From Top Gun to Glengarry Glen Ross: The Astonishing Range of James Tolkan
There are actors who play characters, and then there are actors who become them so completely that the line between performance and persona dissolves entirely. James Tolkan — who died Thursday in Saranac Lake, New York, at the age of 94 — belonged emphatically to the latter category. He was the kind of screen presence who needed no introduction, no close-up, and no monologue to command a room. He simply appeared, and order was restored.
Born James Stewart Tolkan on June 20, 1931, in Calumet, Michigan, his path to Hollywood was quintessentially American in its circuitousness — a childhood shuffled between Chicago and Tucson, a stint in the U.S. Navy, degrees from Coe College and the University of Iowa, and then the great leap of faith: arriving in New York City with seventy-five dollars in his pocket and an appetite for something real. He studied under Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg at The Actors Studio, where, in 1956, a young Warren Beatty sat beside him in class. Neither man, one suspects, was particularly easy to overlook.
The roles that followed ranged from Woody Allen’s Napoleon in Love and Death (1975) to the steely Mr. Strickland of Back to the Future (1985) — the Hill Valley High principal whose contempt for slackers proved so perfectly inhabited that fans spent decades begging Tolkan to reprise the insult at parties, on street corners, at fan conventions. He did. He always did. He reprised Strickland’s grandfather in Back to the Future Part III and returned to the Top Gun universe as the imperious Stinger, the commanding officer who matched Tom Cruise’s Maverick bravado for bravado and emerged considerably more dignified. Al Pacino’s crooked world in Dick Tracy (1990) gained the quietly menacing Numbers, and Sidney Lumet called on him three times — Serpico, Prince of the City, Family Business — because he understood instinctively what Lumet required: precision, pressure, truth.
On Broadway, Tolkan originated the role of Dave Moss in David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross during the landmark 1984–85 season, a performance that cemented his stage credentials alongside a screen career already crowded with distinction. He leaves behind his wife, Parmelee — a scenery and costumes painter at the American Place Theater — whom he met on the set of the 1971 off-Broadway production Pinkville and married that very year in Lake Placid. In lieu of flowers, the family requests donations to your local animal shelter or Humane Society chapter, a parting gesture as quietly principled as the man himself.
