René Auberjonois, Star Trek and Benson Actor, Dies at 79
René Auberjonois, the prolific actor best known for his roles on the television shows
Benson and
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and his part in the 1970 film
M*A*S*H playing Father Mulcahy, has died. He was 79.
The actor died Sunday at his home in Los Angeles of metastatic lung cancer, his son, Remy Auberjonois, told the Associated Press.
Auberjonois worked constantly as a character actor in several golden ages, from the dynamic theater of the 1960s to the cinema renaissance of the 1970s to the prime period of network television in the 1980s and '90s — and each generation knew him for something different.
For film fans of the 197*s, he was Father John Mulcahy, the military chaplain who played straight man to the doctors’ antics in
M*A*S*H. It was his first significant film role and the first of several for director Robert Altman.
For sitcom watchers of the 1980s, he was Clayton Runnymede Endicott III, the hopelessly highbrow chief of staff at a governor’s mansion on
Benson, the ABC series whose title character was a butler played by Robert Guillaume.
And for sci-fi fans of the 1990s and convention-goers ever since, he was Odo, the shape-shifting Changeling and head of space-station security on
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
Much of his later career was spent doing voices for animation, most memorably as the French chef who sings the love song to fish-killing Les "Poissons" in Disney’s 1989
The Little Mermaid.
He played Odo on
Deep Space Nine from 1993 until 1998 and became a regular at
Star Trekconventions, where he raised money for Doctors Without Borders and signed autographs with a drawing of Odo’s bucket, where the character would store himself when he returned to his natural gelatinous state.
Auberjonois was also a regular on the ABC law-firm dramedy
Boston Legal from 2004 to 2008.
Late in his career, Auberjonois would work with independent filmmakers including the artful director Kelly Reichardt, for whom he appeared in 2016’s
Certain Women and 2019's
First Cow, his final role.
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