George Murdock

George Murdock, born George Sawaya Jr. on June 25, 1930, in Salina, Kansas, was an American character actor whose work spanned stage, television, and film. He was the second of seven children born to George R. Sawaya, a Lebanese immigrant, and Olive Johnson Sawaya. He died on April 30, 2012, in Burbank, California, of cancer at the age of 81, survived by his wife, Cathy, and a stepdaughter.

Murdock made his Broadway appearance in 1964 in Conversation at Midnight. His stage work extended beyond Broadway to include founding membership in the Los Angeles-based Melrose Theatre, where he appeared in Lester Sims Retires Tomorrow during that production's early 1980s off-Broadway run. He also performed at the South Coast Repertory, the Los Angeles Theater Center, and the Odyssey Theatre. His stage roles included Judge Julius Hoffman in West Coast and Chicago productions of The Chicago Conspiracy Trial, a role he also performed in a BBC Radio adaptation, and Big Daddy in Tennessee Williams' Cat on a Hot Tin Roof with the Arizona Theater Company during the 1988 season.

His television and film career brought him recurring recognition for roles that drew on his craggy features and deep bass voice. He played Lt. Scanlon, an Internal Affairs officer in Barney Miller, and Dr. Salik in the Battlestar Galactica television series. He portrayed the character identified as God in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier and Admiral Hanson in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The Best of Both Worlds. He also appeared as Yuri Testikov in the Seinfeld episode The Marine Biologist and as Laszlo Gabo in the 1986–87 sitcom What a Country. In 1982, a Los Angeles Times reporter asked Murdock whether he objected to being typecast, to which he replied that getting the job was what mattered.