Already has. Probably not famous enough though
TORONTO (CP) -- He was the smarmy Dean Wormer in the sophomoric cult
movie Animal House.
He was a bad guy who got tossed out a window to his death by the even
badder Lee Marvin in Point Blank. But Canadians may best remember
actor John Vernon as a crusading coroner in the groundbreaking 1960s
CBC crime series Wojeck.
Vernon, 72, died peacefully at his Los Angeles home Tuesday, his
family said.
With his pockmarked face and heavy-lidded blue eyes, Vernon proved to
be the ideal villain in dozens of the 85 motion pictures he made over
a four-decade career. But he started as a hero in Wojeck in which his
character was based on real-life Toronto coroner and politician Dr.
Morton Shulman and which formed the template for future
forensics-based crime series, from Quincy to Da Vinci's Inquest to CSI.
"Everybody's seen my face but nobody's sure who I am," he once told an
interviewer, revealing that he had often been mistaken for Richard
Burton or Robert Shaw. "People confuse me with other people and I
enjoy that."
He was seen most recently on the "double secret probation" DVD edition
of Animal House, in a feature that offered a tongue-in-cheek current
look at the characters of the 1978 film. Vernon's Dean Wormer was a
crotchety, snowy-haired senior in a wheelchair.
Chris Haddock, creator of Da Vinci's Inquest, said at the time he was
surprised that Vernon was still around and agreed it was a great idea
to see if he could make a cameo appearance on the series as a sort of
tribute.
Vernon's other notable film roles included The Outlaw Josey Wales,
Dirty Harry, Airplane II, Topaz, Brannigan, Charley Varrick, Nobody
Waved Goodbye and Tell Them Willie Boy Was Here. He also starred in a
short-lived ABC-TV Animal House spinoff series called Delta House and
in a 1990 CBC movie that reprised his Wojeck character.
TV guest roles included The FBI, Bonanza, Mission Impossible, The Name
of the Game, High Chapparall, Judd for the Defence and Quincy. He also
made a pilot for a failed U.S. series called Hunter. There were more
than 100 roles in Canadian TV, running the gamut from Tugboat Annie to
Cannonball to Forest Rangers.
Regina-born and stage trained, the six-foot-two Vernon, whose birth
name was Adolphus Raymondus Vernon Agopsowicz, spent five years at the
Stratford Festival, where he met his future Wojeck co-star Ted
Follows, Megan Follows' father.
Speaking from his home in Kitchener, Ont., Follows said Thursday that
although he and Vernon hadn't been in touch since they made the Wojeck
movie, they had been close friends for many years. He understood
Vernon had had heart problems and was recently released from hospital.
He recalled how "way ahead of its time" Wojeck was as a prime-time
series that dealt frankly with such issues as abortion and lesbianism.
"(Vernon) was awfully good in that show . . . he really was perfect in
that role."
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