Author: Harrison Smith / Source: Washington Post
David Ogden Stiers, who played the snobbish but sympathetic surgeon Winchester on television’s “M.A.S.H.” and later delighted a generation of children with voice roles in Disney movies, including as the clock Cogsworth in “Beauty and the Beast,” died March 3 at his home in Newport, Ore.
He was 75.He had bladder cancer, agent Mitchell Stubbs wrote in
Mr. Stiers, who once declared that “villains are a slice of heaven,” lent his large stature and booming voice to King Lear, scheming scientists and occasionally sympathetic physicians in more than 150 plays, movies and television programs, including the Stephen King series “The Dead Zone” and eight Perry Mason courtroom dramas.
He performed as the alcoholic magician Feldman the Magnificent in the 1974 Broadway musical “The Magic Show,” appeared in five Woody Allen films (beginning with the 1988 thriller “Another Woman”) and eventually established a second career in music, working as a guest conductor for orchestras and helping found a symphony in Newport, his home for more than two decades.
But he was best known for his work on “M.A.S.H.,” which premiered on CBS in 1972. The series offered comedic and caustic commentary on the Vietnam War, which was then in its closing stages, through its depiction of Army surgeons in Korea 20 years earlier.
Mr. Stiers had initially believed his TV destiny was to play a truculent character on the “Mary Tyler Moore Show,” where he appeared in three episodes as a station manager who berates the program’s title character. “I hoped to be the man who fired Mary at the end of the series,” he once joked to Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper. “I’d have been the most hated man in America.”
Instead he was recruited to “M.A.S.H.,” where beginning in 1977 he replaced the arrogant and AWOL Frank Burns (Larry Linville) as second-in-command of the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital.
As the tall and balding Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester III, he was frequently at the receiving end of pranks by surgeons Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda) and B.J. Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell), though his medical expertise, dry humor and flashes of generosity and kindness made him a more three-dimensional comic foil than his predecessor at the hospital.
Mr. Stiers, a Juilliard-trained Midwesterner, deployed a Boston Brahmin accent that he developed without the help of a voice coach, and supplied Winchester with a love of Wagner and Mussorgsky that mirrored his own affection for classical music.
In , Winchester devoted himself to a patient’s leg wound before realizing that the soldier was a concert pianist, with a hand injury that had largely…
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