“We’re all dying the minute we’re born. Goes fast. Don’t waste it. Don’t waste it.”
These words, muttered by Harris Yulin’s terminally ill retiree Buddy Fixer in the fourth season of Netflix’s crime drama “Ozark,” feels strangely fitting for the character actor’s 87 years of life. A consummate character actor, Yulin carved out a niche for decades in Hollywood as one of those classic “that guy”s of a type you rarely see anymore.
If you wanted someone in law enforcement, big business, or national security grumbling orders (particularly if said character were corrupt), you called Yulin. Need someone who could deliver a home-run joke with the same deadpan efficiency as a threat? You called Yulin. He delivered nearly 200 on-screen performances all the way up to his passing this past Tuesday, all of them perfectly calibrated for maximum menace or geniality, depending on what the role called for.
Born in Los Angeles in 1937, Yulin began his life on the steps of an orphanage, where he was abandoned as an infant. Four months later, he was adopted by Russian Jewish parents who imparted his last name and brought him up. But his journey to acting came after “fooling around in Europe for a couple of years” after a stint in the army, he says in one interview, doing small shows and a nightclub act with William Burroughs. (“That was great fun,” he remarked.) He eventually landed at UCLA, where he would study theatre with Jeff Corey, then made his off-Broadway debut in 1963 with Next Time I’ll Sing for You.
Yulin would continue to build his Broadway bona fides, especially as a practitioner of William Shakespeare’s works: he would have roles in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard III, and King John, as well as a celebrated turn as Hamlet in 1974. But that same decade, he would break out on the big screen in Frank Perry’s anti-Western “Doc,” playing Wyatt Earp to Stacy Keach’s Doc Holliday. Even at his youngest on-screen, Yulin seems grizzled, seasoned, a deeply assured presence underneath that balding head and thick mustache. He had the kind of eyes that could bore deeply into your soul, a resolute frown that could communicate everything from disappointment to deep rancor.
Yulin takes twenty minutes to appear in his first film, “Doc,” but his presence looms large over the first act of Holliday’s journey. When they finally meet in a bar saloon, Yulin’s Earp laments the outlaws that try to make mayhem in his down. Keach’s response feels like a metatextual portent of the kinds of roles Yulin would spend his career embodying:
“If it weren’t for bad people, what would you do for a living?”
Indeed, Yulin made quite the career playing all manner of bad guys; in “Scarface,” he plays a sleazy detective trying to cut off a piece of Tony Montana’s business. In 1994’s “Clear and Present Danger,” he plays a corrupt national security advisor playing both sides against each other in the War on Drugs. “Training Day,” corrupt detective. “Rush Hour 2,” a Secret Service agent who—you guessed it—is on the take. Yulin had a role to fill, and he filled it with gusto; his characters were always filled with a kind of businesslike conviction, which he could convey with a simple arched eyebrow or deceptive sneer.
He brought that energy to television as well, becoming a stalwart of the medium for decades. “Kojak,” “Law & Order,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Veep,” and more all featured short but sweet guest runs by Yulin, who always brought a steely-eyed intensity to even the smallest roles. (One such guest turn, as an implicitly mob-connected fixer who gets Niles Crane’s wife Maris out of a legal jam for a price on “Frasier,” earned him an Emmy nomination.)
But for my money, the role that made the most of Yulin’s unmistakable gravitas was “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine”‘s first-season episode “Duet,” where he appears as a Cardassian visitor arrested in the station for potentially being a war criminal. The episode plays largely as a two-hander between Yulin’s Aamon Marritza and Nana Visitor’s Kira Nerys, as the latter attempts to pin down Marritza’s alleged role in the Nazi-like occupation that her people, the Bajorans, suffered for decades at the hands of his. As the layers peel back on Marritza’s true identity, Yulin modulates his performance expertly through reams of ’90s sci-fi prosthetics: First as an avoidant simpleton, then as a blustering commandant happy to taunt Kira for his deception. Then, just as Kira discerns the truth, so do we: Marritza isn’t the cover for Cardassian mass murderer Gul Darhe’el—he just wanted to pretend to be Darhe’el to help assuage his own guilt at his complicity in Cardassia’s crimes, serving himself up as martyr to help the Bajoran people heal.
In a single scene, Yulin demonstrates the kind of range that befitted a character actor of his stature. He could hold himself with such stillness, conveying volumes of wit, wisdom and world-weariness; he could vent spleen with the best of them, staring daggers into the weakest among us; and he could break down and cry at the weight of all he’s done, vulnerability finally winning out among his grizzled stature.
That one episode is a drop in the bucket compared to his volumes of work before or since (including a 12-episode run on the aforementioned “Ozark,” and welcome dips into comedy on “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” and “Divorce,” among others). He could fill a suit or a cop uniform or a set of spurs like nobody else, and his face would only grow more complex and fascinating to watch with age: balding, bearded, and bullheaded as ever.
But it’s a testament to Yulin’s love and dedication to the craft of acting that he would continue to find new angles to play, and new ways to play the angles he’d long mastered, all the way until his death this year. He never once thought of retiring, as he once admitted in a 2010 interview:
“Retiring is not a thought that I can ever entertain. You love what you do and feel lucky to be doing it, finally, lucky that other people might want to see it or help you to do it.”
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