JOHN HILLERMAN

(20 December 1932 - 9 November 2017)

The American actor John Hillerman, who has died aged 84, was a dab hand at playing rather prissy, stuffed-shirt roles. For his most famous and longest running TV part of Jonathan Higgins, which he played in Magnum, P.I. as well as in Simon & Simon and in Murder, She Wrote, the Texas-born actor assumed an English accent (which he perfected by studying Laurence Olivier in Hamlet). In the late 1950s and early ’60s Hillerman tried stage acting in New York but couldn’t make a living from it, so he moved to Los Angeles. His first film was They Call Me Mr Tibbs (1970), playing the uncredited role of a reporter. Michael Winner then cast him in Lawman with Burt Lancaster, and Peter Bogdanovich put him in The Last Picture Show, What’s Up, Doc?, Paper Moon and At Long Last Love. Other films in the 1970s included Honky, The Carey Treatment, Skyjacked, The Outside Man, The Thief Who Came to Dinner, Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter, The Naked Ape and Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles and, later on, History of the World, Part I. He was also in Chinatown, The Day of the Locust, Lucky Lady and Audrey Rose, after which it was mainly television, with guest shots plus regular appearances on The Betty White Show, One Day at a Time, The Love Boat and Valerie (with Valerie Harper). But it was Magnum P.I that dominated his career, in which he appeared in over 150 episodes from 1980. Much nominated for the role, Hillerman won a Golden Globe in 1982 and a Primetime Emmy Award in 1987. His last film was A Very Brady Sequel in 1996. He retired in 1999.

MICHAEL DARVELL