Ron Dean, a veteran actor whose scores of credits include The Fugitive, The Dark Knight, three Tom Cruise movies, recurring on Frasier and Early Edition and playing Emilio Estevez’s dad in The Breakfast Club, has died. He was 87.
His longtime friend, The Fugitive director Andrew Davis, who cast Dean in seven of his films, said the actor died October 5 but didn’t not provide a cause or place of death.
“Ron Dean was my dear friend and a tremendous actor. He was the essence of what Chicago talent represented,” Davis said in a statement. “Having a very troubled youth Ron turned his life around to have a wonderful career as a loving, decent human being and respected talent.”
Born on August 15, 1938, in Chicago, Dean often played tough-guy Windy City types and/or cops. He began his screen career in the mid-1970s and was working regularly by 1983. That year he had a small in Cruise’s breakout film Risky Business and later would appear in the multi-Oscar nominee’s The Color of Money (1986), also starring Paul Newman, and Cocktail (1988), playing Cruise’s uncle in the latter.
During the ’80s, Dean also guested on such TV series as T.J. Hooker and Wiseguy and recurred on Crime Story and Lady Blue, he also appeared in big-screen films with big-name directors and actors. Among them were John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club, starring Estevez, Molly Ringwold, Anthony Michael Hall, Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson; Garry Marshall’s Nothing in Common (1986), starring Tom Hanks and Jackie Gleason in his final role; Arthur Hiller’s Teachers, with Nick Nolte; along with Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money and Roger Donaldson’s Cocktail.
He later would play Detective Wuertz in Christopher Nolan’s billion-dollar-grossing Batman movie The Dark Knight.
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One of Dean’s best-known roles came in 1993 with Best Picture Oscar nominee The Fugitive, which starred Harrison Ford as Dr. Richard Kimble and Tommy Lee Jones as Samuel Gerard in an update of the 1960s TV series.
“The interrogation scene in The Fugitive with Ron Dean and Joe Kosala deeply moved Harrison Ford. When we first screened the film for Harrison, realizing we had captured the audience’s empathy for the totally distraught Dr. Kimball, he leaned over and kissed me. This was made possible because of the great performance by Harrison but also the tough, cynical, unjust treatment by these Chicago cops.”
Dean’s other ’90s movie credits include The Babe, Rudy, The Client, Eye for an Eye and Chain Reaction. He also guested on such popular TV shows as ER, Chicago Hope, NYPD Blue and Murder, She Wrote and recurred in more than a dozen episodes of Early Edition, starring Kyle Chandler, and multiple episodes of Frasier, including Seasons 1 and 2 when it won the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series. He played Frank Collins, a Seattle cop and poker buddy of Frasier’s father Martin Crane (John Mahoney).
Dean continued to work steadily as the millennium turned, appearing on such top shows as The West Wing, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Cold Case, Six Feet Under, Numbers, Without a Trace, Family Law and a different character on NYPD Blue. He later recurred on Chicago Fire as James Whoritsky, Commanding Chief Fire Marshal of the CFD’s Office of Fire Investigations, and appeared in a 2016 episode of Chicago P.D., which would be his final screen credit.
He shared a Best Ensemble Cast award from the Chicago Comedy Film Festival in 2013 for One Small Hitch.
“It’s hard to capture what an extraordinary human being Ron was,” his longtime partner Maggie Neff said. “One glamorous woman friend of Ron’s once told me that she’d rather grab a hot dog with Ron Dean than have a fancy dinner with some rich bloke. I have always felt the same way.”
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