Michael Tolan

Michael Tolan, born Seymour Tuchow on November 27, 1925, in Detroit, Michigan, was an American actor whose career spanned stage, film, and television from the late 1940s through the 1990s. The son of Morris Tuchow, he attended Central High School and Wayne State University in Detroit before pursuing formal acting training under Stella Adler and at Stanford University. He died on January 31, 2011, at a hospital in Hudson, New York, from kidney failure.

Tolan's earliest professional work was in radio, where he appeared on Detroit's WXYZ station in productions of The Green Hornet and The Lone Ranger. He also gained experience through the Actors Company and summer stock theater in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1948. His screen work in the early 1950s included small roles in films such as Fort Worth (1951), The Savage (1952), and Hiawatha (1952), while his primary focus during this period remained the stage.

His Broadway career ran from 1955 to 1971 and included productions across multiple genres. Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, a comedy, served as his Broadway debut, and he subsequently appeared in the comedy A Majority of One, the drama A Hatful of Rain, the drama The Genius and the Goddess, and Epstein, among other productions. He also performed in Romanoff and Juliet during his stage career.

From the mid-1950s onward, television became the dominant medium of Tolan's work. He appeared in the 1960 CBS summer series Diagnosis: Unknown and held a role in The Doctors and the Nurses. He played Jordan Boyle in the anthology series The Bold Ones during its Senator segments from 1970 to 1971, and took on a recurring role as Dan Whitfield, Mary's night-school teacher and boyfriend, across three episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. He also appeared in three episodes of Mission: Impossible — "Trial by Fury," "The Play," and "Terror" — and made guest appearances on The Invaders, The F.B.I., Mannix, Kojak, Nichols, The Outer Limits, McMillan and Wife, and Law & Order. His final known television appearance came in a 1994 episode of Murder, She Wrote.

Among his later film credits were The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), Hour of the Gun (1967), The Lost Man (1969), John and Mary (1969), The 300 Year Weekend (1971), Talk to Me (1984), and Presumed Innocent (1990). He appeared in Bob Fosse's All That Jazz (1979) as Dr. Ballinger, the cardiologist treating lead character Joe Gideon.

Beyond performing, Tolan was a co-founder of the American Place Theatre, an organization he described as intended to attract writers of substantive material about American life and draw them toward writing for the theater. In his personal life, he married actress Rosemary Forsyth on June 28, 1966; the couple had one child and divorced in 1970. He had two marriages in total, both ending in divorce. At the time of his death, he was living in Ancram, New York, with his partner Donna Peck.