and his grandchildren, Auguste and Avril.
