KIP NIVEN

(27 May 1945 - 6 May 2019)

The name of the American actor Kip Niven, who has died from a heart attack aged 73, may not mean too much to UK audiences, but he had a long career in theatre, cinema, television and radio. A native of Kansas, he joined the university theatre programme and gained much experience as an actor on stage. His TV career began in 1968 and he worked solidly on the small screen until he found favour in Magnum Force (1973), one of Clint Eastwood’s ‘Dirty’ Harry Calahan movies in which he played rogue cop Astrachan. More television work led to films such as Newman’s Law, with George Peppard, and Airport 1975, Jack Smight’s group jeopardy drama with a starry cast headed by Charlton Heston.

He was in Earthquake, another battle for survival with Heston again, and Ava Gardner and the earth-movingly tremulous Sensurround sound process. Niven’s third disaster movie was The Hindenburg, Robert Wise’s flaming Zeppelin drama with George C. Scott and a few archive shots of the original disaster. Completing his run of real-life historical dramas, Niven played a pilot in Battle of Midway with director Smight and Heston again. Scarlet Buccaneer (aka Swashbuckler) was pirate hokum with Robert Shaw.

Niven appeared on TV more than he did in films during the 1970s. In 1977 he did Smight’s Damnation Alley with Jan-Michael Vincent and George Peppard and three years later played a serial killer in New Year’s Evil (1980), a so-so schlock-horror fest. Although always busy on TV, Kip Niven had to wait twenty years to get back in the cinema. The Painting (aka Soldiers of Change, 2001), was a race related film that didn’t make the UK. More Than Puppy Love suffered the same fate, while little happened to Raising Jeffrey Dahmer, The Only Good Indian, Jayhawkers or Goodland. Kip Niven’s last film role was as Farmer Jim in The Land which still awaits a release. In a long career of over fifty years on film and TV, Kip Niven never appeared to be out of work. His first wife, actress Susan Tisdall, with whom he had a son and daughter, died in 1981. He then married the actress Linda Lavin, but they divorced in 1992, and finally he married Mary Beth Reiff, who gave him a daughter, but Mary died in 2012.

MICHAEL DARVELL