Dana Elcar

Dana Elcar, born Ibsen Dana Elcar on October 10, 1927, in Ferndale, Michigan, was an American actor whose career spanned Broadway, television, and film. The son of Hedwig (née Anderberg) and James Aage Elcar, a carpenter and butcher, he attended the University of Michigan, where he was a member of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity. At eighteen, he enlisted in the United States Navy and served a tour of duty near the close of World War II. Following his military service, he relocated to New York in the 1950s to pursue a professional acting career, studying under renowned acting coach Sanford Meisner.

Elcar's stage career in New York extended from 1955 to 1964 and included Broadway productions such as the comedy Good as Gold, The Power and the Glory, Hughie, A Murderer Among Us, and Semi-Detached. Off Broadway, he created the role of the hitman Ben in the American premiere of Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter at the Cherry Lane Theater in Greenwich Village in 1962.

His television work began in earnest in the early 1960s. In 1962, he joined the cast of the CBS daytime drama The Guiding Light as Andrew Murray, the District Attorney of Los Angeles County. That same year and into 1963, his work on The Guiding Light led to appearances in three episodes of the NBC sitcom Car 54, Where Are You? and two segments of the ABC crime drama Naked City. From 1966 to 1967, he portrayed Sheriff George Patterson on the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows. Later in his television career, he played Inspector Shiller in the crime drama Baretta, starring Robert Blake, and held a regular role as Colonel Lard in the 1976–78 military drama Baa Baa Black Sheep, starring Robert Conrad, for which he also directed four episodes.

Elcar appeared in approximately forty films over the course of his career, including The Sting in 1973. His television guest appearances were extensive, encompassing series such as Gunsmoke, Mannix, Ironside, Columbo, Cannon, Hill Street Blues, The A-Team, Trapper John M.D., and ER, among many others. In 1969, he guest starred on Get Smart as KAOS Agent Kruger in the two-part episode "And Baby Makes Four," and in 1980 he was cast as the Chief in the Get Smart feature film The Nude Bomb, a role previously held by Edward Platt.

His most prominent television role came with the long-running series MacGyver, which aired through the 1980s and into the 1990s. Elcar had initially appeared in the pilot episode as a character named Andy Colson before being recast as Peter Thornton, MacGyver's direct supervisor at the Phoenix Foundation. In 1991, Elcar began developing glaucoma, and the condition was incorporated into the MacGyver storyline beginning with the sixth season's seventeenth episode, "Blind Faith," continuing through the remainder of that season and the entire seventh season. The sixth-season finale, "Hindsight," used Thornton's impending eye surgery as a framing device for a clip show. Following MacGyver, Elcar appeared in a 1993 episode of Law & Order, playing a blind man who held his former physician responsible for his loss of sight.

After losing his vision, Elcar took on the role of Vladimir in a stage production of Waiting for Godot, performing with a white cane. He retired from acting in 2002 following his appearance on ER. In 1986, alongside fellow character actor William Lucking, Elcar had co-founded the Santa Paula Theater Center, where he served as artistic director for six years.

In his personal life, Elcar married Katherine Frances Mead in 1948; the marriage ended in divorce in 1950. He subsequently married Peggy Romano in 1954, and that marriage ended in 1970. He had four children: Marin, Nora, Dane, and Chandra Elcar. His long-time partner was Thelma Garcia. Dana Elcar died on June 6, 2005, at Community Memorial Hospital in Ventura, California, from pneumonia, at the age of 77.