During his more than 60-year career, Harris Yulin appeared in over 100 film and television roles, not to mention countless theater performances, starting in 1963 Off Broadway in “Next Time I’ll Sing to You,” with James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons, and continuing on and off Broadway, and as far away as Dublin, where he played Willy Loman in Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman” in 2010.
But Mr. Yulin, who shared a house in Bridgehampton with his wife, Kristen Lowman, was especially active on the South Fork. “Harris had a storied career as an actor in film and television, and his theater work was world-renowned,” said Josh Gladstone, who worked with Mr. Yulin as both the creative director at LTV Studios and former artistic director of Guild Hall’s John Drew Theater.
“Harris directed, produced, and acted in literally hundreds of projects on all of our stages: Bay Street, the Suffolk, Southampton Arts Center, Southampton Cultural Center, and, most recently, at LTV Studios. His work at the John Drew Theater, where his ‘Glass Menagerie’ reopened the 2009 renovation, was extraordinarily generous and long-lasting, and the cohort of celebrity and journeyman actors that came to work with him was a who’s who of the American stage. He was a champion of the art and craft of theater — and his contribution to our community was unique. He will be deeply missed as an artist and as a friend.”
A sampling of those performances includes “Squeaky” at Guild Hall, where he played the title role under the direction of Bob Balaban, “Love Letters” at the Stephen Talkhouse, where he shared the stage with Mercedes Ruehl, and, at LTV, “Scenes of Mirth and Marriage,” where he was again paired with Ms. Ruehl.
Mr. Yulin died of cardiac arrest in New York City on June 10. He was 87. At the time of his death, according to The New York Times, he was preparing for a role in the television series “American Classic,” with Kevin Kline and Laura Linney.
Harris Bart Goldberg was born on Nov. 5, 1937, in Los Angeles. Abandoned at an orphanage as an infant, he was adopted by Isaac Goldberg, a dentist, and his wife, Sylvia, when he was 4 months old. He later took as a stage name Yulin, which was a surname in his father’s family in Russia.
He attended the University of Southern California without graduating and served in the Army for a year. “After I got out I went to Europe for a couple of years,” he told The Star in 2016. “I just moved around, and it was inexpensive to live there in those days, the early 1960s. You could make a living dubbing films at the big dubbing centers in Rome and Paris.”
While in Paris, a friend who knew William Burroughs told Mr. Yulin about a new venue looking for two actors to read from Burroughs’s writing, accompanied by a three-piece jazz band.
“Bill would sit at this table by the side of the stage in a gray suit and gray hat, drinking Pernod, and he would always say, ‘That’s great, Harris.’ I’d say, ‘But I don’t understand this at all.’ And he’d say, ‘Yes, you do.’ ”
In 1962, living in Tel Aviv, he was offered opportunities to act and direct. He considered it, but decided instead to return to New York, where his acting career launched the following year.
Mr. Yulin made his Broadway debut in 1980 in a revival of Lillian Hellman’s “Watch on the Rhine.” He also appeared in Broadway productions of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s “The Visit” in 1992 and Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” in 2001.
His many honors included a nomination in 1996 for a Prime Time Emmy for playing a crime boss in the comedy series “Frasier.” For his direction of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful” in 2006 he won the Lucille Lortel Award from the League of Off-Broadway Theaters and Producers, and in the late 1990s he earned Drama Desk nominations for acting on Broadway in “The Diary of Anne Frank” and Arthur Miller’s “The Price.”
His film work included “The End of the Road” (1970), in which he starred with James Earl Jones and Stacy Keach, a longtime friend and colleague. “Stacy and I are always on the lookout for something we can do together,” Mr. Yulin told The Star in 2021, and what they did was “Vienna,” a two-person play starring Mr. Yulin as Sigmund Freud and Mr. Keach as Carl Jung. The play, a benefit for the Actors Fund, premiered on YouTube that year.
Other film roles included Wyatt Earp in “Doc” (1971), a police detective in “Scarface” (1983), a judge in “Ghostbusters II” (1989), and a White House adviser in “Clear and Present Danger” (1994). On television he appeared in “Ironside,” “Kojak,” “Murphy Brown,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and, more recently, “Ozark.”
Mr. Yulin married the actress Gwen Welles in 1975; she died in 1993. While he first met Ms. Lowman in 1983, when both were cast in “A Mad World, My Masters,” a Jacobean comedy by Thomas Middleton at the La Jolla Playhouse, it wasn’t until 2003 that they got together.
It was supposedly a blind date, which Ms. Lowman resisted, all the more so, she told The Star, when told that he was an actor. “I said, ‘Oh, no!’ Then my friend told me his name was Harris Yulin, and that was the beginning.” They were married in 2005.
Claire Lucido, Ms. Lowman’s daughter, died in 2021. Ms. Lowman is Mr. Yulin’s only immediate survivor.
